Twitter feed on school website!

[CatherineMay]

We have twitter on school website for school information and we use Policy Central to filter some websites eg Facebook and Twitter on students account. This means that student accesses the school website in school the home page hangs up because Policy Central filters Twitter. Does anybody know whether we have the Twitter feed and still filter students' accounts?

[SteveBentley]

The usual Twitter widgets are done client side, they request a bit of JavaScript from Twitter's servers and that gets displayed as part of the page much like taking an image from a remote server.

 

You might be able to get a server side version that uses a bit of PHP or ASP or some other server side language (that is appropriate to what your server supports and how your site has been developed) to request the feed and display it, so that as far as the client computers are concerned everything is coming from your own (whitelisted) website.

[mthomas08]

Strange I know we are going to have the EXACT same issue, we have Frog and I have the Twitter widget setup on our school site and this does get blocked for students.

 

Doesn't really matter though for us because its not the VLE part, do students need to be routed to the actual school site? Is there another page perhaps a "Student Page" they can put on to instead?

[vikpaw]

Don't your filter tools have a hierarchy, whereby you can allow the school website, before those things are blocked?

At one point, we had a redirection on facebook to our website, and the number of pages that have some kind of facebook add-in is amazing, and you'd end up with bits of our website all over the margins and headers it was a bit creepy. Now it redirects to an internal 404 page. Either way, the main page had no trouble loading, it was only the parts that were blocked that got gobbled up.

[CatherineMay]

Thanks vikpaw, that's is gobbledygook to me, I will forward your suggestion to our techs guys.

[vikpaw]

Sorry @CatherineMay i was wittering on with my story. The main question is, is it possible to put your website on an exclusion list, so that if they go to that, the other rules aren't applied. Even if there are parts of the website that would normally be forbidden.

 

Our system just uses ISA server and blocks facebook, but the rest of the page still loads okay. Either option should be possible.

[CatherineMay]

Thanks vikpaw, I understand a little bit more now. I am sure our tech guys will understand.