It’s been two weeks since my latest project, Ask a Scientist, was released into the wild and so I thought it was about time to at least mention it here.

The site sees young people (primarily between the ages of 14 – 25) engage and interact with science on a new level – by providing them with a platform to ask any science related question they want – and get real scientists from around the UK to provide the answers, stimulate discussions and generally teach and inspire young people to make science their career.

After months of planning, designing and negotiating with various science organisations and scientists, the site finally went live on July 15th – with the aim to expand and enhance the content of the site over time. I’d also like to thank all the support I’ve had so far from many, many people who without them, the site wouldn’t be anywhere close to completion – that includes my friends and family, colleagues at NPL, and various people from a whole host of other organisations including STEMNET, Kingston University, the MET Office and the NHS to name a few!

Go check it out – let me know what you think – and by all means get involved and help improve and expand what the site currently has to offer!

www.askascientist.co.uk

The site also makes use of various social networks – you can follow it on Twitter at @askascientist – and, if you tweet questions they will automatically be added to the question repository. There’s also a Facebook fan page and a Youtube page for the videos.

Working in collaboration with Cherry Designs, last week saw the relaunch of the new website for photographer Andrew Brookes. I was responsible of turning the new site design into a fully working site, coded in XHTML, PHP and jQuery.

Andrew Brookes is an award winning photographer, and his new site features a javascript gallery to showcase his work, as well as having sections to provide contact details and more information about him for potential clients to make contact with him.

The site is also optimised for search engines to increase it’s position in Google and other search providers.

www.abstill.co.uk

Well after a few months and a lot of time spent working on the site during the evenings and weekends the KTNs site is ready to be let out into the wild for you folks to explore, test and give us your valuable feedback!

www.ktns.co.uk

Why has it taken so long? Well I’ve worked on this site solely during my spare time, which at times can be hard to come by – and there have been several big coding changes throughout its development, either to improve usability and page loading times – to just keeping up to speed with the developments of the new KTN platform currently being introduced over at http://ktn.innovateuk.org

So what is this site all about I hear you ask?

Well, to put it simply; the site’s main purpose is to monitor and gather all of the social media activity conducted by the UK’s KTN’s into one place! The site currently monitors several KTN accounts on Twitter, Flickr and their blogs on the new KTN website platform – with their updates being posted up to every minute on this site as and when new items are posted!

The site is structured in a way which should be familar to KTN members. Each KTN is listed on the homepage (and the networks page), and then sub groups of each KTN are listed on each individual KTN’s page.

For example;

www.ktns.co.uk – All main KTN’s updates

www.ktns.co.uk/networks/digitalsystems – Updates from the Digital System KTN’s main accounts

www.ktns.co.uk/networks/digitalsystems/locationtiming – Updates from Digital System’s Position, Navigation & Timing group.

Technical

The site is coded in PHP with a MySQL database for the core functionality, with jQuery being implemented to improve usability and add to the whole site experience such as auto-updating the stream as and when new updates are posted.

Future

There are many more features and updates planned to be launched over the next few weeks so keep an eye out over on the KTN site!

*Part of this blog orignally posted over at ktns.co.uk/blog

Following a few tweets back a forth with a couple of people it became apparent that there was no one place where someone could view all the Knowledge Transfer Networks (KTN’s) on Twitter.

What’s a KTN I hear you say? Well, they are government funded networks (there’s quite a few of them!), where groups of industry professionals can get together to discuss and share knowledge and keep up to date on what everyone’s doing, and what’s happening within their profession.

Anyway!, to put a stop to there being no single repository of their Twitter activities I’ve set up a Twitter list to do bring them all together - now you can find and follow to all the KTN’s at once by heading over to my Twitter list here: http://twitter.com/lloydengland/ktns

If you know of any other KTN’s which arn’t on my list, please do let me know.

*Note – This is not an official list by any means, and was solely created by me to benefit others with no involvement from any official party.

Yesterday I released a small new plugin to the WordPress respository. It’s a quick and very simple plugin which does one specific task – which is to restrict access to the backend of WordPress to every user except administrators.

When activated, when users log in they will be redirected back to the blog homepage and if they try to access the backend, including their profile, they will again simply be redirected back to the homepage.

I plan to vastly improve the plugin in the next few weeks; upcoming features in the next version will enable you to choose access levels based on roles and customise the page a user is redirected too.

You can download the plugin over at WordPress here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backend-user-restrictor/

Let me know what you think and what features you would like to see in a future releases

UPDATE: 9th May 2010

Version 1.1 has been released with the thanks from a kind contribution from Dustin Vietzke. The plugin update features;

• Updated to allow specified pages to be seen
• Accounts for https connections
• Tested upto WordPress 3.0 Beta