I’m testing out the WordPress-Wiki plugin, which allows people to set up blog posts and pages to act as wikis to be editable by all Authors and Contributors of a site, without having to mess around with roles and permissions, or giving everyone Editor or Admin status. Wonder how well it works…
cool. it tracks revisions, and generates the table of contents block automatically, as MediaWiki does. This could be verrrry useful.
I spent some time this afternoon poking around in the database that runs UCalgaryBlogs.ca to see if I could get a better sense of how it’s growing. Turns out, it’s growing MUCH faster than I thought it was (and I thought it was growing pretty darned fast).
It’s still pretty small scale, compared with giants like WordPress.com and Edublogs.org, but the growth looks pretty much exponential. I’m glad we’ve got lots of room to scale this puppy. And that campus IT isn’t upset with growing demands on database resources.
I’m trying out a new Survey plugin, which will let you run surveys as part of your WordPress site here at UCalgaryBlogs.ca – and thought it might be a good excuse to try to solicit some early feedback on the service itself.
If you have any feedback that isn’t captured in a checkbox in the survey, please feel free to post comments here.
I’ve been meaning to redesign the main site at UCalgaryBlogs.ca for awhile now – the Edublogs Clean theme isn’t intended to be dropped in as a stock theme, but as a starting point for hacking something tailor-made. The Edu-Clean theme is available as part of the fantastic Premium WPMUDev subscription – and it certainly helped me get UCalgaryBlogs.ca off the ground quickly.
Edu-Clean has bugged me because it hijacks the front page by using home.php, rather than using a page template to render the front page. The annoying part of this technique is that it makes it difficult to list blog posts within that site – so news updates posted on the main blog only show up on the “latest posts” widget, and then disappear from sight when they roll off the bottom of the widget.
And, the Edu-Clean theme, while looking fantastic and being very well designed and polished, is really just the Edublogs theme. So, my straight reuse of the graphics and styles was a bit confusing (I had a couple people mention “oh, that’s edublogs. I know that.” – um. no. it’s not, but it’s using the same theme… confusing…)
So, today I decided to sit down and hack the best parts of Edu-Clean out, and graft them into a copy of the sweet and flexible Carrington theme.
I’ll post a description of what I did, why, and where, but for now it’s basically working. It’s still very much a work in progress (I’m thinking it’s a little busy, but I like the focus on community, content and function rather than marketing). The other nice thing that the use of page templates allows is the WordPress front page setting – I can set the front page to be rendered by a static template, and set the “real” blog to be displayed at another page on the blog – Site News, for example. Much better, IMO.
Here’s the previous design, powered by the elegant Edu-Clean theme:
And the redesign, based on Carrington:
I’m certainly no designer, but I like that the featured content is right up front, rather than marketing info about the service. It’s also much easier to spot the login info (if not logged in) and stuff you can do (list of your blogs, etc…) without having to scroll down.
I’ll be tweaking it, but I think it’s a keeper.
Back in the heady early days of podcasting – all the way back in 2005 – one of the first use cases of the technology was to create “walking tours” where a narrator could guide students through a tour of an area. When video podcasting became possible, it would make the guided tours more effective because you could show supplemental or orienteering images to support the narration.
Fast forward to 2008, and the TLC just produced a walking tour of the U of C campus, featuring Julie Walker, a naturalist and hiking guide with the University of Calgary Outdoor Centre.
Grab a copy, drop it on your iPod (or PSP, or cell phone, or laptop, or cough Zune) and follow along with Julie as she guides you across campus.
I had the distinct pleasure of introducing Dr. Leslie Reid this morning, for her presentation “Creating Team Projects that Work in Large Classes: Redesigning a Large Science ‘Service’ Course” – part of the Teaching & Learning Centre’s 10th anniversary series of presentations. She talks about her experience in redesigning a large class (300 students with 13 weeks of lectures) into a format based on group projects (250 students with 6 weeks of lectures and 6 weeks of group work).
The video recording of the presentation is just over an hour long, and includes some questions from some of the faculty members in attendance. I recorded the session with my little Flip Ultra camera, and it did a surprisingly good job.
I just put up a bunch of these posters in a few of the buildings on campus. Time to spread the word a little more widely…
Trying out the sweet looking new plugin cets_EmbedRSS, which lets you embed any RSS feed into a WordPress post or page.
Ferinstance, here’s (hopefully) a live display of posts from my main blog:
And my latest Flickr photos:
and del.icio.us bookmarks:
Hmm… Looks really, really sweet. But the Flickr feed failed for some reason…
[openbook booknumber="0679745408"] I’m currently reading Neil Postman’s Technopoly. Also, I’m testing out the interesting OpenBook Book Data plugin for WordPress, which, if successfully installed, should have yanked a book cover of Technopoly, and the relevant info about the book…
