Something else was going on in Colchester around the time of IWMW 20009. While delegates of the Institutional Web Management Workshop were hearing the mantra ’seek forgiveness rather than permission’ for any improvements we’d like to make to our institutional web provision,  The Human Shrub was hard at work with some unapproved upgrades of his (or her) own.

Inspired by the guerrilla gardener I’ve decided to take some direct action on an area of our site. I’m going to tell no-one, and work by cover of darkness. I’ve yet to decide on an outfit.

The aim is to use spare time and all available methods to improve the look and feel, user interface and usability of the area in a non-invasive way, avoiding all the usual time constraints. By the end I hope to have something suitable to replace or update the area that all stakeholders will find difficult to refuse.  To do this:

• All work must be carried out on breaks, out of hours or overnight
• No live content will be touched, proof of concept will be devised & created as alternate services
• Extant environment and systems will be respected – that means working with the CMS, with the means of editing and deployed using the normal methods
• Ease of integration or implementation a major determinant of any approach (so no recreating the whole site as a Symfony plug-in)
• As with any unofficial, unbidden and unapproved endeavour, the goals will shift & adapt as and when.
• Horticultural metaphors will abound.

Where do I go now then, exactly?

Can I have my navigation back please?

Can I logout now please?

please?

Writing from Wokingham – redDot Liveserver training. Last day today, so we’ll be heading back sometime in the afternoon. Hopefully we’ll be dropping into Burghclere to see the murals by Stanley Spencer at the memorial chapel.

edit: got to Burghclere, well after dark and if it had been open, it was, by then, shut.

We’ve been spoiled here as the accommodation is adjoined to the excellent pub, so the food and drink has been great and in good supply!

I managed to lock myself out of the en-suite. Managed to get it open again (with a bit of jury-rigging involving a pen-refill) but didn’t figure out how it happened in the first place.

Thanks go to Phil Wilson for his post about Wiki promotion in small teams. I ran an impromptu formatting tutorial at my desk yesterday, and continue to post everything I do, then mail the link to the team. Few, but some of us, are using Feedreader to get updates.

In a new twist, I’m appealing to their inner children, and a little fear and mistrust can also go a long way. In short:

we’ve started keeping scores for The Circle Game on the wiki.

All in all it’s working, I have been distracted from this post twice now due to my Wiki’ing cohorts. What’s more they’re using it for work stuff too.

Simple Back Button generator (opens in a new window)

It’s not rocket science, in fact it’s probably not even breadmaker science, but it’s useful. Detects if there’s a history to return to before adding a back button to a menu of your choosing.

Our CMS generated breadcrumb trail reflects the site structure, not an individual user’s path into the site – this was one possible solution to the loss of adequate return navigation when you go from one site area (say a school) to another (a service team perhaps).

Will someone please tell Outlook 2003 about this.

Finally the team has a Wordpress MU installation up and running – we’re now creating a flurry of blogs for everyone (including one of the Operators, who’ll be running a ‘claim to fame’ blog which started this whole process off.

MU appears to have a just a few limitations which we may need to iron out, but no showstoppers so far. It’s running on the same VM as the wiki, but thankfully now on a dedicated server – not my desktop!