Glossary of Hijack Terminology

What is Hijack?

Hijack is the name of the system as a whole. It is the tool  you will be using to curate and deliver online events and experiences for your audiences.

What is a Hijack?

When we talk about ‘a Hijack’ we are talking about a singular instance of the tool. This is one event or experience which has its own Start/End times and one or more specified URLs on which it will run.

For example, you may set up a Hijack to run an online open day on the homepage of your website. You might set up another to manage a live Q&A for a particular department on a subject area’s landing page and perhaps another to deliver important information to international students on a knowledge base article.

The point is,  you can create multiple Hijacks which are set up and ready to go at their specified times and on their specific pages. You can even run several at the same time!

To the front end user, a Hijack initially appears as a small icon which sits in the bottom right-hand corner of any page on your website. It only appears here within the time frame you have specified for the Hijack to run. When clicked, the Hijack opens as an overlay on top of the page itself. This overlay contains all of the content as configured by yourself in the back end. Your audience can explore and interact with your content in the overlay for as long as they like whilst the Hijack is active.

What is a Chapter?

Chapters are the building blocks that constitute a Hijack. From the front end of the site, a user will choose from a list of Chapters when they first open a Hijack. Clicking between them will dramatically change the content a user is faced with. From a backend perspective, the most important configuration choice a Hijack Publisher will make is in choosing which Chapters should be inserted into a Hijack.

One of the most useful and characteristic properties of a Chapter is that it can be reused again and again on as many Hijacks as you like both consecutively and concurrently. So, for example, a Chapter which covers ‘Accommodation’ might be useful on an ‘Open Day’ Hijack. It might also be useful to include it on a ‘Student Life’ Hijack. It can exist on both, and even at exactly the same time if you prefer.