Jim Groom and others have been getting excited lately tools and techniques for integrating blogs and wikis. A while ago we had worked on a one-off script to bring the content of a wiki directly into WordPress blog. The idea is similar to XML separation of content and display--wikis are fantastic as a collaborative writing space, but don't have the robustness for presentation that WordPress has. So, we worked on a quick-and-dirty, one-off way to bring content from the writing space of one wiki page and stuff it into WordPress, treating WordPress as the presentation space.

Lot's of making wee alterations to various Drupal 4.7 installations--nothing big, but just in case they're useful to others:

Title of the blog block

On one site only the instructor is blogging, so the default text of the block for recent blog posts, "Recent blog posts" (or something like that) seemed off. The place to change it is in blog.module, the function blog_block (around line 298):

$block['subject'] = t('Recent blog posts');

Change 'Recent blog posts' to whatever you like

SEOPosition comment settings

I've really liked the SEOPosition theme--it has a major sidebar, and two minor sidebars underneath it. But the template doesn't include the links for comments that some other templates do. comment.tpl.php has what's needed, almost at the bottom of the file:

<div class="commentfooter"><?php print $author ?> | <?php print $links ?> <?php print $date ?></div>

The $author, $links, $date variables bring in (or leave out) the relevant material for the footer

SEOPosition and user uploading pictures

One drawback of the SEOPosition theme is that it doesn't leave much room at the right side of the main content area. Some things get chopped off or oddly repositioned. One such case, at least when there are long sidebars, is the "Browse" button for users to upload a picture. Changing the size of the text input that goes with the upload form does the trick. The setting is in user.module, link 1326:

Craig Vasey has been hard at work using Drupal to produce an online logic textbook as his project for the Teaching and Learning Technology Fellows here at UMW. Since he has Powerpoint presentations he's used before, we worked a bit on how to incorporate them into the text. Seems, though, that the best bet with them will be to attach them to appropriate chapters for two reasons. First, as Powerpoints developed for class they lose their context and meaning significantly when put in the very different context of the book. Second, though OpenOffice happily converted them to Flash videos, it could only convert slide by slide, which lost some of the effects built in to the Powerpoints.

It did get me thinking, though, about where a slide presentation converted to flash could be useful in an online writing space. One thing that struck me as possibly useful is the way a flash video of a slide show could be used to reorient the temporality of reading. That is, traditional print books correlate progression through time with progression down the page: later in time = farther down the page. Putting a flash video into a page lets that switch around so that progression through time has a new dimension to follow: the sequence of clicks to progress through the slides of the presentation. That strikes me as being useful for thinking about content that has a tight temporal progression such as steps in a process or, more particularly, steps in a proof.

The semester begins!

With the new semester comes my return to blogging. Since my new office takes me to a different building from the departments with which I work, my mission is to spend a little time sitting in the hallowed halls of Trinkle and Combs to bump into the faculty I work with. Between bumpings, it's blogging time!

First up is the launch of a community site for our Spanish majors, a project initiated by Dr. Elizabeth Lewis. The mission is to provide some more ways for the students to make contact with each other and with the faculty. We're using Drupal, with the organic groups module and the event module to foster people talking and meeting together, and images and audio modules to provide some more fun stuff. Hardly needs to be said, but I'm taking lots of cues from the academic Drupal-meister D'Arcy Norman.

I'm looking forward to a lot of neat and unexpected interactions coming out of it...perfect blogging material!

And...I'm finally claiming my blog with technorati....
Technorati Profile

It's been a good bit of debugging, and I've learned a lot! So far, I've discovered a lot about regular expressions (don't fear the geekery) because IE can't handle XML very well, which means switching my nice tidy XML responses from the server back into plain text for the AJAX to play with. Quite a variety of search-and-replacing came into play, especially to get rid of the white space (carriage returns and the like--carriage returns will be an upcoming blog: since when did anything return, and what's a carriage?) that appears here and there in web pages. In short, the XML tools led to nice elegant solutions, but the incomplete implementation of XML tools require icky moving back and forth between XML and plain text.

So I'm thinking about this thing that I've put on my lap, and seeing many different directions to go with it

Drupal-centric approach

On one hand, I see a route of learning a lot more about Drupal and integrating margin comments into Drupal's comment structure. At this point, I don't know if that is even possible (but I'm guessing it is somehow). I like that for openning it up to things like co-comments, track-backs, and more.

It's time for a conscious effort to make my blog more lively and frequently-posted-to. It seems like there's a little bit of that going around, and I don't want to end up losing the thoughts going on over the summer. That's meaning number 1 of 're-mediating the blog'

I've been reading "Tools for Thought" by Howard Rheingold lately. It's been great fun for focused intellectual history, and set me into a mood of making many connections. One of the big ones was, happily enough, to a television program that, now that I think about it, had a profound impact on me during my teenage years, "Connections", the documentary series by James Burke on intellectual, technological, and scientific history.

In particular, there is discussion early in "Tools for Thought" about symbolic logic. The really fun part was that I was taking margin-notes, especially using "cf." in the margin to make a note of comparison. "cf." has always struck me as one of the most powerful margin-note tools because it makes a darn good guess at finding a hidden, sneaky, and delightful connection (!) between ideas, but one that needs to be worked out much more than the margin can handle, as Fermat knew only too well!

When I taught first-year composition, I always concentrated a lot on the good reading habits that go along with good writing habits, and making use of the margin to make cf.'s was at the top of the list. It see it as giving students a little free space to make a good guess, play with an insight, and come back to it to tease it out and see if it walks.