I was somewhat frustrated when signing up for an account a website for work recently.  We were doing this to help with the collection and analysis of  publication rates from the universities that I work with using  ISI Web of Science.  I don't envy my colleague who has been preparing searches which stretch the limits of the search parameters for this service.

On setting up a new account, the site asks for the usual range of information, including a strong password.  Now I am all in favour of proper security.  Using your kid's name, or favorite holiday destination just is not good enough for your top secret files, and your root password.  However this site requires an eight letter password with at least one a number, a punctuation character _and_ a capital letter.

All I will do is to save my search preferences and perhaps list of my favourite journals. I really, really do not need a paranoid strength password for this site. 

The main SUPA website has been using the same basic design for several years now.  Looking a the front page and the structure, it seems that the main question that the site was designed to answer was "what is SUPA?".  It seems likely now that many of our staff and students are visiting for other reasons.  It would be useful to think about and understand what motivates people to visit our site.  And perhaps understand how we can help them to find what  they need more easily.

Karon was starting to put together some proposals for appearance of the SUPA main website, and has some nice things on the go   I really can't wait to get started on this revamp of the site.

Really seeing the advanteges of customisable plugable web services.  Really nice to be able to show off the work that you are doing elsewhere in a blog or profile page.  Makes the work done on offering elgg gadgets which you can use to pull in external content onto your profile page nice.

However I notice that the list of gadgets is somewhat limited at the moment.  Does anyone have any suggestions of external content that would be nice to pull in here?   I'm thinking twitter, flickr, external blog, del.icou.us links etc.  But would be open to other suggestions.  

Perhaps a nice effect to offer a bit more control would be to pull in content selectively eg. only external photos or blog entries tagged with 'supa.

Last year during the summer I managed to write a few blog entries in My.SUPA during development work on Summer projects.  Karon and David did something simiar.  However the blog tool in moodle is somewhat basic, and did not really seem to foster a dialogue.

 So here's a quick attempt at making Elgg look presentable as a blogging and community tool for SUPA.

 Quickly tweaked the CSS, and then added some plugins

• z_acsext - access control plugin
• river - a facebook style minifeed of actions by users and friends
• modified the profile to show your current blog entry and link to the remaining items

If you have any thoughts about other widgets or plugins that you would like to see, please do let me know.

At the moment you need to sign up on the site itself.  Contact Karon, David or myself about getting an account set up.  Hope to add moodle integration to allow people with My.SUPA accounts direct access to this service later.