David Simpson

Here are the slides from a talk I gave at the European Luminis User Group in Nottingham last week.
Outlined are some thoughts behind reusable UI elements in the Luminis portal at the University of Nottingham.
Portal UI Design Patterns

We run Confluence with the (default) en_GB locale and language. For our purposes, some of the boilerplate text needs changing. This post describes how to solve this problem with a partial British English language pack that overrides only part of the Confluence interface text.

…or how to display attachments in an unordered list.
Something that bugs me in Confluence is the way that attachments are shown. The default view is a big table with just about all the information related to each attachment.
This is great if you want all this detail, but I’m a simple soul [...]

Here’s a quick demo I wrote to test out the Google Analytics API.
It shows pageviews for an Atlassian Confluence wiki on a space by space basis.
You’ll need your own copy of Confluence hooked up to Google Analytics for the demo to work, so I’ve done a video demo too – no sound, sorry.

Confluence & Google [...]

Here’s a quick screencast I made to show how easy it is to add custom segments – e.g. based on country/territory – to Google Analytics. There’s no audio. Sorry.

Adding custom segments to Google Analytics from David Simpson on Vimeo.

Having installed Google Analytics on Confluence, you need to ensure that you’re not lost in a world of pretty metrics.
Make sure that your new analytics toy produces something solid and actionable. Anything less is just a shiny curiosity that your organisation will soon fail to engage with.
This article presents 4 useful tips [...]

If you’re using the Verdana typeface in your printed documents, stop now.
There is no need and it is helping destroy the planet.
Verdana takes up about 19% more horizontal space than Arial. So a switch away from Verdana could reduce your paper costs by up to 19%. For further savings, switch [...]

Want to know who are the most active users on your Confluence wiki this week?
This wiki markup snippet should help. It tabulates:

Overall activity
Page creations
Page Updates
Page views
Page Popularity

h1. This Week’s Wiki User Activity Charts
 
h2. Overall
 
{topusers:spaces=@all|timespan=1w|period=weekly|events=create,update,view|display=icon,title,count}
 
h2. Breakdown
<code>
|| Page Creation || Page Updates || Page Views || Page Popularity ||
| {topusers:spaces=@all|timespan=1w|period=weekly|events=create|display=icon,title,count} | {topusers:spaces=@all|timespan=1w|period=weekly|events=update|display=icon,title,count} | {topusers:spaces=@all|timespan=1w|period=weekly|events=view|display=icon,title,count} | {popular:spaces=@all|timespan=1w|period=weekly|events=view|display=icon,title,count} |
</code>

I love Confluence. It’s simple. It’s easy to use. It’s hierarchical, so you can build a nice structure.
But…
I hate Confluence. I can’t find anything. Ever. It’s hierarchical, but which branch in the hierarchy is my content located in? Damnit, the Lucene powered search doesn’t seem to be able to find what [...]

You’ve chosen Confluence as your Enterprise wiki and got it installed. People are using it. But how many people?
You could have a look at the Global Activity page on Confluence, but this might confuse matters.

You’ll get to see graphs, but what do they really mean? The Global Activity statistics are [...]