I 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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This was Evan last Monday at Kananaskis Village. He loves climbing, and loved toboganning down the side of Mount Kidd even more.
I only posted this to test out the Photon iPhoto plugin. It works, but seems a bit rough with what it does to the new post. Had to come in and clean a bunch of stuff up.
Read MoreI’ve been playing around with MovableType to test it out for a potential weblogs@ucalgary rollout. It’s really quite nice. I’ve used MT 2.x before (and it’s still running on our main commons.ucalgary.ca webserver), but 3.15 is a nice and polished package. I can’t seem to get it to recognize my NetPBM installation to generate image thumbnails, but that’s not critical. I also can’t seem to get LDAP authentication working, and that’s a bit more critical. I’ll try to tinker with that when I get time.
Read MoreI had to write a utility for the Mavericks project to allow me to import asset descriptions that were exported from ContentDM via a tweaked XML format, into a MySQL database for use in Pachyderm authoring. I was going to write a simple python or php script to do it, but realized just how much simpler it would be in WebObjects. Using JDOM to parse the xml into a DOM Document, and then passing the data into an EOEnterpriseObject to be persisted into the database. Access to both libraries made my code insanely simple.
Read MoreKing announced yesterday that he has accepted a position at a company in downtown Calgary. Congratulations, King! You’re going to enjoy it. Projects in the Real World are different than University projects in so many ways, and I know King will do well in that environment.
Which leaves me trying to figure out how to fill his chair here in the Learning Commons. Replacing King is just flat out impossible. Anyone who has ever worked with him will attest to that. He is by far the most gifted programmer and all-around-developer that I have ever met (and I’ve had the distinct pleasure to have worked with him for 4 years now).
Read MoreWell… I guess the writing’s on the wall… Leon Tightlips is about to take over the blogosphere. It was fun while it lasted. I, for one, welcome our new Lightship overlord…
Now, if only Leon Tightfist could have easier-to-type URLs. He might get linked to more often… Oh, yeah, and maybe if he had some meaningful content on his blog. That might help a bit, too… All that’s up now is some odd Ali-esque ranting monologue…
Read MoreI just started a wiki page to store information about the candidates for institutional weblog platforms.
If you know anything about the candidates (or if there are some other real contenders that I’ve missed) please feel free to contribute!
Read MoreUPDATE: Since there seeems to be some serious interest in this topic, I’ve started a wiki page to compare the packages.
I’m starting to toss some more ideas around for a proposal to kickstart a weblogs@ucalgary.ca project. Ideally, the system would be able to integrate via LDAP to the university’s authentication system, so people wouldn’t have Yet Another Login to remember. It should also scale to thousands of weblogs.
There are several software candidates I’d like to test a bit more before moving forward: (in no particular order)
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