When the announcement came up that the guys at TSR HQ were looking to take on a summer intern I jumped at the chance. After last years bagel-based reviews and the opportunity of sun, sea, sand (ok, forget the sand) and TSR work behind the scenes, I couldn’t really miss out. Luckily enough they offered me the chance and have been enjoying all sorts of projects and bits and pieces involved in running the site this week.
Work stuff ranges from the here and now (ad’ campaigns and general admin stuff), soon to be implemented projects (which you’ll probably notice in the not too distant future) as well as longer term plans (such as the mammoth v3.5 to v3.8 vBulletin migration). Not to mention coursework.info developments i’ve been putting a little bit of code in for.
But yeah, Brighton in the sun is a great place, the people are friendly (the guys in the office as well as my chatty beachside tramp pal) and where else would you find a window cleaning company with a gothic herse as transport?
However today has been a bit different to the norm. An invitation was received for the launch of YCC’s (youth citizenship commission) launch of “Making the connection; Building youth citizenship in the UK” initiative in London, now that findings and research have been published and ready to be presented to the government about a number of issues with objectives set. The general outline being the involvement of young people in politics whilst also looking into the potential to lower the voting age to 16. An idea i’m still not so sure about.
So me and Jamie (J) were there in an amazingly diverse room with corporate looking people, guys in baseballs caps, children and various others young and old. A few notable names where there, including Wes Streeting – NUS National President (to give him his proper title), journalist Miranda Sawyer and Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson among others. Most of those invited seemed to be affiliated with sites or schemes aimed at the younger generations with politics in mind. Interesting to hear of different sites and their intentions to bring politics to the younger demographic through various means, of which I had not heard before. Catch 21, Student Voice and the Young Mayor Network just a few of the names there. Infact it was slightly puzzling as to why TSR hadn’t been engaged more in a non-commercial approach to aiding the objectives of the research findings. I guess a lot depends on the input from the government, although the attending MP (Bridget Prentice) seemed to big up the plans, who knows what will really happen. If anything does then there should be an update here and no doubt TSR will hear/debate about it. But for now, the YCC site for those interested.
Hopefully the following weeks will prove just as involving and who knows what’s just around the corner.
So, until next time…and to leave you with an image from the South Bank. 10/10 for creativity. I give you the music man…cat:
As a moderator on TSR you get invited to all the best celeb parties and are able to make exorbitant expences claims for second computers and giraffe houses. But surely the best perk is the chance to intern at TSR HQ during the summer months.
I’m pleased to announce that this summer sports CJ mod will be with us in the office.
From mid July CJ will be working on a number of projects with us which will definately involve the input of TSR members. More details will come from him nearer the time.
If you see CJ on the site in the lead up to his placement be sure to wish him good luck
During March we ran a survey on the site and anyone that contributed was entered into a draw to win a new LG mobile phone. I’m pleased to now announce the names of the recipients who were selected at random.
Congratulations:
Sijia
mikeyd85 and Jess Kennett
Enjoy your new handsets when they arrive in the post! Thank you to everyone that took part in the survey. I’ll post up some of the findings in a subsequent post.
I’ve set up a Student Room Youtube channel and hunted around for videos that have obviously been made by TSR users and have added them to a playlist. The only other stuff on there at the moment is a playlist of music getting rotation in the TSR office. Would be cool if TSR members could add videos to the channel but thats not possible I don’t think…It may turn out to be pointless but its pretty fun all the same. The videos made by members of different emoticons are great
Any video requests from us? A tour of the TSR office could be good?
Screengrab above from Dius.gov.uk homepage (5/02/09), click to see full size version
We’ve been working with DIUS (Dept of Innovation, Universities, Skills) since the christmas holidays on and off on a new resource for prospective mature students and today it went live to quite a national fanfare.
A map to search for an institute near you and then click for mature student specific information from that institute.
Written and Video profiles/case studies
The TSR forum and articles from Directgov and TSR.
Thanks to the members of the TSR mature student forum for getting involved in suggesting content and then by writing profiles that will be really useful to others considering returning to education.
The page will continue to grow over time, got ideas for how it could be better? Let us know.
On tuesday evening TSR had a significant site update. Most of the features in this update are things our users told us they wanted way back in the surveys we did early 2008 or during various focus groups and chats we’ve had with members prior to summer 08.
Since Summer 08 it’s been heads down getting the templates designed and functionality specced out. Then our developers have been working away for months getting the code updates onto our development site for testing.
Its been months coming and the site was down for 4 hours on tuesday night, but the general feeling is that it was worth the wait!
The updated site has a cleaner look to it. Lots of the clutter from the previous navigation has been removed or repositioned so the actual content has more prominence.
The expanding ‘Explore TSR’ button has helped with this but also the updated look of the breadcrumb navigation at the top of the site, better spacing between things, the improved positioning of ‘Advanced search’ link next to the go button rather than below it and the removal of various superfluous vertical and horizontal lines.
The big news is that you can now have TSR in your favourite colour (as long as your favourite colour is red, pink, green, blue, purple or grey). Simply click on ‘Customise your TSR’ on the homepage, select a colour and then click save at the bottom. I think purple is winning still in the favourite colour poll currently.
You can also customise the site to display what bits you want to see and where. So for example by again clicking on ‘Customise your TSR’ you can opt to have your quotes appear in the side bar wherever you are on the site, or your watched threads or the latest and most popular discussions. You can tailor those widgets to show as many as you want to see and you can drag and drop them around the homepage or up and down the side bar to position them as you choose.
TSR is such a busy site (1.9 million unique users in January!) with sooo much information it’s a challenge making that information easy to find. With the cleaner site template and customisation options we’ve introduced it should go a long way to making the site easier for new users and die hard TSR fans alike.
Of course it presents other opportunities too, future skin colours, and future widgets
Many TSR users will know Fleur de lis, she’s been an amazing moderator and a good friend to many on the site. Always sensitive to people’s feelings and point of view she’s clocked up some serious hours on TSR providing support, advice and fluffy giraffe loveliness day and night.
Fleur is stepping down from her demanding role as a Supermod to concentrate more on her own studies. But between me and you the real reason is because she’s assuming a key role within Barrack Obama’s team of expert advisors – She’s that good!
She’ll be missed by the mod team and the members BUT the good news is that she’s actually not going away, she’ll be hanging out in Health and Relationships in a Minimod role
If you see her on the site give her big thanks for her hard work, she’s given a hell of a lot to TSR and we’ve been lucky to have her on the team.
Good luck Nic! See you in the sexual health forum (I’ll be the Anonymous user with the raincoat on)
on an unrelated matter the member ‘ViolatedTreason’ has a very cool avatar:
I just thought I’d share a few site stats with you.
On Monday 19th January we broke the record for the most visits ever to TSR in a single day (again) with 129,795 visits. Up by 68 visits from the previous visit sat last week. The trend looks like we’ll have some even bigger days later on this week however.
A Level results day last August still remains the biggest ever day for page views with around 1.124 million page views. We’re edging ever closer to this figure again though with Sunday 18th January seeing over 1.107 million page views. If things continue we should eclipse this record soon too.
A final figure I want to share is the total number of visits in the last month. For the first time we’ve broken the 3 million barrier with 3,002,003 visits over the last month. We have to remember this contains the Christmas and New Year period too which saw some very quiet days so we can expect this record to be increase too as the Christmas and New Year weeks stop being counted here.
Overall the site is about twice a busy as the same time last year. If this continues can we expect our first 200,000 visit day during the summer?
The year has started well, already we’ve been breaking records. The busiest day ever was on the 14th of Jan when we had 128,000 visits, 94 unique users in a single day. That’s 282% growth compared with the same day last year!
For those into their stats The Student Room gets about 1.5million unique users a month now
Lots of stuff going on at the moment…
We’re working with DIUS (Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills) to put together a page of resources on TSR for people considering going into education as a mature student. This will be live early in Feb and we have been consulting with TSR users in our mature student forum to make sure we get it right.
The TSR test team have been crawling all over the development site trying to find problems that we can get fixed before we go live with the new site updates.
all things going well we plan to make the latest site update in the middle of next week. The site will have to be down for a while (probably wed evening) to make that update.
The feedback we’ve had from the Test Team has been very positive, especially the ability to switch template colours. It will be interesting to see which the most popular colours turn out to be.
Congratulations to the winners of the end of year TSR awards! While its fresh in peoples minds make suggestions below if you have ideas for how the awards could be even better next year.
Finally just a quick note to say thanks to +epic for getting a ‘TSR welcome pack‘ started. It’s got a way to go but the idea is that this could become a simple guide to TSR for newcomers and we can link to it from the email that people get when they register. Its a wiki page so feel free to add anything you think could be useful that perhaps confused you when you first came to TSR.
Good luck if you have exams and essays to write at the moment
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