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Archive for the ‘Development’ Category
|Changes to our twitter account
Monday, July 11th, 2011
We’ve been tweeting the top, most active KTN’s news stories (and the second most active KTN’s for that matter) for sometime now. The system was scheduled to tweet news stories at specific times of the day, only if they hadn’t been tweeted before.
This worked well to a point, but on occasion duplicate tweets were sent out due to some poor coding, and the way the system was designed meant that the account could have long gaps of not tweeting anything.
Today, that’s all changed. We’ve been improving the code, and from now our account will tweet slightly differently.
- Firstly, the frequency of tweets have been increased – however they’re still spaced evenly throughout the day so you get the best, latest news as soon as possible.
- Every news story which is tweeted is now logged on our own systems, which is checked before we send a tweet – preventing any more duplicate tweets from being sent out.
- If the most active KTN, or second most active KTN, haven’t posted a new news story by the time we’re ready to tweet again – rather than not tweet at all, we’ll now tweet the latest news story on the site at the time (again, only if it hasn’t been posted before), by whichever KTN has posted it. Hopefully, this will also increase the amount that smaller KTNs get their news stories tweeted by our service.
Posted in Development, Twitter | No Comments »
Changes to how we collect stats
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
After implementing our stats package the other month, we quickly became aware of a potential issue which could cause individual KTN’s to gain an unfair advantage over a short period of time, and then become ‘Top KTN’ for the rest of the week.
To help give other KTN’s a better advantage and to make the system more equal, we have implemented a change which will come into affect immediately. From today, the KTN’s which are tweeted from our account, and the Top KTN which is featured on our homepage, will be calculated on a rolling daily basis as opposed to weekly.
This should help improve the content on the site, allowing us to retweet a much better range of KTNs, and making our homepage more fresh, by featuring a greater amount of different KTNs.
We’ll monitor how these changes work over the next few weeks, if you have any suggestions or comments, do leave them below.
Posted in Development, Services, Twitter | No Comments »
We’ve had a facelift!
Sunday, February 13th, 2011
We’re nearly one year old, and what better way to celebrate than to have a facelift!
So, if you’ve been living under a rock – what changes have happened? Well the biggest is the homepage. Gone is the one single list of updates, and in it’s place, three columns on the latest news and activities! On the left, is the latest blog posts from the KTN’s. The central column is the place for the Featured blog post (more on that later!), and off course, the latest KTN tweets underneath.
The right hand column see’s the latest multimedia items, such as content from Flickr and -from today- Vimeo!
So, what was that about a featured blog post I hear you ask. Well, for the past year we’ve been monitoring social media usage from all of the KTN’s and compiling ‘Top KTN lists’ each week. But, not much else. So, from now on, the Top KTN of the past week (that’s the last full seven days), the most active KTN during that time with have their current, newest blog post featured on the homepage.
We’ve been busy adding support for more features too. Vimeo accounts are now supported on the site – as well as links to each KTN’s Facebook pages.
To round this quick update off, we’ve also been busy adding more and more KTN’s. Over the past few weeks we’ve added; Biosciences, Chemistry Innovation, HealthTech and Medicine, and Modern Built Environment
We hope you like the improvements. If you have any comments, please leave them below.
Posted in Development | No Comments »
New Feature: Item Pages
Monday, April 26th, 2010
A new feature of the site which was quietly introduced the other week and after a successful trial run has now been launched officially. What is this new feature I hear you ask? Well, it’s single pages for items.
From today, by clicking on the avatar (logo) of each item, you will be sent to a permanent individual page just for that tweet, blog post etc (so it will still be available once the item has become too old to show in the stream!). The benefit of this is that you can now direct people directly to the item in question, and for people who like sharing stuff via social media – we’ve included quick and easy share buttons for Facebook and Twitter!
What’s more it will enable us to develop another new feature which is RSS feeds – which are currently in development and which we hope to launch soon!
Let us know what you think!
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Welcome to KTNs.co.uk
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
Well after a few months and a lot of time spent working on the site during the evenings and weekends the KTNs site is ready to be let out into the wild for you folks to explore, test and give us your valuable feedback!
Why has it taken so long? Well I’ve worked on this site solely during my spare time, which at times can be hard to come by – and there have been several big coding changes throughout its development, either to improve usability and page loading times – to just keeping up to speed with the developments of the new KTN platform currently being introduced over at http://ktn.innovateuk.org
So what is this site all about I hear you ask?
Well, to put it simply; the site’s main purpose is to monitor and gather all of the social media activity conducted by the UK’s KTN’s into one place! The site currently monitors several KTN accounts on Twitter, Flickr and their blogs on the new KTN website platform – with their updates being posted upto every minute on this site as and when new items are posted!
The site is structured in a way which should be familar to KTN members. Each KTN is listed on the homepage (and the networks page), and then sub groups of each KTN are listed on each individual KTN’s page.
For example;
www.ktns.co.uk – All main KTN’s updates
www.ktns.co.uk/networks/digitalsystems – Updates from the Digital System KTN’s main accounts
www.ktns.co.uk/networks/digitalsystems/locationtiming – Updates from Digital System’s Position, Navigation & Timing group.
Future
There are many more features and updates planned to be launched over the next few weeks – to get a sneak peak at what they are; I’ll be posting a blog post later with details!
More
If you want to know more about the site as well as answers to questions like ‘why are not all the KTN’s are currently listed?’ – Please check out the FAQ section.
If you have any questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to leave a reply to this post – or – send me an email using the contact form on the contact page.
Posted in Development | No Comments »