Ok so call me behind the times, I didn’t know what a Tumble (b)log was.

Made popular by Tumblr, a tumble blog seems to be a bit like an extended version of twitter, in that it is a blog that is intended to house short bursts of text, quotes, pictures, videos, and the like. It’s not designed for long, drawn-out posts typically seen in most blogs (albeit not this one, much!)

I installed Gelato in minutes, once I realized I had one setting wrong. I am playing with it now. Find my installation at…ok so my install doesn’t work, although I was able to see the inside workings. It seems fun, but I do a bit of this now, so no need to duplicate. Maybe good for kids, though, not sure. You decide.

Link: gelato cms

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Go read the official Wordpress release post for the entire list of changes. Some of the tasty ones include Blogger imports and widget support at the core level.

I have not upgraded yet, but plan to soon, I’ll let you know how it goes. Or you can use the link below to hit the download page.

WordPress › Download

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So the upgrade to Wordpress 2.1 went flawlessly! All my plugins work, although I am having an odd issue with Akismet that I have yet to solve. No worries, I use Spam Karma 2 so Akismet was really just a second line of defense.

I followed the instructions to the letter, and backed up EVERYTHING just in case.

I don’t see a major change, but do like the ability to change the front page to a static page, although that was possible using a plugin before.

I am avoiding upgrading the NextGenTeachers blog for now because of an issue with FeedWordpress. It’s patchable, but with our first show coming out soon I don’t want to risk a meltdown.

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I have been joking recently that I would love to run Ubuntu and Windows in a situation akin to the Mac/Windows relationship possible through Parallels.

Trouble is I don’t want to erase my current Windows installation.

I have Ubuntu installed on a laptop, VMWare server brought in (see earlier posts), and Windows XP Home SP2. Works nicely!

Now onto my desktop, where I have had Windows XP Pro running for years. I have three hard drives, with over 150GB of used space of stuff I don’t want to lose. It’s the digital archive of my life. Needless to say, this article caught my attention.

Ubuntu Installation Now Easier than Ever in Windows - CyberNet News: Keeping you plugged in!

Just look at this screenshot!

The homepage for the Prototype project will tell you more about this idea. For more opinion, go read the Cybernet news article mentioned above.

I might try this! If I get brave, I’ll keep you posted on the progress!

Technorati Tags: christophercraft, ubuntu, windows, prototype

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I had been a little frustrated with Nvu of late. Now I don’t do a whole heck of a lot of web design these days. If I am looking at code, it is probably within the context of a content management system. I may hack a sidebar here, or call a function there, but long gone are my days of staring at a blank notepad screen typing out html code. I am glad I have that experience, as it helps me put together quick and dirty pages when all I need to do is embed a quick tutorial video. Heck, Google video did the encoding code for me, so all I did is wrap it in html, title, and body tags, center it up and I was golden.

When I was working on my new entry portal to be used when folks want to find me (yikes!) I naturally turned away from those evil proprietary softwares (which I really just don’t own and looked for an open source solution. Along came, Nvu, a solid WYSIWYG based editor. Except it is a little frustrating due to a couple minor bugs.

Enter KompoZer. They bill themselves as “Nvu’s unofficial bug-fix release”. KompoZer is available for all three platforms. Enjoy (mostly) bug-free web editing!

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Caught this in my dashboard, and inside of fifteen minutes I upgraded three blogs.

Wordpress 2.0.6 has been released, roughly a day ago and sports a few bug fixes and security releases.

Their upgrade directions indicate a process involving deleting directories, backup up and the like. Me, I’m a bit wreckless.

All I did is extract the file on my machine and FileZilla’d it straight up, knowing that it would not overwrite my config.php file (since WP doesn’t ship with one preconfigured). Nor were my plugins in danger, save for the fact that they would be infected by close contact with the Hello Dolly plugin that ships with WP. All I can hope is that it was the Carol Channing (I met her) version of Hello Dolly.

Anyhoo, it works flawlessly as far as I can tell. The sites look the same and it threw no errors. It copied in record time and doesn’t seem to show any ill effect (nor any positive effect, but hey).

So go upgrade! Security risks are abound for the late adopter!

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Openacademic should be coming close to a release. So sayeth Bill Fitzgerald on a comment that reads like this…

RE: ?I wish OpenAcademic would hurry up.? ? Me too

All kidding aside, we?re getting there ? Part of the reason that we are moving slowly is that we want to make sure we get it right ?

And, by ?getting it right? I mean making sure we have a system that is easy to install, intuitive to use, and will scale easily for both the individual user/school and collaboration between multiple schools.

It?s a broad target, but we want to be sure that the tools we develop don?t exclude the smaller players who might not have access to a well-funded technology infrastructure.

So, sorry about the wait, but it is drawing to a close ? trust me.

You heard it here! This episode talks a little about the seeming purpose of OpenAcademic, some of the technology behind it (I left out Mediawiki in my recording) and some of the benefits of OpenID.

Oh, and I ask Bill for an interview.

So whatdya say Bill, can I Skype interview you to help my audience (few though they may be figure out what’s in store for the first OpenAcademic release?

I await your response…(anxiously!)

 

 Open Source Classroom dot com Podcast Episode 12 - OpenAcademic [6:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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This is for you, Jeff. Well, for his kids anyway.

Jeff recently asked how to embed video in Drupal. Since I’m working with a new Drupal installation I decided I would try and figure it out, just in case it came in handy for me and my sites at some point in the future. So I did, and here’s how I did it.

First, I installed the Embed Filter which allows for embedding and object tags. Once I installed it, I activated it, and added http://youtube.com into the allowed domains list. I also added http://www.youtube.com just for kicks. I may go back and add the ip address (http://208.65.153.251) to it as well, making it possible to see from other spots if I’m lucky.

But it didn’t work. I began to wonder what was happening. I had installed the FCKEditor plugin, which I LOVE. This plugin requires a separate download of the actual FCKEditor to work. When I used the source command the video would be seen upon returning to WYSIWYG mode, but then once saved it would not. Hmmm.

I then made it where FCKEditor opens in a popup rather than by default. This adds a link that says Open Rich Editor alongside the body of what you’re writing. Still didn’t work. My logic is that FCKEditor was cleaning the code and making it faulty. Nope, sorry to have blamed you FCKEditor.

Then it hit me, my code WAS being filtered, by Drupal.

I had to enable FULL HTML under the Input Format menu below the posting. Once I did that, I was golden.

Now, for student accounts on my site to be able to do this, the administrator (me) would have to enable it in the permissions. You can do this by clicking on Administer –> Input Formats and then configuring a certain role (student in my case) to be allowed to use FULL HTML. You will still have to click it on each post, but that’s an easy solution.

So there it is, Utecht’ers. Hope this helps!

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I have been fighting with Nero all day trying to force it to burn an image that I downloaded recently. The image is a new beta version of Dream Linux Multimeda Edition. If you’re not familiar with Dream Linux, you should be. It looks markedly similar to Mac OS X and seems to be a bit easier to use for my kids. Now we’re a PC school, but the interface is relatively intuitive.

So after making a few frisbees compliments of Nero, I recalled having downloaded an open source burning software once before. I have used Nero for years with mixed results, and my PC has two CD/DVD burners, and I tried both, to no avail. I hopped over to www.burnatonce.net and found my software. It it easy to use, and burned my CD in 3 mins and 26 seconds at 48x. Of course, since this is an ISO image, I might not have burned it at 48x normally, but I was tired of waiting. The CD is booting on my laptop as we speak.

As you can see, the main screen is fairly simple. The goal of this software seems to be to burn ISO images to discs. I did not explore to see whether disc copying was available, but it looks to be.

The settings screen also is fairly straightforward.

Do yourself a favor, make your life easier when it comes to disc burning, go download burnatonce at once!

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I suppose it is no secret that I am a little bit obsessed with wikis. I think that the level of collaboration available through the use of a wiki is superb and unparalleled. As you may know, I recently did a thorough review of a short list of wiki selections in a two part series.

In my unending quest for the perfect wiki, I have been playing around with wikis that seem to be more geared toward the corporate world. My most recent dip in the wiki pool took me to Twiki.

What intrigued me about Twiki is that it is CGI based, as opposed to PHP. I had to do some serious work to get this one to work on Bluehost, although that is NO fault of theirs, this is just a complex program. But now I am wiser, and that is always my goal in learning this stuff. We talk so much about being lifelong learners, and this is one way I am completing this goal.

This post will also serve as a bit of a tutorial as to how to make TWiki work on bluehost.

1. The first thing you must do is download the software from www.twiki.org.

2. I would highly recommend NOT using SSH to unpack the files. I typically DO use SSH since it tends to work so much better than FTP’ing. The problem is that the permissions were wrong, so when I first attempted my site (after fixing the next problem) it looked like heck. Turns out I had to change the permissions to the /pub directory to 755 recursively. Had I unzipped the package (or extracted the tarball) to my desktop in a directory and then uploaded it, I would have avoided this problem.

I did post to the TWiki support board (not sure if I can really call it a forum) and even I was a bit confused by the posting process. They noted in a follow-up comment that 755 might be a smidge unsafe, as the executable flag is not needed, and that they recommend 644. Would that I were to keep this program installed, heed their advice I would.

On a related note, this bug was relative only to TWiki, and I will continue to use SSH (secure shell access) and Putty for many years to come. I like the command line interface and control features.

3. I also had to change the file extension on everything in the /bin directory. I have to admit, this was a real pain in the neck. I felt like I should not have had to work so hard to get a wiki installation working. I began to seriously question whether it was worth it. After changing all the extensions, it worked.

I then had to get Bluehost to install the CGI::Sessions extension for me. I am not quite sure if this is necessary, but I ran across it so many times in learning about the Twiki install process that I decided to go ahead and have it there if I needed it. As I understand it, the CGI::Sessions would be necessary if I were using some sort of authentication system for logins and permissions. So now it’s there, and it gave me one more chance to be impressed with Bluehost. They really have been fantastic!

Since TWiki is a CGI based wiki, it typically cannot run in a root directory, so one needs to use an .htaccess file to properly redirect. I didn’t set this up since I had decided against Twiki, but there it is nonetheless. I will post a follow up with more information on making Twiki work with Bluehost, as there is a more thorough, manual way to do it.

You can see the basic installation here. Scratch that, I deleted it, decided it was too much of a security risk and I didn’t want to change all the permissions again. So Twiki is gone.

So, now that TWiki is has been installed, here are my impressions.

Overall, I am not terribly impressed. One limitation that is inherent to using CGI is the naming scheme. Everything has to be what they call “WikiWord” which means it is all one word, with little to no separation characters. So, a page that Wikispaces would call Cool+Ed+Tech+Stuff Twiki forces you to call CoolEdTechStuff. If Wikispaces didn’t add the + symbol for you, this would be a bit of an issue, but they do, so it is a seamless naming scheme. This applies to most of the hosted wikis that feature WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM editors. As I understand it, the reason behind the WikiWord naming scheme is that it lends itself to automatic inline hyperlinking. So if I were in the throes of document creation, I would not have to worry about manually hyperlinking back to the originating documents, provided I inserted the proper WikiWord name.

I am not sure why I am so interested in wiki offerings. I keep coming back to Wikispaces and Wetpaint, almost exclusively. I keep looking at Jotspot, wondering how it’s going to look once it’s fully integrated with Google.

I notice that David Warlick uses PMWiki. It would work well for me, but Wiki Markup language is so difficult for my young students, which contraindicates its use in my classroom (along with MediaWiki, etc etc). I keep going back to the WikiMatrix to see if anything new has surfaced. Maybe one day the wiki market will grow to one that is hosted and appropriate for kids.

I did get an email from www.helpingstudents.org (not linking) and I noticed that they simply use jspwiki, and I wondered what the benefit is. Seems like Wikispaces is a stronger wiki (not to mention WetPaint). My solitary gripe about Wetpaint is the limited amount of wiki space. I look at Wikispaces and see a little menu, and lots of editable space. The menu on the right on each Wetpaint is a little bothersome for me and my kids. I am hoping Kevin and those guys will consolidate the menu.

One major positive for WetPaint is the monthly (I think) status updates. I got a little email the other day telling me my wiki was 315th of over 100,000. That was nice to see, along with how many contributions I had made, and related other sundry information.

And so continues my obsession with Wikis. Part of the reason I continue down this road is because I feel like kids will be using Wikis in their jobs, and since the job market is changing so much, I think they need to learn about these now. I thought it would be fun for them to use one of the major players in the corporate wiki market, such as SocialText, Confluence, or Twiki.

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