City University London Web Team

IWMW 2009 – Steve’s reflections

July 30th, 2009

This afternoon web team returned from sunny Colchester, we have been attending the Institutional Web Management Workshop. We all heard useful stuff and came away with lots to think about (particularly as we embark on the website redevelopment). I’ll take a couple of paragraphs to share the things I am thinking about.

Machine readable content

This was something more than one session touched on. The idea is that you don’t just think about the humans that will be interacting with your content, but you also provide ways for computers to interact programmatically with it.

This can be as simple as providing RSS feeds for website searches, or any list of things on your site (e.g. courses?). Or as complicated as providing a full blown API (api.city.ac.uk anyone?) with a RESTful interface.

This was covered in some detail by Mike Ellis of Eduserve and Tony Hirst from Open University, and again by the BBC guys. The idea is that this will allow other people to re-purpose your content in ways you wouldn’t even consider, and even encourage people to do interesting things. One interesting example was Tony’s own mashup map of MPs travel expenditure, where he took data from the guardian, munged it and put it on a Google map.

Amazon Web Services

Mike Richwalsky gave us a compelling demonstration of AWS, including the serving of static content from S3 and the ultimate in virtual servers EC2.

S3 is a service where you can upload content to the Amazon infrastructure and have it served superfast from their data centres. It operates on a PAYG pricing scheme, you only pay for the bandwidth and storage you use. Mike is using it to serve flash video up at his University website. And I was impressed with the quality and speed in comparison with our offerings, might be something to consider as we decide how to take the video stuff forward.

EC2 is a service where you can create on-demand computing power, bringing virtual servers up and down on a whim through your browser. Again only paying for how much bandwidth/uptime you use.

In all it was a worthwhile couple of days where we could take time out to consider the bigger picture ad rub shoulders with others in a similar situation to ourselves. I look forward to implementing some of the things we’ve seen in the coming months.

Entry Filed under: Development, Website