Alex Little

Came back from holiday yesterday (see the pics!) , to find a stack of emails about problems with MSG crashing IE. This is a bit odd as we’ve not updated MSG for a little while, so strange that it just seems to have started occuring. It seems quite an erratic problem, but it does bring the whole browser down – something I find a little odd for a purely javascript application.

I’m really hoping to get this fixed very soon, but haven’t yet found the root cause, I can reliable recreate the issue, so just need to find why it’s happening.

Plus I need to get my presentation for next weeks OpenLearn conference written sometime soon!

Update (29th Oct)… I have now got the problem resolved, though still don’t know the real root cause. I fixed it by going back through the changes I’ve made recently and seeing at what point the error started occuring.
The change which appears to have been causing the error was when I switched from using <a href=”javascript:….”> to using (what I thought was the proper way!) of adding/removing event listeners. The actual problem occured with the call to detach event, although it didn’t fail everytime – it would work for the first few times and then randomly cause the browser to crash. I did notice that the carsh would only happen if I had the MSG client and the referring site (the one with the users presence icon) open at the same time, if only one was open the crash wouldn’t occur.

For info this was the code that was causing problems:

var oldImg = presenceNode.firstChild;
//remove any current listeners
if(oldImg.removeEventListener){ // Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox
oldImg.removeEventListener('click', launchClick, false);
oldImg.removeEventListener('click', readMessageClick, false);
} else { // IE
oldImg.detachEvent('onclick', launchClick);
oldImg.detachEvent('onclick', readMessageClick);
}


So I replaced this with the code below that just alters the location and title of the link (also a bit of adjusting to add the <a> in):

var oldAnchor = presenceNode.firstChild;
var newAnchor = oldAnchor.cloneNode(true);
newAnchor.href = "javascript:readMessageClick();";
newAnchor.title = MSGAPIconf.str_oneMessageUnread;

So, glad to have got it fixed, but would be even better to know why this was really happening at all!

Update Number 2 (1st Nov) – The fix has now been made live on the MSG-OpenLearn servers.

This morning the live OpenLearn servers have been updated with quite a few improvements…

• RSS feeds published for a variety for units (including unit content)
• MyLearningSpace and MyLabSpace – so you can see your courses, recent forum postings etc in one place (well really it’s 2 places!! – one for each OpenLearn site)
• More prominent forums – so will hopefully generate some more discussion, and what dicussion there is will be more visible to users
• much more sensible login navigation for users with OUCU (SAMS) user accounts
• plus, obviously the most important update (!) is to MSG block, so you now receive much more obvious new message notifications, when a new message arrives you’ll see a small pop up box appear in the bottom right of your browser window (in a similar way to how GTalk informs you of new messages)

Plus there have been lots of other updates to the servers too (bug fixes etc), but the ones above are (IMHO) the most significant.

In ‘other news’, I’ve put the FB stuff on bit a of a backburner for now, whilst we get chance to think about what exactly we want the FaceBook MSG application to actually do. The other (real!) reason for this is that I had quite an obscure bug which took most of last week to track down and fix. In the MSG forums there were a few people who weren’t getting automatically logged in to MSG. There didn’t appear to be any pattern to who was affected, and I didn;t have a user account which displayed the issue, so was difficult to pin down. Eventually we found it was to do with not all users being auto logged in to both LearningSpace and LabSpace, and it was these users who then didn;t get logged in to MSG. So we’re pretty sure we’ve got the issue fixed now, but if you’re still affected then please let us know!

I’ve just finished updating the MSG Map Widget so that you can allow filtering. The filter can either be specified in the javascript command and/or an optional filtering control can be added to the map. You can also select whether you would like to display just the online users or both on and offline users. Another new option is the ability to have the map refresh every x seconds (the previous version showed the users at the point the page first loaded). See the map below for an example – this one shows all OpenLearn users who have enrolled on courses with ‘german’ in the title. Feel free to have a ‘play’ with the filter:

Few points to note…

• You can’t select to highlight the text in the filter box, you need to delete each character – which I know is a right pain. I’ve not figured out why this is – I’ve a feeling it’s something to do with the fact that text box is within a Google map, so ‘selection’ doesn’t work in the same way – since holding the mouse button down whilst dragging means something different in the map context. But I could be wrong about this!
• Similary the tab to ‘go’ button on the form doesn’t work – you need to use the mouse
• When the maps says it’s showing ‘all’ users this isn’t quite true! It actually shows all the online users, plus up to a maximum of 100 offline users. This is help prevent potential performance problems when displaying 100′s or 1000′s of markers.

I’ve created a page on the MSG website to explain the various options/parameters available.
All feedback welcome

Encouraging users to remix and upload content back to the LabSpace has been a bit of a problem, most likely due to the fact that downloading and editing the content on your own PC is such a pain (finding XML editing package etc etc). So we’re looking at being able to edit content in situ, which should make it far easier for users. Enabling this won’t be quite a as easy as it first seems (even though Moodle provides most of the necessary functionality) – most problems being related to tracking changes and version control.

In the meantime, Jenny gave me access to be a ‘teacher’ on a course I had uploaded, meaning that I can now edit the material in situ. Giving users permissions in this way this might be an interim option until the full in situ editing is enabled, though it could be time consuming if lots of users requested access – so will need to wait and see if the porgramme team give this the go-ahead

We had an informal get together yesterday with the Research ‘arm’ of the OpenLearn project – basically to see how we (as in the developers and other member of the OL team) can be using the OpenLearn sites ourselves, essentially with the view to encouraging other users to participate more in the site.

One thing we noticed was that there seemed to be too many forums on the site (Steve has written about this on his blog). My feeling is that learning journals aren’t a good substitute for forums – they each serve different purposes – and that we should focus on just reducing the number of forums and making them more easily accessible (they can be a bit tricky to find, even though there are so many!)

Spent couple of hours putting together a little MSG map “widget” – so you can embed a Google map with markers for where users are online on your own webpage as the examples below show….

For the msg.open.ac.uk server

For the msg-openlearn.open.ac.uk server

This is the code that you need to use to embed this on your own page:

<script src="http://msg.open.ac.uk/msg/widget/msgmapwidget.jsp?host=msg.open.ac.uk
&height=300&width=450&zoom=2&lat=50&lng=0"></script>

Just change the parameters for fit what you’d like to show and how:
host: the MSG server to get the info from – valid entries currently are: msg.open.ac.uk or msg-openlearn.open.ac.uk
height: height of the map to display
width: width of the map to display
zoom: starting zoom level of the map
lat: starting latitude coordinate for map centre
lng: starting longitude coordinate for map centre

At the moment it’s just something I’ve been playing with, but would be good to be able to extend so that it can show the presences of your own contacts and give live presence info and provide the click to chat links etc.

As part of the CALRG conference a whole day (the Thursday) is going to be devoted to presentations from the OpenLearn team. I’ll be presenting a session on how we developed the Google Maps within MSG and there are also sessions on developing Open Educational Resources, Communications & Technology in OpenLearn, how to provide interactivity, usability testing and more!!
So hope to see you there

A competition has just been launched to encourage the remixing and reuse of OpenLearn LabSpace content, full details can be found at: http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/get-started/get-started-educator/competition.php.
It’s open to all to enter and you could win yourself up to £250 worth of technology of your choice!

I’m thinking about entering in the remix category – maybe taking some of the existing content and embedding MSG into it – especially the presence mapping, so perhaps something with one of the geography and/or language courses.

We’re still finding that people don’t always realise they’ve received a new message in MSG (I’m guilty too!), and I think this is because the only notification they get – when they’re just on one of the OpenLearn sites, so don’t have MSG Client or MSGAlert running – is a change in the presence status icon in the banner. Even if users notice it’s changed, unless they mouse over, they’re not really going to know what it means – especially new MSG users.

So here are some options we’ve come up with to make the receipt of a new message more obvious… and I’ve included a few mockup screen shots of how it might look…

Option 1: leave as-is

Basically don’t do anything to what we’ve already got.
Pros: no work involved!
Cons: doesn’t solve the problem!

Option 2: pop up layer

This would have a pop up layer (not a browser window!) which appeared in top right when a new message arrives. This is similar to how GTalk works and the actual design & text etc of the layer can be changed, along with the actual position – could be in bottom right instead.

Pros: makes it very noticable and fits with how other web-based IM systems work (well, GTalk!)
Cons: covers over existing text etc (though it disappears when layer clicked on to open the MSG chat window)

Option 3: Text next to presence icon

When a new message arrives text would appear just next to the presence icon in the banner, clicking on the text would bring up the chat window. The actual text that appears can easily be altered.

Pros: doesn’t cover over any existing text
Cons: might get lost in all the other text in the banner (esp the new my learningSpace link etc)

Option 4: Blinking presence icon

When a new message arrives the presence icon in the banner would blink (between say green/red or green/gray). Clicking on the blinking icon brings up the chat window and stops the blinking.

Pros: doesn’t take up any more precious space on the page!
Cons: users still might not realise what a blinking icon means so would still need to rely on the mouse over. Also some users might not like blinking icons (well I know I don’t!)

So, those are most of the options we’ve got, so I’d like some feedback on which might be the most likely to work and would be acceptable to appear on the OpenLearn websites. Please bear in mind that the exact design/position/layout of each can be changed easily enough, and we could combine two or more – eg text appearing & blinking icon.

Comments or other suggestions welcome

The MSG Presence Maps have now been launched live on the OpenLearn LearningSpace and LabSpace websites. This adds Google maps integration to the MSG block on both sites, allowing users to see where other users are located geographically. This also means that MSG is now available in LearningSpace – not just LabSpace, giving a much larger potential user base as the LearningSpace has approximately 10 times the hit rate of LabSpace!

Feedback is always welcome, especially on the new presence maps, so feel free to leave a comment here on my blog, or alternatively on the MSG Forum.