Superstition: Middle Ages and Now

Posted on September 25, 2006 by Reverend

A test run of Viper007bond video plugin for YouTube, straight from WFMU’s blog post about this video …

[youtube]N2TohOTqwm8[/youtube]

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Embedding Google Videos in WordPress

Posted on September 25, 2006 by Reverend

I just found a great Coca-Cola commerical parodying Grand Theft Auto on digg. The commerical is hosted on google videos, so I went searching for a solution to embed it in a post of a WordPress blog I recently setup for Dr. Carole Ann Creque’s Marketing 310 class (they are currently discussing the advertising history of Coca-Cola). Talk about an awesome example of viral advertising and blogs!

You may remember I posted a little while back on ExtremVideo 2.0 for WordPress as an all-in-one solution for WordPress videos, turns out that it has some issues with google videos. Giving up on ExtremeVideo for the moment, I tried including the embed link provided by google vide os in a WordPress blog post to no avail. After a quick search I found a plugin at Viper007Bond that made the whole process very, very easy (it also handles youtube videos, windows media videos, quicktime movies, avi, mpeg and ifilms).

Posting Google Videos

Caption: The three wmv icons are for avi, mpeg, and wmv files, respectively!

If you are just looking for the code to include a google video in your post without a quicklink button just follow the format below, which works for youtube or google videos. Just put the video’s docid for the youtube or google video between opening and closing square brackets that have the term googlevideo or youtube (depending on which service you use) as illustrated below. Note that you will still need the plugin for this option:

Google video code

The docid can be found at the end of the google videos url …

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3913745262811179417

The same holds true for YouTube, difference being it is letters not numbers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twhtswFUGGg

Now for some fun …

[googlevideo]3913745262811179417[/googlevideo]


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Single Sign-on for Third Party Applications with Typo3

Posted on September 24, 2006 by Reverend

Well, I have been meaning to do it for a while now, but looks like now I have no other choice: its time to re-visit Typo3. I have become pretty familiar with this CMS over the last 6-8 months and I worked on a museum site using Typo3 ver 3.8 – but I think its time to ramp up to ver 4.x and start playing a bit more seriously.

Single Sign On Typo3
“Why?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you why, Sunshine. Single sign-on for Typo3 is an extension that integrates Third Party Applications like phpBB, mediawiki, moodle, and hopefully WordPress sometime soon (I just put in a request for it!). You can see the entire list of open source applications implemented, or being considered, for implementation here. What this means for the educational community seems pretty major. We have spent some time working through ideas for hacking applications like WordPress, Drupal, and Mediawiki together loosely, and have made some progress I might add. But the idea of having a space where users can authenticate on to all of these applications at once, and access them through the Typo3 portal, as well as integrate content through feeds, content elements etc, into this portal-like space offers something close to my vague understanding of eduglu. Here is the blurb on the SSO for Typo3 website:

TYPO3 Single Sign-On is a free (GPL, Open Source) TYPO3 extension by net&works. It provides seamless integration of Third Party (i.e. non-TYPO3) Applications into the TYPO3 frontend.
This includes
* access to Third Party Applications (TPAs) with no additional logon (for authenticated TYPO3-users)
* role-based integration of the TPA into TYPO3 navigation or content
* a sophisticated three-layer security architecture
* no need for server-to-server communication, no need for central reverse proxies
* no need for a common/shared/synchronized password database or even user database

i’ll have to parse some of this before I make claims or promises I regret (uncharacteristic, I know). Nonetheless, i am excited by the idea of having role-based integration which integrates these programes into the Typo3 navigation and content. Making the Typo3 install not something the users will have to manage, but rather an integrated gateway that aggregates applications and content from those applications. They are also working on what the call user propagation, which means “that a user created on the SSO server (e.g. in TYPO3) can now automatically be created on the Third-Party system”. Scalability, anyone? OK, so I am trying not to get too excited but that is difficult because this reminds me a lot of the openacademic.org project Darcy Norman pointed to a week or so ago.

For anyone interested, there is an online demo that demonstrates the logic of this extension. Link.

Thank you for the heads up, Zach. I wish you would start blogging so I don’t feel compelled to pass off these links as if I actually knew something about the interrnets.

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A WordPress Website with Static Front Page

Posted on September 23, 2006 by Reverend

Update: be sure to check out bloghelper’s tutorial on the same subject which offers more in-depth details and a few more alternatives.

I Love WordPressFor many the WordPress application has become synonymous with blogging. And while I am certainly guilty of this conflation, I have recently been exploring how this program can be used as a content management system (CMS). To this end it may make some sense to discuss how I have been using WordPress over the last month with some faculty to help them create a relatively quick and easy website with, or without, a blog.

This option of using WordPress as a CMS for faculty web sites has in many ways grown organically out of exploring this application for faculty courses. For while integrating WordPress as course management software recently, I have simultaneously been getting requests from faculty regarding their languishing or even non-existent webpages. Rather than pretending either of us will have the time or energy to work through a program like Dreamweaver, I have been presenting WordPress with Static Front Page as a quick and easy solution to both creating and easily maintaining their websites. This obiously makes sense on some practical level for me in terms of training and documentation, much ofwhich I have for WordPress. Howeer, I am also of the mindset that WordPress can be easily repackaged for faculty who want to revisit the idea of their web presence because it has become so user-friendly. I would ask how many of you out there could install, configure and train a group of faculty on using another CMS in under an hour? Moreover, once faculty have a viable tool for creating and maintaining web content for their professional wesite with WordPress, the chances seem much great that this space would be integrated into a much more dynamic virtual learning space for course material, course sites, blogs, etc.

In fact, the process below is pretty straight-forward. Keep in mind, however, that this is one of many ways to accomplsih such feat – the WordPress documentation has another (in my opinion more convoluted way) here.

The first thing to do is download the plugin Static Front Page by Semiological or filosofo’s Home-Page-Control. I will be discussing Semiological’s Static Front Page because that is what I have used thus far, as always any additional options would be appreciated in the comments.

Once you have uploaded the static front page to the plugins folder of your WordPress install and activated it, you are ready to roll:

Using the static front page plugin is very simple:

1. Create a page titled ‘Home’
2. Activate the plugin and you’re done

The static front page plugin looks for the page with a page slug of ‘home’. Thus, you can safely change your ‘Home’ page’s title after it is created.

In addition, the plugin turns any link to your ‘home’ page into a link to your blog’s front page. And it lets you customize your front page normally:

* If you want a front page specific template, simply create a home.php file for your WordPress theme
* If you want front page specific features, simply use WordPress’ built-in is_home() test normally

The static front page plugin fallbacks to normal blog mode when no page with a page slug of ‘home’ is found, and will override the opt-in front page plugin when both are active.

Once you’ve followed these steps (which are staight from the Semiological page) you now have a WordPress installation that can create new pages with new content using WordPress 2.0’s quick and easy page creation, editing, file upload, multimedia plugins for audio & video, as well as nested subpages. In fact, you can even tack on a WordPress blog to your website, just follow these instructions below (again from Semiological)

1. Use the static front page plugin normally
2. Create a category called ‘Blog’, make it the default category, and put every post in it
3. Link to the ‘Blog’ category in your navigation menu

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Flickr Set Slideshow, featuring the Red Scare!

Posted on September 19, 2006 by Reverend

For a while now I have longingly watched Darcy Norman include Flickr sets in his blog posts. My urge to finally scratch this itch was further prompted by the fact that I recently bucked-up and became a proud Flickr Pro account holder. So last night I was thinking, “Hey, maybe I could find a quick tool for WordPress to make this happen and be as cool as them Canadians.” What I discovered in the meantime might just make me twice as cool. (You’ll note, however, that Darcy Norman commented on the following tutorial over a year ago – damn I’m slow.) Paul Stamitiou posted a quickie tutorial on how to include a slideshow of images from Flickr in a blog post or page. This code allows you to include images by tag, sets, date, etc. – it is very vesatile, and above all I think it works with just about any blogging system or html encoded page. Very cool. I would also like to say the Paul Stamitou is my new found guru of online tutorials, his K2 series is to die for. In my recent searches for tutorials for everything from Azureus to K2, Paul’s work floats to the top. His cool, calm and collected tone makes me wanna rethink my mad ravings all together. Thanks for all the hard work Paul, you make it all so easy.

But now for the goods:
Continue reading →

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IMing with my Tech Muse, or Blue Skying Course Managment Alternatives

Posted on September 17, 2006 by Reverend

If there is any one person directly responsible for my current state of exile in instructional technology nirvana at UMW, it may very well be Zach Davis. A few years back, circa 2003, he was talking to me about how he had integrated a movable type blog into his 16th and 17th-century British Literature survey course. I said “A blog? What’s a blog?” and the rest is all too recent history. He brought me on as an Instructional Technology Fellow at the CUNY Honors College and wham bam -I met my true love WordPress. Zach is one of those truly inspirational cats that can move between Milton and Myspace in .2 seconds flat (sounds like another cool cat I know). And he represents one of those rare assets to the intellectual world of technology, for he is a scholar, a teacher, and a professional programmer.

Every so often, between programming, writing his dissertation, and raising a child, he carves out a few minutes to fuel my unpoetic, some might even say “b” grade, imagination. He had been following my recent posts about finding alternatives to the heroine-like addiction that higher education has to closed course management system models like blackboard and WebCT, which brought us around to the following discussion. In short, the question arose, “In a perfect world, how he would go about building such an open source alternative?” The transcript below is his exciting response which epitomizes, for me, that generative, “blue sky” thinking that I have gotten used to lately and which keeps the wheels turning late into the night.

Blue Sky LMS

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Creating Custom Categories for WordPress using K2

Posted on September 16, 2006 by Reverend

I Love WordPress One of the things we have been experimenting with here at UMW is creating custom categories for a WordPress installation that will allow us to track students and/or groups quickly and easily in the sidebar. The NIAHD Journals gave me the idea for this hack, and while its not the prettiest hack you’ll ever see, it does help dramatically with the logic of categorizing content and aiding both instructors and visitors in their attempt to navigate the blog effectively. This tutorial is for the K2 theme in particular – although the process should be roughly equivalent for other themes.

“Why don’t I just manage the Categories using the parent-child logic WordPress affords and abandon this madness?” you ask incredulously. Well, hot shot, because while you can have groups and students listed under the Categories header in the sidebar, this option does not necessarily allow you to nest the student links within the group links, nor separate out the two. This hack offers a way to have students and groups as two separate sidebar categories that are quite logically and conveniently nested within the categories menu of the backend in the write tab (a statement that will become clearer I promise). All of which makes it a win win for everybody. So, if you’re done with the interruptions, I’ll proceed.

Additionally, part of this tutorial also allows you to reformat the archive pages that the category links in the sidebar take you to by default. This element of the tutorial may prove useful for anyone wanting the linked archive posts from the sidebar to look consistent with the rest of the blog.

Note: I have not yet explored how this will impact the feed logic by category – particularly since I am effectively creating two distinct category calls in the sidebar that allow me to effectively organize and separate out student content from group, while simultaneously keeping them integrated -how paradoxically cool!!!

Creating separate categories for students and groups in the sidebar of K2 for WordPress.

Let’s open up the sidebar.php file in the Presentation –> Theme Editor tab and get to work.

Copy the following code in the sidebar:

    And place it the sidebar.php file anywhere above this code. Once you have done this change the following line to reflect the new category you want displayed on your sidebar. For example, I will change the word ‘Categories’ below to ‘Students’.

    change to

    Now I will copy this same code as in step 1 in the sidebar once again and title this category ‘Groups’

    Having completed this it might be a good idea to create the students and groups through the manage categories tab in the backend of your blog. To make this process a bit simpler and more logical for the users you can have the students names nested within their particular groups (this is irrelevant if you are not using groups). See illustrations below:

    manage categories

    add new category
    Continue reading →

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    The plumber is in …

    Posted on September 14, 2006 by Reverend

    I’m here to unclog your internet tubes.
    Internet Tubes
    Image care of Michael Heilemann’s flickr account, one of the great minds behind K2
    .

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    Johns Hopkins has taken the Lyceum pill -boooyaaa!!!

    Posted on September 9, 2006 by Reverend

    Hopkins WeblogsI had known this for a few days now, but I wasn’t certain if it was a test run or the real deal, but it seems official given the recent post to the ibiblio lyceum blog- Johns Hopkins University is using Lyceum as a multi-user blog solution. See site here. Asheesh Aroia was instrumental in seeing this project through and he explains his process in some detail here. Great stuff, Asheesh.

    It is pretty exciting when a research 1 university with the renown of Johns Hopkins adopts an open source blogging project like Lyceum – congratulations to the WordPress folks and, more specifically in this case, John, Fred, and company – this is major!!!

    What is even more exciting about this development is that a smaller university with fewer resources, like Mary Washington, can just as easily join the party thanks to all the hardworking, inspired folks involved. Thanks to all y’all …

    By the way, Asheesh has also set up a JHU wiki using MediaWiki. Very cool, and wait I just got a wonderful, awful idea:).

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    Introducing bavawiki …

    Posted on September 8, 2006 by Reverend

    Jerry and I have been discussing how useful a centralized wiki would be for collaboratively tracking and editing documentation for web 2.0 applications we have been using frequently over the last couple of weeks. To that end I am introducing bavawiki as a repository for tutorials I have been working on as of late, I’ll start this wiki off with tutorials for WordPress, WordPress.com, and Mediawiki. I’ll soon after follow these up with the tutorials I already posted on this blog such as “Using Cpanel to install a MySQL Database,” “A Lyceum How to,” and “Hacking a Virtual Learning System using WordPress parts I&II.” We envision this mediawiki install as a space to host such documentation that can be easily edited by others and/or quickly and easily harvested for various uses by various users.

    Bavawiki

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