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