iSpot & EML project blog

With the backup architecture pretty much finished, just waiting for some network ports to be opened, we’ve got back to work on further site improvements. Rich has now added the ability to link observations into other social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. He’s also added a news feature about S159 as well as having carried out several site maintenance tasks such as spam user removal and fixing the ‘more’ link on the groups pages. I’ve managed to finish the work I’d started prior to the backup work on the My Spot area. This now comprises the my unread tab and the favourites tab as well as as the other previous tabs. I’ve also changed the image tab to now be unlinked images with the ability to delete any of these directly from the page.

We have now at last got the automated backup for the live site working on an hourly basis. There are still a couple of things that we’re waiting for to do with the networks to allow us to have a complete mirror site working for both the research and backup site, but the actual data is all now on an hourly backup cycle. The remaining network things should hopefully be sorted out today which will mean that we should have the research copy of the site up in the next few days.

On the maintenance front, I spent some time rewriting the role checking code for S159 students which should now mean no more problems with students not being assigned the correct privileges. It does mean that the code runs a bit more frequently than I’d wanted but this doesn’t impact on the user experience.