Posts Tagged ‘directory’

All About You

Posted on October 17th, 2011 by Nick Jackson

As you’ll know if you follow the adventures of Alex and myself we’ve been playing around with our new-look staff directory (give the beta a whirl). We’ve rebuilt it from the ground up to be stupidly fast, using bleeding-edge search technology all wrapped in Web 2.0 goodness to deliver your search results as quickly as possible. After all, why would you want to hang around waiting for half a second when we can have the number you’re looking for in a quarter of that time?

Directory search is awesome, but we thought we could do more with this information. We could take a person’s staff directory entry and make it a little bit more epic, as well as a bit more useful on the internet as a whole. So we did, and we’re happy to introduce the (beta) of staff profile pages – for examples see mine, Alex’s, Joss’s and Paul’s.

Read the rest of this entry »

Build a Better Search

Posted on February 1st, 2011 by Nick Jackson

Hot on the heels of my Staff Directory Search, I decided this lunchtime to make it even more awesome. “But wait Nick!” I hear you cry. “How can you make it even more awesome than it already is?”

Well, how about avatars for everybody (using the awesome Gravatar system), adding tel: links to phone numbers so users with compatible software can dial with one click, kitting out everything with semantic markup using the microdata spec and adding OpenSearch descriptions?

How Staff Directory Search Works

Posted on January 27th, 2011 by Nick Jackson

I’ve had a couple of people ask how my lunchtime project today actually works behind the scenes, so here’s the lowdown in easily-digestible speak. I should point out that I am relying heavily on two frameworks which we’ve already built at Lincoln. These are Nucleus – our heavy-lifting data platform – and the Common Web Design – our web design and application framework. These two gave me a massive head-start by already doing all of the hard work such as extracting data from our directory and making the whole thing look great. Now, on with technology.

Read the rest of this entry »

Things I did on my lunch break.

Posted on January 27th, 2011 by Nick Jackson

Today on my lunch break I enjoyed a creamy chicken and broccoli bake from the Atrium, and then decided to muck about with code and see what I could come up with.

Turning to the power of Nucleus, our one-stop-shop for data, tying it together with the Sphinx search engine we’ve used previously in Jerome, and wrapping it all up in the CWD I was able to come up with a glossy version of our existing Staff Directory.

Give it a whirl at http://phone.labs.lncn.eu.

Staff Directory v2, complete with Bakelite rotary dial phone.