Posts filed under 'Web Tech'
O’Reilly’s ONLamp brings you an article by Shlomi Fish (what a cool name!) introducing several types of wikis: Which Open Source Wiki Works For You?
An old idea–user-writable web pages–has taken off again recently. Wikis are becoming more popular as tools for communication and collaboration. There are also several dozen packages to create them. Shlomi Fish compares features of several popular open source Perl, Python, and PHP Wikis.
Personally, I like TWiki, as it gives me all enough high-end doodads and sprockets for everything I want to throw at it. It is a bit of a pain to set up, though, and the documentation is thorough, but confusing. (It took me nearly an hour to figure out that I had to set the preferences by actually editing the “Preferences” wiki page.) I had PhpWiki there first, but the default installation lacked a number of things (like support for media files) out of the box. MediaWiki (used for the Wikipedia) is way overkill for my needs.
I do want to mention another of my favourites, though: ZWiki. If you have a Zope installation, give ZWiki a whirl. I was able to set it up in two minutes flat, and it uses the built-in security and products of Zope for most of its power and flexibility. I’ve used it for various online courses in the past, and have found it just the right balance of ease-of-use and tweakability.
November 7th, 2004
Just getting back from a few days on the road. Owing to a buggy power supply, I haven’t been able to access the Net in nearly four days. It’s amazing: here I am, around plenty of people, with full access to television, radio, newspapers and humans, and I feel completely disconnected from the world….
Business 2.0 has an article on the Firefox browser, headlined (in the typical far-fetched and sensational way) Microsoft’s Worst Nightmare. While I definitely evangelise the merits of Firefox to anyone willing to listen, it’s going to be a while before any David can take the Goliath down. Still, this article does go over a lot of the progress made recently with the browser, concentrating on the contributions of the 19-year-old wunderkind Blake Ross. While it’s nothing extraordinarily detailed or new, it’s a good summary for those folks not following this exciting story (well, “exciting” to techies anyway).
On related news, I see that the SpreadFirefox campaign to purchase a full-page ad in the New York Times for the release of 1.0 (on November 9th) has been an incredible success. Still time left, if you want to see your name in print in the NYT as a contributor. It’s a brilliant idea, and very well executed; the team should be proud.
October 25th, 2004
Great introductory article for newbies about RSS, del.icio.us, Flickr and Bloglines over at Newsforge: Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us make RSS delectable. Haven’t jumped with both feet yet into Bloglines, but the rest I now find indespensible.
October 14th, 2004
Long and well-researched article from the blog incorporated subversion: Communication dynamics: Discussion boards, weblogs and the development of communities of inquiry in online learning environments. A little dense for perusal before your morning coffee (unless you live and breathe academics), but the writing is very thorough and raises a number of very important points regarding how best to use weblogs, wikis, forums and other online educational tools to their best advantage.
October 14th, 2004
For all you folks wandering about lost, seeking decent web-based content management systems, LinuxInsider has an article for you: Open Source Weblog, Content Management Systems. Mini-reviews combined with links and a broader view of Open Source tools makes this a great article to peruse and use as a jump-off point for experimentation. Discussed are weblogs, portals, image galleries, surveys and more. As always, most of the Linux tools work perfectly well with OS X hosts as well (thanks, Steve… that was a good move).
I should probably remind folks that you can play with many different types of pre-installed CMS tools at OpenSourceCMS.com, including most of the systems mentioned in the article. Really handy, if you want to see what they’re like, but don’t want to take the effort to install them.
October 12th, 2004
Since my last post on essential applications was rather well-received, and I’ve found a few dozen requests in my mailbox inquiring about my choice for web-based applications, I thought I’d share a few of the programs that I’ve found very useful over the past few months. I say, the past few months because I’m constantly trying out new applications, and often implementing ones for friends and clients that I subsequently find invaluable.
The following applications serve many different purposes: some are entirely personal, some are for educational uses, some are for collaborative documents and workspace, and some are just for fun. All of them, I have found essential at one time or another, and each one has helped me solve certain problems that arise in my work and life. Note that every single one of my installed applications is Open Source, and thus completely free. They are UNIX-based, and should work on both Linux and OS X. (You Windows users might be able to run some of these, if you are accustomed to installing and using environments like PHP, Perl, MySQL, ImageMagick, etc. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re probably going to experience some major pain and frustration if you try to install them.)
- Blogging: I first tried Movable Type 2.6x (after jumping through all the convoluted technical hoops to install it), and had published all of two entries when I found out that the next version was shrouded in questions regarding cost, licenses, and extensibility (such as making plugins). As a result of these issues, I started investigating other options, and found that many MT users were switching to the PHP-based WordPress. I downloaded and installed it in mere minutes, and I’ve been happy with it ever since. There are quite a number of templates and plugins to play with, although the only one I’ve really used is the Image Browser plugin. Note that WordPress is currently not designed for multiple blogs (although multiple users is fine): I hear this will be rectified in a future version.
- Wiki: As all three of my regular readers would no doubt have noticed, I’ve a big fan of wikis, such as the Wikipedia. When it comes to running my own personal wiki, I use two different applications in two completely different ways. For general super-fast notekeeping, I use Emacs with emacs-wiki.el mode. (Note: only nerds need apply… this is definite geek territory.) It uses the full power of emacs as a text editor (/kitchen sink) to edit a local wiki. With a press of a button, it can publish all the wiki pages to a webserver so that other machines can access the pages via a web browser. For an online wiki, I’m currently digging twiki. It strikes just the right balance of simplicity and flexibility for me. Since I use many different machines (and operating systems) in many locations, this wiki has served as my web notepad. Any time I write or find something that I’d like to be able to access anywhere, I jump into the wiki, add the material with a cut-and-paste, and jump back out again. I’ve also found it helpful for basic project management (such as to-do lists and project logs), contact info, writings-in-process, and lists of resources. When I have to work on a collaborative document of any type, I simply create a new web, grant my collaborators the permissions to use it, set up some blank documents within a contents tree, and away we go. Beats whipping a Word document back and forth, in my humble opinion, and it’s far easier to use when more than one or two people are involved.
- Photo Gallery: My own personal photo gallery is running the aptly-named Gallery, a PHP-based system that is both easy to use and quite powerful. I really enjoy the Java-based upload utilities. If I wasn’t already using Gallery on my own server, I would probably be using Flickr, which I have just recently discovered. (There are a lot of cool features there, no doubt about it.) Another option would have been the SpyMac photo gallery, which comes as part of every free SpyMac account along with the 1 Gb email, blog, storage space, and other toys. If you’re not a system administrator, and you want something that “just works”, I’d seriously advise you to check out these latter two options.
- Learning Management System: The more I experiment with Moodle and its approach to social constructionist pedagogy, the more I like it. I’ve already published a dummy course on my closet server, and have seen how easy it is to add material and utilise community-focused modules to enhance the learning experience, such as wiki pages, journals, forums, workshops and much more. If you’re looking to implement any type of online course or training, you owe it to yourself to give this a spin. There’s even a Moodle “course” to learn Moodle basics. I should take this opportunity to mention that I’ve recently stumbled across another LMS called ATutor, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet.
- Bookmark Management: Until the “roaming bookmarks” code becomes part of the stable Mozilla, which will allow multiple Firefox browsers to share bookmarks from a shared server, it’s still a bit of a pain to try to keep bookmarks in sync across multiple machines. Sure, if you pay for a .Mac account (I gave mine up a few months ago), you can keep your Safari sync’ed. But suppose you don’t want to fork over your cash for a dotMac account (I didn’t consider it worth the cash), or you’re not using Safari and Mac OS X? Well, you could whip up some fancy scripts to interface your bookmarks to a CVS server. Ouch. You could use a few third-party applications to try to keep them in sync, but you risk some serious corruption issues. Ouch. Or you could use del.icio.us. This bookmark service not only allows you to have an account where you can store bookmarks through web-based forms, but you also get to see what others are sharing with similar tags (analogous to simple category meta-data). I found a Firefox extension at delicious.mozdev.org that allows me to post current pages to del.icio.us and use a sidebar to fetch and use them. I recently added a new tag for “wordpress” and found plenty of other sites that people had added with the same tag, leading me to discover some cool new sites. I’ve only been using this service for a week or two, but I’m finding it very handy. That being said, only this morning I stumbled across SiteBar (along with a related Firefox extension). Whereas del.icio.us is more of a social bookmark manager where you share your bookmarks with others, SiteBar performs more like a traditional personal bookmark manager that you can use to share your marks among your various browsers and machines. I’ll be taking it for a spin within the next few days, and will let you folks know how it goes.
- Email: My favourite web-based email service, by far, is gmail (which, unfortunately, you need an invite for). Second favourite is SpyMac, because it not only gives you webmail, but also POP3 access (allowing you to use a good email client like Thunderbird) and a full 1 Gb of storage space. Hotmail and Yahoo are way down the list because of the endless spam, clunky interfaces, and “Got a date, loser?” ads. If I had to run my own web-based email application, I’d probably use SquirrelMail, but thankfully I haven’t needed to do anything like this for a couple of years.
- Middleware: [geek alert!] Although I use various languages for different strengths (and find programming in some far more preferable to others), sometimes you just need a big, cuddly, rapid-prototyping web development platform. I’ve been through a number of these, but keep coming back to Zope. Zope is a web development system that runs atop Python (and therefore on almost any system), has hundreds of add-on products, and can connect to almost any database. The built-in scripting language, DTML, is extremely easy to use, and all the development occurs within an intuitive browser interface, thus allowing you to work from anywhere. There’s a kick-ass portal add-in for it called Plone, a blogging engine called COREBlog, a wiki add-in called ZWiki, and tonnes more. Because of the way Zope is designed, all these various products can generally interface with each other through very simple scripting. Although I occasionally hit a wall using plain DTML, since it can use Python (and Perl) scripts in conjunction with the DTML and products, there’s virtually nothing I find that I cannot do, and very quickly to boot. I used Zope when teaching beginning web developers, and they were able to create fairly complex applications within weeks. That stands as a strong testament to the design of Zope, rather than to my teaching ability.
If you’re not a system administrator, or don’t have access to your own server (or a friend’s), you can probably find hosting providers offering services such as WordPress, Zope, Gallery, Moodle and Wiki software for free or low cost. Many sites also have demo installations or “sandboxes” that you can use to experiment with.
Well, that’s my list for today. As always, I appreciate your comments or suggestions.
October 3rd, 2004
Details are here. If you already have the Preview Release version, it’s a quick click to update your copy. If you’re not running the latest version of Firefox, you owe it to yourself to give it a go. I must say, between the Security Bug Bounty program and the availability of patches before any known exploit, the Mozilla folks are really continuing their trend of excellent security measures.
October 2nd, 2004
Microsoft: To secure IE, upgrade to XP | CNET News.com
This makes me rather angry. Security is not something that you should have to pay for, especially if you’ve already laid down your hard-earned cash for a product. Understood, it’s not feasible for most businesses to support 10-year-old software like Windows 95, but the 200 million people still using Windows 98, ME and 2000 should not be left open to viruses, trojans and other forms of malware just because they haven’t doled out the money for an upgrade that just wouldn’t be worthwhile to them. Surely a business like Microsoft can issue patches to older versions of Internet Explorer: they certainly have the experience and the manpower to do it. This is just another “forced upgrade” with a large price tag attached.
If you’re one of these 200 million people not running Windows XP, get Firefox.
September 24th, 2004
For those who don’t read anything in the technology news, Firefox is a new free (Open Source) web browser created by the good folks from the Mozilla group. Lately, they made available version 1.0 PR (Preview Release), and stated the goal of achieving one million downloads in ten days. According to the Spread Firefox community site, they have passed that goal in just four days! Congratulations to the team!
Meanwhile, if you haven’t tried it yet, you owe it to yourself to take Firefox for a spin. Once you’ve tried tabbed browsing, the new find bar, the pop-up ad blocking, the enhanced speed and standards support, and the tonne of really cool add-ons (extensions), you’ll never go back to the dinosaur that is Internet Explorer.
It’s also worth noting that IE market share has been steadily declining for the first time in many years, eaten away by the Mozilla browsers. Let the Browser Wars recommence!
September 19th, 2004
An interesting article comparing the development process and future directions of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Brittanica:
Spreading Knowledge, The Wiki Way.
The part of me that forever proclaims “All knowledge should be free!” is certainly in agreement with the philosophy behind the Wikipedia, all the more so because one of the established goals is to produce paper and CD-ROM versions for third-world countries. However, the part of me that is aware of the commercial necessity of making a buck in order to stay in business, well… my sympathy goes with the EB folks. But the times, they are a-changing. True, it is worth paying for quality, and the EB is certainly a quality product, but it is a commodity whose full merits must be realised before most people would bother paying subscription fees. Why would most people bother paying money for something that has a free version which is more convenient and easily accessible? While the EB has consistently higher quality per entry, many people are not aware of this difference because they want a quick “knowledge fix” and, accustomed to the rapid-fire nature of the Internet, they want it immediately: they have an assignment due the next day, or their neighbours are thinking about Yucatan and want to know more about the country, or they want to know what souvaki is, or they want to know if the cat is in any mortal danger because of the venus flytrap. Why bother going through the hassle of subscribing and paying money for something when that “fix” is easily satisfied elsewhere? (I must reiterate here that I trust the Wikipedia far more than 99% of Internet sites.)
I am not trying to cheapen the value of knowledge, nor the fine efforts of the EB crew, writers and editors; I am merely musing the unique value propositions that differentiate EB from the Wikipedia. Personally, I’d love to have a full EB in real, honest-to-goodness dead tree form, filling an entire bookcase with its heavy leather-bound tomes. Alas, I doubt that day will ever come: as much as I love real books, I cannot justify its cost among so many of my other needs and expenses, especially when I can purchase it in digital form for a tiny fraction of the price of the set.
In the meantime, I need an educational resource that is timely, constantly expanding to keep pace with changing events and discoveries, available anywhere on a moment’s notice, filled with the collective knowledge of thousands of individuals, and free for students: despite the occasional shortcoming, the Wikipedia fills that description in spades.
September 9th, 2004
I’ve been so busy lately that I didn’t notice that a new version of Moodle was released a few days ago. For those of you who are involved in education or training, it’s definitely something that might pique your interest, “A Free, Open Source Course Management System for Online Learning.” A month or two ago, I spent a full weekend weaving my way through the capabilities of the older version, and I was very much suprised to see that such an incredible product with so many capabilities had escaped my attention for so long. I’m really looking forward to experimenting with this version when I get a chance, especially the new and improved add-on modules.
September 8th, 2004
Recently, I finally received an invitation into that secret world known as Gmail, or Google Mail. For those of you who have been hiding from technology news this year, it’s Google’s foray into web-based email. One of the reasons for its popularity is that it’s “by invitation only,” and invitations were very difficult to come by, at least at first. Only well-known techie celebreties received them at first, and they could only invite others on an occasional basis.
It was a coup for viral marketing: the technology was so well-received and talked-about on news and review sites that everybody dreamed of becoming one of the “elite few” to own an account. Besides some interesting ways to manage your email (basically, they are threaded to group both sent and received mail together, like a forum), Google also gave you a full gigabyte of storage (huge, in email terms), access to legendary Google search mechanisms to search and group your messages, and (most important of all) a chance to actually get yourname@gmail.com, as opposed to douglasjohnston2641isalinuxgeek2@hotmail.com. Accounts were being sold off on eBay for as much as $500 US ($234,534.97 Canadian), and swap sites popped up overnight to see what people had to offer in exchange for one. It wasn’t unusual to find on barter such things as iPods, website development, copies of Microsoft Office, nude pictures of wives and, shall we say, certain favours, depending on your locale.
It’s changed lately: it seems every techie and his pet python have accounts to give away, and so it is lately that I finally found the heart-stopping invitation in my inbox. Almost immediately, I received the notification that I could give away six more invites, and so my friends were brought into the fray.
I haven’t had this much fun with email in years. Is it that I’m finally tasting the forbidden fruit? Perhaps, but it goes deeper than that. Gmail is actually an effortless and enjoyable way to handle your email.
I mentioned that the mail is handled through threads, much like a forum: Gmail calls this “Conversations.” While threaded message handling is nothing new, Gmail takes it a step further by bringing everything together on on page, including your sent messages, and hides all the frequently-requoted cruft that makes long threads so difficult to get through (you can unhide them with a mouse click). At any point in the conversation, you can click on the Reply or Forward link at the base of a message, and a little box opens beneath it. Type in your message, press Send, and it’s done. Like I said, effortless. If conversations become too long, Gmail will compress several of the older messages together so you only see the most recent ones, unless you want to Expand All again.
Other little time-savers further involve getting rid of the complexities and information overload that comes with email. For example, you don’t see full headers (unless you want expand them with a mouse click): you see headers like “Rick Norman to me - Sept. 2 (2 days ago)”, which tells me everything I need to know at a glance. Simple keystrokes can be used to function just like a real mail client, too. J and K move your little selection arrow up and down, N and P move through conversations, X will select an item, ENTER will jump into it: the *nix-luvin’ folks at Google chose keystrokes that seem very natural to me.
For the first time since my old UNIX terminal days nearly 20 years ago (eek!), email no longer seems like a chore. In fact, I constantly watch my Gmail Notifier in Firefox, hoping for another message so I have an excuse to use it again. And for something that is normally so much of my daily grind that it wears me down, finding an interest in it again is a good thing.
So watch those inboxes for invites, and keep an eye on the tech news to see when Gmail opens up to the general public (soon, is my guess). In the meantime, check out the unofficial Gmail FAQ for more information about this really cool service.
In case you want to email me at my new address, you can reach me at my full name (see my domain name), without periods, at gmail.com. (Sorry for being cryptic: I want to avoid being automatically spammed on this account as long as possible.)
September 4th, 2004
I’ve been using wikis for years now, without really thinking too much about how they work and for what purposes they are best suited. Coming from a strong web development background, where so many things are quite complicated or at least time-consuming, the only real things that struck home about wikis were that they were so easy to use, and yet so conducive to collaborative writing.
For those who have not yet tripped across a wiki, you should run –not walk– to Wikipedia.org and see what these folks have been up to. Basically, a wiki is a large collaborative website where almost anybody can go in and add or modify pages. Yes, you see a page, you want to change the content, you hit “edit” and you can publish your changes without knowing HTML formatting, database functions or even who runs the joint. The Wikipedia is actually a giant, sprawling community-driven encyclopedia that grows by leaps and bounds every day. In fact, I’ve heard tell it’s already three times the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica (although the content is far more variable, as one would expect). Smaller and more specialised topic wikis can be used to discuss text editors, horticulture, pop stars, and every topic under the sun.
So, since I’m preparing an online version of a high school English course for the province, I’ve started examining the possibilities of using a wiki for more educational purposes. I have set them up in the past for other courses I’ve taught, mainly technical, and they were all very well received. But could a wiki work for an English course?
My thoughts on this so far:
- English, and all other liberal arts, are often best learned in a fully collaborative environment. “Listen, and repeat after me,” or “Read this page, then do this exercise on your own,” are not exactly conducive to the subject matter. After all, if the outcomes are best served through shared experience and the search for meaning from differing viewpoints, the students will not be able to reach these in isolation. A wiki allows students and teachers to work together on a “collective” series of documents with input from all involved. This can work especially well from a distance.
- The Internet is transitory, and if it is used as an integral resource for an English course (almost essential for online learning and distance education), there should be an easy way to update all of the resources to keep them current and relevant. With a wiki, not only can the teachers do this with a simple and non-technical tool, but the students can as well.
- A wiki can be used as a way of not only giving assignments, but collecting and presenting them as well. A teacher can assign work to students that involve adding to or improving the information contained within the wiki, thus furthering its relevance for all involved.
- Peer pressure is an amazing force that can be used for good or evil. In a wiki, the collective eyes of the group provide strong motivation to not only do the best job you can, but to screen out undesirable information. With a simple click, the teacher can see all recent changes to the wiki, and check their appropriateness. If necessary, the pages in question can be “rolled back” to a previous version. This is not to mention that changes can be logged to show which inviduals contributed what, enabling the teacher to contact them about their material if need be.
- The essence of Language Arts is the exploration of meaning. The native form and function of a wiki encourages cross-linking to relevant items, and thus exploration. Therefore, students do not necessarily receive a very narrow viewpoint of the material, but can “leap off” into alternate theories, related subjects, debatable issues, and external resources that can foster a somewhat-controlled environment of discovery.
- Many students, raised on high-tech and the Internet, will no doubt be able to push the wiki to its furthest. However, this also puts some pressure on the teacher to learn its techniques and benefits, and to encourage its use on a daily basis. (Any tool will degrade without proper usage and maintenance.) That being said, if a skilled administrator sets everything up beforehand (including user accounts and permissions), any person with a modicum of computer experience under his or her belt should be able to run matters very smoothly within just a few days of regular use.
A wiki can obviously be a highly effective and very advantageous tool for delivering Language Arts material online. While the benefits are many, and the strikes against it are few, the biggest challenge in fostering its use is the sudden shift in paradigm that many teachers will no doubt face. After all, if one is used to being in a classroom, dealing with students face-to-face, reading body language and often-subtle hints to determine the effectiveness of the current lesson, the whole notion of online teaching is difficult enough. Now, if you deviate even further from the norm, from the usual “progression of steps leading to an inevitable conclusion,” how can you feel comfortable in your role as educator? The ease of exploration and self-discovery inherent in a wiki provides so many possibilities that turn sequential education on its ear, that empower the students to more actively pursue meaning, it is difficult to predict how most traditional teachers will adapt to this new medium. Add to this recipe the advantages of other web-based and multimedia technologies, like blogging, software-driven presentations, A/V editing/distribution and Flash authoring, and the teachers of the new millenium face a world unlimited in both potential and complexity. Thankfully, a wiki is but a small step in this direction, one that most teachers should be able to make without great stress, trepidation or confusion. In this way, it is but a gentle and effective introduction to modern educational technology.
Boy, that ended up sounding like an essay. Must be the influence of all those textbooks I’ve been reading lately….
August 19th, 2004
Next Posts