I just finished the first round of authoring for the Mavericks exhibit, using the Pachyderm 2.0 Beta 1 software. It’s by far the largest beta test case we’ve had. Currently, there are 67 screens in this project (but there will wind up being hundreds of screens), with many assets, and lots of text. It should be a good stress test for all parts of the authoring and publishing processes.
Authoring went very smoothly. Here are some tips:
Read MoreI was just poking around in the logs on weblogs.ucalgary.ca to see if everything was continuing to run smoothly (it is, touch wood :-) ) and noticed an entry in the log that stated a user had added a post using the Blog API (MovableType compatible). I knew that was possible, and had tested that myself.
What surprised me was the name of the application this user was using: Zempt. I’d never heard of it before. It’s an open source project, currently running only on Windows, but with versions slated for linux and MacOSX.
Read MoreI got to give a presentation to a group of about 15 anthropology grad students today, about new technologies for teaching and learning (the official topic was “new technologies for the classroom,” but that’s rather limited, no?). I had initially planned on talking for only 15-20 minutes of the hour we would have, and we booked a lab so every person could hammer away at weblogs, wikis, etc… I wound up giving the whirlwind tour of new technologies - intro to blogging (3 people read blogs, 1 has one already), wikis (huh?), Flickr (one user), social bookmarking (huh?) I showed them the new weblogs.ucalgary.ca service (which worked fine in the demo, but the LDAP connection died when they tried to login - think that’s been fixed now). The students were quite interested in the tools, and we had a discussion about how they could be using wikis to collaborate with other students and colleagues. I told the story of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, TheFuss, and Pachyderm (showing the paper we wrote for Museums and the Web 2005 in a wiki). Next time I do this, I’ll have to remember to break it into smaller bite-sized pieces. Perhaps a session on weblogs. One on wikis. One on RSS. One on social bookmarking… Links and resources for this session are online here and here.
Read MoreQuick note to self: When installing MacOSX Server, always always follow up by installing the Developer Tools. Things like make and other goodies come with the Developer Tools, and will make life simpler. For bonus points, install Fink as well, so you can easily install all kinds of funky utilities and apps over an SSH connection.
Alan’s almost got his server up. It’s basically running now, on an external firewire drive. He just needs to finish tweaking that installation, and move it onto the internal drive module.
Read MoreJust got an email from Alan Levine asking me to light the beacons to send word throughout the Kingdom of Man that his XServe has succumbed to the unblinking gaze of Sauron himself. As a last ditch effort to salt the earth lest Evil gets a foothold, the server promptly decided to rename/delete some rather critical files. Needless to say, it’s now a smouldering pile of shiny brushed aluminum (until probably Monday, when a fresh hard drive module will be slapped in and life-giving charges of electricity once again flow through its temperamental silicon heart).
Read MorePaul and I just had a brief meeting to discuss what we wanted to do about this. We decided that the best thing to do would be to set if free, and see if anyone on campus starts fiddling with it.
It’s a beta, and we’ll be experimenting with the best setup of modules and content, but the only way to know if this boat will float is to put it into the water. So…
Read MoreI’ve been going through the various options, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Drupal may well be the best solution for what we’d need for a campus weblogging service. It doesn’t have per-blog themes, but that’s coming in Drupal 4.6. The rest of the package is rock solid, and the LDAP integration means every @ucalgary.ca could hit the ground running, as Drupal creates weblogs and forums on the fly as users enter the system. That makes administration much simpler for me, and makes the system more flexible for the users.
Read MoreI was just going through some old posts to see what else I’d written on Pachyderm, and noticed that there are several posts that have munged “Read the rest…” links.
Looks like when I exported everything from Blosxom to the MovableType archive format for importing to WordPress, long posts got clipped. I’ll have to dig out the original source .txt files from the Blosxom incarnation of my weblog and fill in the blanks. What a PiTA.
Read MoreThe Pachyderm project just pushed the software into “Beta 1” status, which we’re using as an internal beta testing stage so we can squash some bugs before releasing it to the wild.
To the 42 people on the internal beta test list, your login info is just about in the mail (I’ve created the accounts, and am now looking forward to sending out 42 templated emails, hoping I don’t goof up the passwords :-) )
Read MoreI just started playing around with ELGG - an open source multi-user weblog package. It also claims to do some e-portfolio stuff. It’s a really nice app. LDAP is a required feature. It can be deployed on any server you want. Templates are customizable on a per-blog basis (with selection of templates from a list of options, and the ability to create and extend templates).
It mimics Flickr in its use of tags and friends to create webs of content. And it seems to strike a nice balance between complexity and ease of use. It’s complex enough to be useful. Simple enough to not be scary.
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Originally uploaded by dnorman.
Trying the Flickr Blog This feature…
Hey. that worked pretty well! Easy peasy. Some more-complicated-than-necessary HTML in the new post, but that’s not fatal. Cool.
Read MoreI’ve just finished installing the Kubrick template for both Drupal and MovableType. The template does a decent job of hiding the complexity inherent in these systems, and looks relatively pretty, too.
In my mind, it’s back to a dead-even horse race. The biggest drawback of Drupal was the complexity - too many widgets on the screen, so novices could get easily confused. It’s immediate benefits are LDAP authentication, and extremely flexible content types and easy publishing. Drawbacks include the mash-everything-into-one-website-with-multiple-views strategy, where it becomes difficult (impossible?) to create truly unique weblogs as part of the larger system. They all feed into the same content store, and are all displayed via the same interface.
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