Blog Posts

Flickr Faves 2006/06/11

More places I’d rather be…

University of Calgary selects Drupal as "official" content management system

I hinted at this in a previous post, but it wasn’t “official” yet so I didn’t provide any details. It’s now official. The University of Calgary just finished the official CMS selection process, including input from ~140 web folks on campus and 6 presentations on 6 different CMS options. I was asked to present on Drupal, drawing on what we’ve done on some projects, and how it might fit into a larger community and workflow on campus.

Pedagogical applications of Drupal

Alan forwarded me a link to this really great presentation by Tim Lindgren at Boston College, documenting some pedagogical and instructional design applications of Drupal. I’m sure much of it would translate to other software platforms, but there are some detailed descriptions and case studies written specifically from the point of view of implementing this in Drupal.

Thanks Alan! And thanks to Tim for putting this together! 

Canon Digital Rebel XT test shot

A test shot taken with my new Canon Digital Rebel XT. The lense cap was on, and the Vt mode was selected with a 30" exposure. I count 14 visible bad “spots” (pixels?), but Photoshop’s Histogram counted many (i.e., dozens/hundreds) of bright non-black pixels in the image.

This will make photographs of stars basically impossible, as there will always be bright blue/red/gray spots on every dark image.

Drupal Search Funkiness

I’ve been noticing that the search feature of this Drupal blog has been acting up for awhile - searching for “drupal” turns up only 4 items, but I’ve written many many posts mentioning Drupal. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but I’ve actually been getting emails and IMs asking me wtf wrt searching.

So, I dug a bit deeper. Turns out, Drupal is refusing to index my content when cron.php is called. It’s called every hour, but the /admin/settings/search status indicator is stuck at:

Drupal Module Sets for Various Website Profiles

I’ve been helping to assemble some lists of modules that would be enabled by default for three “typical” website profiles that we’ve come up with at the TLC.

“Simple site” - a regular “static” department-ish website that is really just using Drupal as an easy way to share editing duties without requiring a geek.

“Community site” - akin to weblogs.ucalgary.ca - which may (or may not) be a superset of “simple site”

Drupal Modules by Profile

Alternate PHP on MacOSX?

I’m working on a project where I’ll need to demonstrate the process of importing static websites into Drupal, so I’m toying with the import_html module. The only problem is, it doesn’t work on the PHP that comes with MacOSX. It requires XSLT to do it’s magic (chunking through the DOM of the static site pages).

I’ve tried installing the Entropy.ch PHP5 package , but that just borked Drupal on my test system. Is there a sane way to install a more fully-featured PHP version that will work with Drupal on MacOSX?

Got my Canon Digital Rebel XT

Father’s Day came early at my house. And Christmas. And my birthday. And Kwanzaa. For the next several years. Janice got me my Canon Digital Rebel XT today. What a sweet camera.

We sprung for the Canon XT, with spare battery, vertical grip, case, UV filter, and some other goodies I’m forgetting at the moment. Not sure if/when/how I’ll use the vertical grip, but the extra battery will come in handy. I’ve attached the UV filter as a permanent fixture, if nothing else than to protect the lense.

BCCampus ETUG 2006 Windup

I’m sitting in the Comox airport (it’s actually quite a nice little airport, with wifi and everything) relaxing after the BCCampus ETUG 2006 workshop/session/mini-conference in Courtenay BC. North Island College was really gorgeous - lush, green, giant trees all over the place, and nicely designed buildings on campus. It even has a cool giant totem pole!

After the morning sessions today, I was arm-twisted into spending the afternoon in the beach (or was I the one doing the arm-twisting?) - had a blast hanging out with Keira and Harry, exploring Goose Spit beach in Comox (nice name, btw). I wound up taking something like 50 photographs, but culled that quite a bit. My faves are online of course…

SOLR: Sharable Online Learning Resources for BCCampus

Scott is demoing BCCampus ’ SOLR application for sharing online learning resources in the province of BC. I’m really liking the tie-ins with Creative Commons licensing, making it easy for content creators to safely share their stuff.

Here’s a screenshot of the cool “Browse All Creative Commons Resources” utility, ala Flickrlilli et. al.

BCCampus SOLR Creative Commons Browser: a screenshot taken of the SOLR BCCampus repository ’s Creative Commons browsing interface.

ETUG Social Software Workshop Debriefing

Our session this morning went really well. I think we were able to walk the line between force-feeding the participants with the relentless firehose of super-cool social software stuff, and having a fun interactive session that served as a solid starting point for people wanting to play with Web 2.0™ toys.

The session was completely full, with Harry quietly jamming to the groovy vibes of Sesame Street. It was pretty cool having Harry in the session, and he was good enough to let Keira participate.