Playing with Technology» Geek

Using LDAP with Apple Mail

Jon — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:28:36 +0000

I have been trying to connect my Apple Mail client to Wooster’s LDAP directory off and on for the past four years. Initially it just wasn’t possible. Then after 10.4 it was supposed to be possible but I just couldn’t get it to work. It turns out that everything in the LDAP setup in Address Book needs to be lowercase. Our networking group had given me the organizational units and organization names with initial caps and I guess I just never thought to change them. So if anyone else has been trying to connect Apple Mail to their organization’s LDAP, try making everything lowercase.
For people at Wooster you can use the following when setting up LDAP in Address Book.

Server: ldap.wooster.edu
Port: 389
Search Base: o=wooster this will make all people affiliated with Wooster searchable (Student, Staff, Faculty, Alumni)
Scope: Subtree
Authentication: Simple
User Name: cn=yourusername,ou=yournovellcontext,ou=yourrole,o=wooster (e. g., cn=jbreitenbuch,ou=math_cs,ou=faculty,o=wooster)
Password: yournovellpassword

What I’d like to do is find a way to limit the search base to just students, faculty, and staff, but entering ou=staff,ou=student,ou=faculty,o=wooster didn’t seem to work. This is probably because you can only go down one branch of the tree at a time. Doing something like ou=student,o=wooster does work and will only search LDAP for students. So creating an LDAP entry for each search base (ou=student,o=wooster; ou=staff,o=wooster; and ou=faculty,o=wooster) should allow one to search for everyone but alumni. If anyone happens to try this and has trouble just leave a comment.

Exploring CSS 3 and more on @font-face

Jon — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:44:25 +0000

I’ve continued to play with @font-face and have decided that while Typekit is a nice service; it is not worth paying for unless I am getting access to Adobe’s Library or Linotype’s Library. There are a lot of nice fonts on the service but I discovered Font Squirrel which has a number of the same fonts as Typekit and actually has substantially more than the Free membership option of Typekit. All of the fonts in the @font-face section of Font Squirrel are free, but they do warn that you will need to check the license yourself to make sure you can put the fonts on the Web. You will also need to edit your CSS stylesheet to add the fonts you plan on using and generate .eot versions of the fonts if they don’t have them. (Font Squirrel kindly has created a kit which makes all of this easy.) Once that is done you can upload them to your website or blog. I created a font directory in my blog’s theme folder and put the fonts in there. Doing so means you’ll reference the fonts with url(fonts/fontfilename); in your stylesheet. As a result of this I’m now using MgOpen Moderna (Helvetica inspired) for most headings and MgOpen Cosmetica (Optima inspired) for the body. This should be working for Opera, Firefox, Safari, and IE 8 (I generated the .eot files myself).

While playing with @font-face I’ve also looked at some other CSS 3 commands to try out on the site. Currently I’m making use of the rgba command and border-radius command to style block quotes. I did try the -moz-column-count: 2; -webkit-column-count: 2; commands to make post content two-column, but it doesn’t work so well with video. I’m thinking what one would do is make the post content two-column and then have a postfooter that spanned the entire div. So a post would have a containing div with a content div (with column styling) and footer div inside it. You could then use a plugin or custom fields to place the video in the footer. More experimentation is required. I encourage everyone to start to experimenting with CSS 3 and see what it can do.

Make Cloud a bust?

Jon — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:07:36 +0000

So my RSS feed tagcloud doesn’t seem to be showing. Is the Pipe broken or is Make Cloud broken? I have no idea and will investigate. It may not matter as I noticed the site was super slow to load when it was working. I also have to ask myself what the point was. Why did I want to have a tag cloud pulled from all the RSS feeds I read? Ideally a glance at that cloud could give me a sense of what was happening in the technology world since that is what most of the feeds are. It it the same reason people want to make clouds from their marketing messages. You want to see what the text is conveying as the important message. This seems to be a failed experiment and I really couldn’t find a better alternative. I guess it’s back to the drawing board. Do you think it’s worth it?

Stats

Jon — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:47:27 +0000

It occurred to me that I used to have Performancing stats going on the site. I’ve noticed some referrences to Performancing as the page loads and thought I’d check. Of course the stats are all gone because of the move to the new domain, and I had forgotten my password (what I wouldn’t give for a universal ID so that I wouldn’t have to remember a billion different username/password combos). I eventually remembered my password and set up this site and Kath’s jewelry site in Performancing. I also set them up in Google analytics, plus the blog has the WordPress stats, and I added SlimStats. So among those I should be able to get a good sense of what people are viewing and where they are coming from. It’s too bad I can’t look back and see what I wrote that caused 74 people to be on the site at the same time.

And we’re done

Jon — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:16:57 +0000

Do you notice a difference? Probably not and you aren’t supposed to notice one. I just redid the grid that I had so that it is fluid. You should be able to hit CMND+ or CMND- to increase and decrease the fontsize while maintaining the overall layout and proportions (except for the graphical elements). This layout is in no way as complex as something like blueprint and I’m not sure I could cut up something like that for a blog theme in a day. Maybe over the course of a few weeks I’ll try to design something.

Pipes is pretty cool

Jon — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:05:23 +0000

I got all my feeds put into the Pipe and had it working in about five minutes (I have a lot of feeds). I put it into Make Cloud and had the code for a tag cloud in about two more minutes. I added the code to the blog and… nothing. I can’t tell if the page is cached or what. I know caches make things run faster but they make it annoying to test updates.

New feed cloud

Jon — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:36:31 +0000

My feed cloud has been broken for longer than I can remember. I think this gives me an opportunity to look at Yahoo! Pipes and Make Cloud.

Didn’t I blog about Pipes at some point?

960 Grid System

Jon — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:28:44 +0000

So, it is a bad idea for me to watch movies about typefaces, I’m just sayin’. I think I am going to really look at this site through the lens of typogridphy and by extension the 960 grid system. If that goes well then I may take what I learn and apply it to the Instructional Technology site. Hopefully this research will also find its way into the discussions about the College’s Web site redesign. One of the recurring themes of the movie was the influence type has on conveying the message. This makes total sense to me, bah, maybe I should have been a graphic designer.

Note: The discussion about the divisibility of 960 does make me wonder about an IS topic and whether there is something that could be done…

MIT’s SIMILE

Jon — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 13:13:59 +0000

Bryan has been holding out on me, or maybe I missed a post at Liberal Education Today. The SIMILE project has a lot of cool stuff going on. I’m not sure their Timeline gets at what 3D Timeline does and what Eric suggested doesn’t quite seem to get at it either. 3D Timeline does let you see more context while looking at the details. I think that is what I like the most about it. Anyway, I’ll be checking out some of the other things MIT is doing. I wish I could develop cool widgets but I am just a consumer

Instructional Technology Web site update

Jon — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:01:48 +0000

So, you want to have a Web site and you want it to be dynamic, what do you do? One option to hunt for a free content management system (CMS). You could also go with a wiki. I decided to go with WordPress. Basically, when you are making a Web site you want to have pages of information organized in a logical manner. This is different from a blog because a blog to most people is a string of, for the most part, discrete posts. Most blogs are really capturing the authors stream of consciousness, and this wouldn’t work for the for a Web site. Users don’t want to come to your site looking for information and being greeted by what seems like a stream of random thoughts. However, there are a number of magazine style themes available for WordPress (Branford and Revolution are two of them) that allow you to use WordPress as a CMS and thus make it seem like a static Web site.

The way these themes work is through page templates and categories. The idea is to set up page templates for all the different types of pages and then on each page template pull posts from a particular category. So our current test site has about five page templates pulling from the featured articles, news, showcase, and technologies categories. This part actually didn’t take long to figure out. What has been taking up a lot of my time is adding plugins to get customizable forms, an event calendar, and collapsing categories. I have the first two things working, but can’t seem to find anything to make the third one work like I want. For the record I am using

cforms II for customized submission forms
Collapsing Categories to try and make a compact and organized list of categories
Event Calendar to put a calendar of events and list of upcoming events on the homepage
SimplePie to pull articles from our blogs to be displayed on the homepage
SimplePie Widget
FuturePost to allow us to create post with future dates which have a published status instead of scheduled