Work

I followed Jim's instructions to get UCalgaryBlogs.ca converted from using a single database (as is the default) to using multiple databases (17 separate databases now) via the premium.wpmudev.org Multi-DB code to prevent growing pains. The single database config is good for getting up and running, but with 300 blogs in the system, table explosion was causing grief on the shared MySQL database server - there were almost 3000 tables, which was making the automated backup script complain a bit.

I just tried logging into ucalgaryblogs.ca using a test user account, and was surprised to see a strange item in the admin bar at the top of the page:

I was curious, so I clicked it.

mwah? Those are site-admin items, being displayed to a non-admin user. I was actually able to click the "Admin Message" item to set that, even though the logged in user wasn't an admin. Scary. Luckily, nobody's noticed the extra menu yet - or if they have, they've behaved.

I just pushed the latest version of the WP-Sentry plugin out to general use on UCalgaryBlogs.ca - any site can now enable it to have the ability to create groups and to set the audience for posts and pages. A site admin can create groups and put members of the site into any number of groups - which can also be hierarchically arranged - and then the members can decide who should be allowed to see the posts that they publish.

I've been looking at various options for student response systems - primarily clickers - and have been quite frustrated at how that market is set up. I wouldn't be able to recommend use of those, in good conscience, given the recurring costs. It also seems a little strange to compel students to buy a specific piece of hardware to perform the task, when they (almost) all have laptops and/or smartphones in their hands anyway.

I spent some time this afternoon poking around in the database that runs UCalgaryBlogs.ca to see if I could get a better sense of how it's growing. Turns out, it's growing MUCH faster than I thought it was (and I thought it was growing pretty darned fast).

It's still pretty small scale, compared with giants like WordPress.com and Edublogs.org, but the growth looks pretty much exponential. I'm glad we've got lots of room to scale this puppy. And that campus IT isn't upset with growing demands on database resources.

Following a thread through some blog posts this morning - I started at The Reverend's post about Martha's documentation of her hacking on WPMU, including a description of a WordPress plugin I hadn't heard of before - Flutter.

Damn. The Rev's gonna love this.

One of the things I LOVE about Drupal is the fantastic CCK plugin that lets me create compound structured content types without hacking the database or writing code. Things like Events. Profiles. Pretty much anything that can be stored as database records.

I've been meaning to redesign the main site at UCalgaryBlogs.ca for awhile now - the Edublogs Clean theme isn't intended to be dropped in as a stock theme, but as a starting point for hacking something tailor-made. The Edu-Clean theme is available as part of the fantastic Premium WPMUDev subscription - and it certainly helped me get UCalgaryBlogs.ca off the ground quickly.

Edu-Clean has bugged me because it hijacks the front page by using home.php, rather than using a page template to render the front page. The annoying part of this technique is that it makes it difficult to list blog posts within that site - so news updates posted on the main blog only show up on the "latest posts" widget, and then disappear from sight when they roll off the bottom of the widget.

Back in the heady early days of podcasting - all the way back in 2005 - one of the first use cases of the technology was to create "walking tours" where a narrator could guide students through a tour of an area. When video podcasting became possible, it would make the guided tours more effective because you could show supplemental or orienteering images to support the narration.

Fast forward to 2008, and the TLC just produced a walking tour of the U of C campus, featuring Julie Walker, a naturalist and hiking guide with the University of Calgary Outdoor Centre.

I had the distinct pleasure of introducing Dr. Leslie Reid this morning, for her presentation "Creating Team Projects that Work in Large Classes: Redesigning a Large Science 'Service' Course" - part of the Teaching & Learning Centre's 10th anniversary series of presentations. She talks about her experience in redesigning a large class (300 students with 13 weeks of lectures) into a format based on group projects (250 students with 6 weeks of lectures and 6 weeks of group work).

I just put up a bunch of these posters in a few of the buildings on campus. Time to spread the word a little more widely...

I just had to uninstall the TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter from UCalgaryBlogs.ca - it's a simple plugin that uses a dictionary lookup to try to detect what it thinks are REALLY obvious spam comment attempts. But it was a bit overzealous. Instead of just modifying the dictionary to remove some valid words (which words are valid? who gets to decide that? in which contexts?), I decided to just delete the plugin outright so that comments can be posted without censorship.

I've disabled WP-Super-Cache on UCalgaryBlogs.ca because it was doing quirky things like showing the anonymous front page after someone logged in, etc... And, with our low load and mostly logged in users, it really wasn't necessary.

Except for the RSS feeds used to generate the Recent Posts and Recent Comments sections on the front page of the site. Without WP-Super-Cache enabled, the front page (and ONLY the front page) took glacial epochs to load, as the RSS feeds were generated, parsed, and embedded. I wanted to be able to cache the feeds, without having to throw the switch on caching the entire site.