Today I am performing some essential maintenance to our website. Please accept my apologies if our site appears to misbehave for the next few hours!

Whilst you may not notice any new features, parts of the site may load a little faster, and the issue with our maps not showing all projects and reports will be resolved.

Thanks,
Tom Goskar
Web Manager

[Update]: 3.00pm - Maintenance on our server and website have now finished. If you have any comments, please leave them below or email webmaster [at] wessexarch.co.uk

You might have noticed that with the redevelopment of our website in recent months we have introduced three boxes on to the front page of our website, each containing what appears to be a jumble of different-sized archaeology-related words.

Mini tag clouds from our homepage

And there's more on our tags page:

More tag clouds

These are known as "tag clouds" and can help you to navigate around our website.

What are they for? Why are all of the words different sizes?

Each page on our website has key words attached to them. They can be seen just above the footer:

Keywords, or tags, are attached to each page on our website

We call these keywords "tags" and they can help us to identify important topics contained in pages, and can help to make our search facility more accurate. They can also help us to group pages outside of their normal, hierarchical, structure. Tags are stored in a central database, and by listing them on a page, we can see the large number of topics contained on our website. Tags used more frequently will appear in a larger font. This gives visual clues to the quantity of information on a particular topic that we currently have on our site.

The tag clouds dynamically change as we add more content, so that changes and topics can be easily spotted.

For example, if you look at the "Explore by Place" tag cloud on our homepage, at the time of writing the county of Surrey appears in very small text. Wiltshire is in the largest font size, and most prominent. We have published only one project from Surrey, but twelve from Wiltshire. If we were to publish some more of our Surrey-based projects, and not add anything from Wiltshire for a while, then the tag cloud will reflect this by increasing the size of the word "Surrey" and reducing the size of "Wiltshire", if projects from other counties overtook.

We hope that you find the tag clouds useful, or at least as a fun way of exploring our content.

Feel free to explore our "big" tag cloud on our tags page, which includes keywords, counties and periods, or read more about tag clouds on Wikipedia.

Eagle-eyed readers of our website might have noticed a new addition underneath the last paragraph of most pages.  It is a little link saying "Share This". Clicking the link allows you to email the page to a friend, or add it to your favourite social networking website such as Facebook, MySpace, Delicious and StumbleUpon.

If you haven't seen what it looks like, here is a screenshot of the window that appears after link after it has been clicked:

Share This

If you are logged in to Facebook, for example, clicking the Facebook logo opens up a new window (or tab) in your web browser where you can describe the link and post it to your profile. 

Blogging

If you want to blog about anything on our website, the Share This link helps to make this a bit easier. Just click the "Post" tab and click the logo of the service that you use to blog (or micro-blog). The usual services are there, such as Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, LiveJournal, etc. Clicking your service will either open a new window, or ask you to log in, and you'll be posting the page details to your blog in seconds. No details are held on our servers!

Sharing pages by email

If you just want to tell a friend about one of our pages by a more 'traditional' method, then you can click the "Send/Email" tab on the ShareThis window, and fill out your details and those of the person you want to send the page link to.

I hope that this little feature comes in handy!

Wessex Archaeology hompage, July 2008Regular visitors to our website will have noticed a few changes during the past fortnight. Now that we have completed the transition of our website to a content management system, I have had a chance to focus on useability and navigation.

Home

The first change is a complete redesign of the www.wessexarch.co.uk homepage. I have wanted to design something bright, bold, and easy to use for some time now, and, thanks to Drupal, I have been able to do just that. It represents a departure from our past homepages, in that there are fewer words describing services and capabilities, and more focus on content and finding things.

Who Wessex Archaeology are, and what we do, is now covered by one sentence, in a large font, at the top of the page, with an inviting link to our "About" page (also soon to be updated). The 'latest news' block now aggregates the titles of latest posts from across all of our blogs, and we can now include a nice, bold, featured photo at the top of the page, with a large search box underneath it. Tag clouds provide a fun way of browsing the site, and we also list our growing number of blogs.

The large blue box contains a quote from Sue Davies, our CEO, explaining what archaeology is, and what it can do for us. It is good to define archaeology, and the context within it that we work, on the front page.

Explore

I have long thought that the word "Projects" was perhaps not the best way to describe our work. From talking to people, and doing some useability testing, it became apparent that I was right. From our homepage, more people were reaching for the search link than the projects link.

The old projects page simply contained a list of periods, counties, and Coastal and Marine projects.While this was very easy to use, there was no space left to include related content that was not directly linked to a project. Thus the Explore section was born.

Explore was going to be a sub-section of the projects page, but given the problems with the word 'Projects' in our main navigation bar at the top, I decided to change things completely.

Our new Explore section contains prominent, brightly coloured blocks of information about the different aspects of our work. At the top are links to projects by period, place and tag, so that it is still very simple to jump into our work via a 'traditional' route (although tags are a bit new...). The period and places pages contain new Google maps to help make finding projects a little easier. New themes and reports sections, and a syndicated news (more on them later) section are linked from Explore, all with colourful icons from the kNeu! icon set.

The Explore section will change and grow to reflect all aspects of our work, in ways that we have never done before.

I hope that our website is now a little easier to use, and certainly a bit more colourful. We hope you like it. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment.

As detailed in my previous post about our recent server problems, we had to disable our archaeology photo gallery earlier today. I have spent most of the day putting together a new version that would be independent of our "workhorse" content management systems, WordPress and Drupal. If we experience very heavy workloads then we can easily detach the gallery and move it to a different server, without having to move other parts of our infrastructure.

The new Wessex Archaeology photo galleryThe new gallery, while more or less identical in terms of functionality to its predecessor, also gave me the opportunity to give it a new look. I have opted for a dark theme on a black background to bring the focus on to the photographs themselves. It is based upon the Satellite Flickr gallery script by Ted Forbes, and thanks to his excellent and clean templates, I was able to rapidly customise and style the gallery into our own theme.

The eagle-eyed amongst you will also note that the URL of the gallery has changed from http://news.wessexarch.co.uk/photos/ to http://www.wessexarch.co.uk/photos/ - a 301 redirect has been set up to let search engines know that it has moved, and to keep people's bookmarks working for the time being.

Feel free to leave any feedback about the new gallery here. Happy browsing!

[Update] The photo gallery is now online again. Fingers crossed this version will last!

Visitors to our website over the past few days will have noticed that all of our websites were either very slow or even unreachable. Some of you may have seen an triumphant error message stating that there had been a database connection error. Well, our poor server has become rather overloaded - one of the consequences of being a popular desitination on the web for all things archaeological..!

A closer look at the load on our server pointed towards the scripts that run our photo gallery. Unfortunately, the database that the scripts connect to had become corrupted, and the tables had inflated to a rather large 2GB, and MySQL (the database engine that runs our websites) began to consume a lot of RAM (memory). In fact, all physical memory on the server was being used, as well as nearly 2GB of swap (virtual memory). This caused the whole server to essentially grind to a halt. For the server-literate folks out there, our server load average peaked at 9302%...

For the time being, I have had to temporarily close our photo gallery while I try and fix it. Since this is one of the most popular sections of our website, I am hoping to return to normal service as soon as I can. I will post here when normal service resumes.

Sorry!

A blog isn't much of a blog unless it is possible to leave a comment, to enable conversation and debate. While we simply do not have the time to enable (and crucially, moderate) comments on all of our content, you can now leave a comment on all of our blog entries.

It has taken a little while to get comments set up on Drupal in a secure manner, and quite a few lessons were learned along the way. I don't want you all to have to set up an account just to leave a comment - I know I hate doing that myself. It should be simple and quick to leave a comment, and, hopefully, now it is. Click the "Add a new comment" link below to leave one.

reCAPTCHA

While we all get junk (spam) email, those of us who run websites know that spammers don't just stop at email. Any website that accepts comments is also a target for comments containing links to unsavoury websites, dubious pharmaceutical deals etc. To check that you are a human genuinely wishing to leave a comment, as opposed to a computer program trying to leave rubbish, I have installed a CAPTCHA.

reCAPTCHA 

All you have to do is type the two words as you see them, as shown in the above image. If the words aren't clear enough, click the little 'cycle' button next to the box. This will hopefully load in a better image. Then, if you get the words correct, your comment will fly through the internet and into our comments inbox, where we'll check it's OK and publish it below the blog post.

The reCAPTCHA scheme also has a hidden agenda. Many of the world's libaries are digitising their collections of printed material. Optical character recognition (OCR) software "reads" the content and converts it into computer recognisable text (like a word processor document). The trouble is, computers aren't (yet) as good as humans at reading, and sometimes they get it wrong, or simply can't read a word at all. This could be because the ink has bled on contact with the paper, or because the type was pressed too hard, etc. The reCAPTCHA system takes the words that computers can't read, and passes them on to humans to decipher. So by leaving a comment you are helping to digitally preserve a book as part of a scheme set up by Carnegie Mellon University in the USA.

Read more about the reCAPTCHA scheme on Wikipedia.

Wessex Archaeology on TwitterTwitter, the social 'micro-blogging' service that allows users to post short, 140 character updates (or "tweets"), has been very popular amongst members of our IT department. It allows users to 'follow' each other to stay up to date with what they are up to. Updates from your friends can be delivered via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, or via desktop software. It tends to be a very rapid form of communication, with most people seeing updates within minutes of them being published.

I have set up a Twitter account for Wessex Archaeology.  All of our blogs are configured to send a quick 'tweet' whenever new content is posted, so that followers of WA on Twitter can be alerted of new announcements within minutes.

For those who wish to learn more about Twitter, Wikipedia has an excellent article about the service, or of course, head over to Twitter and sign up for a free account to explore it for yourself.

Screenshot of the Wessex Archaeology website in May 2002A lot has happened on the Wessex Archaeology website since I began looking after it in early May 2002. Before then we had a small brochure-style site listing our services, created using an ageing copy of Serif Page Plus by our Drawing Office. Thanks to the Internet Archive, a copy of our website from those days can still be seen (minus the graphics). We were not publishing any archaeological information online at the time.

Keen to improve it, I was tasked with creating a new version of the website using Dreamweaver. This was just in time to coincide with a major discovery made by Wessex Archaeology staff: The Amesbury Archer. Interest in the story of the Archer was huge, and I was able to use our website to help distribute as much information as we had to satisfy global demand for copies of the press release and print-ready photographs. Newspapers and TV stations linked to our website, and very quickly our website went from being under the search engine radar, to being very much in the limelight.

Since May 2002, the website has steadily grown, and we have tried to be innovative in our approach to web publishing. We were one of the first archaeological organisations to start a blog in December 2004. We started podcasting and using Flickr in 2005, began posting videos to YouTube in 2006, and posting selected reports and other documents to Scribd in 2007.

The use of social media websites like these allows us to reach out to new audiences.  Our aim is to help people learn about their past through archaeology, and to make it as easy as possible for the information that we are able to put online to be found. 

In June this year (2008) we migrated our website into Drupal, an open source content management system. This introduced many new features to help us communicate our archaeological work more effectively.

The Website Blog will keep visitors to our site up-to-date with the latest features and content, and in the spirit of open source software, share some of our experiences too. Comments will be enabled when I have time to set up and test the user roles. Comments are now open!