The number of pipes available and the range of functionality is astounding. You can create pipes that allow for user input or pipes that operate on CSV and other data files available on the Web. The funny thing is I don’t hear about Pipes by the year and it worries me that such an awesome tool may just disappear one day. Maybe I just am not moving in the circles where Pipes are common place, or maybe people just take them for granted. But I think I’d like to get more faculty playing with Pipes and thinking about creative ways they could be used in education. What about digital storytelling with Pipes? Bryan? Alan?

Edit: Based on the related posts it looks like I rediscover Pipes about once a year. I find that amusing and sad.

This change should open up a world of plugins for MS installations that MU installs could not really count on. It also is a huge undertaking since we have been running 2.8.6 for the past year. I just want to document the steps I’m taking on the test server for upgrading from 2.8.6 to 3.0.

• Disable BP Events plugin (breaks when upgrading to 2.9.2 with white screen)
• Disable Incsub Support, Wibstats, RA BP Author Link, RA Featured Posts in mu-plugins (move to retired-mu-plugins)
• Switch themes to a generic theme
• Rename our modified BP Corporate theme to Wooster BP Corporate
• Enable Wooster BP Corporate theme for main site
• Activate Wooster BP Corporate theme
• Upgrade BP Corporate Theme (download from WPMU Dev Premium)
• Rename BP Corporate Child theme to BP Corporate Wooster Child
• Copy header.php from BP Corporate theme to the Wooster Child and add the modifications to allow rotating header images
• Upgrade from 2.8.6 to 2.9.2
• Disable Ahjira Recent Site-wide Posts (broken with newer BuddyPress versions)
• Upgrade any plugins that indicate they need it (BuddyPress and BP Groupblogs excluded)
• Disable BuddyPress and BP Groupblogs
• Upgrade BuddyPress
• Upgrade BP Groupblogs
• Switch the theme to BP Corporate Wooster Child (our old modified version of BP Corporate doesn’t work with new BuddyPress)
• Run the Upgrade script to update all the blogs (takes a long time, maybe 2 hours)
• Click the Update to 3.0 button in the Dashboard
• Click Upgrade Automatically
• Follow the instructions in the Dashboard header
• Click on Update Network (and wait 2 hours for it to finish)

After this lengthy process Voices should be upgraded to WordPress 3.0 with the latest BuddyPress. One item of note is that any changes that were supposed to be made to .htaccess need to be made to the wpmu-rewrite.conf file of the Apache2 install. Our SysAdmin does not use .htaccess and has those directives in this special Apache2 config file. This means an Apache restart will be required for images to work after the upgrade from 2.9.2 to 3.0.

I came back to thinking about this again yesterday when I saw a post in my RSS feeds saying Apple had approved some app and that Jobs had said people who wanted to watch porn could get an Android phone. Do you find this alarming? As I thought about it I sure did. Basically I’m letting a third party tell me what I can and can’t do on my device. Then I wondered how that is any different than network television. I don’t think I’m completely off base with my concerns and I’m sure others have voiced similar concerns and so the question becomes what can I do about it? I’m sure the Android app store has some sort of approval process and policies governing what can be in the Market. Until you can add apps to the device without going through a store you are stuck.

This is why I’m not sure I’ll ever own an iPad. To me it is a giant media consumption device and I can consume media on my HDTV, laptop, and iPhone just fine. In fact the laptop even lets me create things for others to consume and that is the rub. Without a way to create meaningful content the iPad will always be useless to me. I think the only way this changes is if everything is in the cloud and the iPad just becomes a means to interface with it. But for now I can’t develop a WordPress template in the cloud (maybe someone will enlighten me). Maybe Chrome OS will be where we are in 5-7 years, but for today I am left pondering whether I agree with the closed universe Apple seems to be developing.

It was only a few months later I think that I heard about QuickSilver the perpetual beta quicklauncher. I don’t remember why I switched but I switched from Launchbar to Quicksilver. It was probably the nice bezel look I could get on Quicksilver that made me switch. I was still in heaven and able to fly around my computer without taking my hands off the keyboard. Maybe I wasn’t flying since I type so slowly, but it was faster then mousing around. Then a few months ago Boone Gorges wrote a post about how he was using Quicksilver and I realized I had been missing so much. I tried to follow some of Boone’s tips but encountered little success. To top it off Quicksilver started crashing and just generally acting sluggish since upgrading to 10.6.

So today I happened to read a tweet that mentioned a new quicklauncher, Alfred. The name is not as sexy as Quicksilver, but I downloaded it anyway. Initially it didn’t work. I wrote the nice folks at Alfred and they hooked me up with a version that would run on my old non 64 bit laptop (someone should really get me a new one). Let me say I love the design of their site and so far Alfred feels a lot faster than Quicksilver. I’m not sure Alfred can do all the crazy things Boone has Quicksilver doing, that is why I’m hoping he downloaded it and can try to push it. For now I’ll try Alfred and keep my hands on the keyboard. Yahooooo!

Tungle makes it super simple to allow people to schedule meetings with me. In the first four weeks of class, I’ve already had half of my class use the link I give them in our course site to setup a meeting. So far it has been a joy to use and I can’t think of anything I’d need to change. I’ve enjoyed it so much that I recommended it to the other members of the Instructional Technology department. And they must be doing something right because my boss has started using it. I’m not sure how you’d find it via Google as a search for “web based scheduling” and “web based appointments” didn’t turn up Tungle in the first page of results. Hopefully people reading this spread the word.

I must say it has been relatively painless to convert Voices from just a plain WordPress Multi-blog setup to a BuddyPress powered community site. My first step was to convert my existing Multi-blog setup on DreamHost to use BuddyPress and mark it as the development environment. Once that was done in late October I began looking at my options for a theme to use as the main site theme. This was before the changes in theme structure for BuddyPress. At first I tried to code something myself, but given that I wanted it to be ready for this semester and that I have other duties, it was clear I couldn’t take the time. I looked at some of the free options like Bruce, but could not get them to really work consistently and be stable. In the end I settled on BP Corporate by incsub. It is a nice clean theme, which is what I really wanted since the content of an academic community should be the focus.

Once I had picked a theme I started playing with where to put the widgets and how to make sure the site had a dynamic feel. I ended up using the plugins Ahjira Recent Site-wide Articles, Auto Group Join (with some modifications to make it work), BP Groupblog, BP Events, and Recent Global Comments Widget. The homepage also uses some of the built-in BuddyPresss widgets like Groups, Site wide activity, Who’s Online Avatars, Members and Recently active member avatars. Eventually I’d like to add a Featured Post widget, but the ones available currently do not seem to work. I think the overall effect has been very good. The site feels dynamic and people can see what community members are writing about.

I would say it has definitely been worth it. Even though the main use is for class blogs at the moment, we are getting a number of users joining because they want to be a part of the community. This is something that was not happening before BuddyPress allowed us to easily create the community features. The feature with the biggest impact though has been BuddyPress groups with the Auto Group Join plugin. This has made creating class blogs super easy and faculty have really loved it. There are still some things to tweak, but overall I’m happy with how it is going.

I also had a chance to meet Jim Groom, Andrea and Ron Rennick, Andy Peatling, Matt Mullenweg, and many others. Jim and I had a chance to talk over some yummy pizza and some drinks. Our views on WPMU, the direction of personal publishing, and education in general seem to be very close. We talked a little about the idea of setting up a multi-school WPMU, possibly with the help of a grant. Our thinking is that this might cut down maintenance and would give us an opportunity to connect students and faculty at the participating institutions in a way that cannot be done currently. This is kind of sketchy, but I really want to explore this some more with Jim.

I also had a thought while attending all of these presentations. I saw so many people with their laptops open and typing away. I’d say about 90% of some of the audiences had their laptops open. Of those 90% it seemed that about 10% were taking notes/tweeting notes. The rest seemed to be checking e-mail, surfing, etc. This struck me as a little odd. I took my laptop but all my notes were written on paper. I also thought it was interesting that Jason Alley of Lafayette was taking paper notes as well. I just wondered what people were getting out of surfing while sitting in a session. I think this is the fear that some of our faculty have when we mention laptop programs.

• 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.

If you’re not aware there is a new feature in CSS3 called @font-face. This feature is intended to address one of the major issues of publishing on the Web: not all readers have the fonts you used in the design! For graphic artists, publishers and typography nuts (such as myself) this has been a real issue. We develop a fantastic layout and design with fonts that make the entire piece or site look gorgeous, only to see it on a friends computer displayed in Arial, Georgia, or Trebuchet. @font-face and the Typekit service are here pull us out of this Dark Age of Web typography.

So how does it all work? You can see Web fonts with @font-face for a more detailed explanation, but the gist is that you host your fonts on the Web and then access them as you would any other Web file. It sounds great and if you take a .otf file and put it in a Web accessible directory then you’ll be able to use it with @font-face. Sounds great doesn’t it? So why do we need Typekit? Well, fonts are software. I know it sounds crazy but in terms of the licensing of their use they are treated like software. This means that you are allowed to have a copy on your computer and to use it to produce documents, but you cannot freely distribute it. This is exactly what you would be doing if you put that .otf file in a public Web directory.

Typekit has developed a solution which a number of font foundries seem to think is a good solution. Typekit’s solution is to host the fonts on their servers and require you to use some javascript to be able to access the fonts in your sites. They have arranged their offerings into 4 packages: Trial, Personal, Portfolio, and Corporate. Prices range from free to $49.99/month. A free account will entitle you to 5GB of bandwidth per month, two fonts from the 62 in the Trial Library to be used on one website, and you will have to display the Typekit badge (as you see in the bottom right of the site). Other plans increase the bandwidth, number of fonts you can use, number of fonts to choose from, and allow you to opt out of displaying the badge.

Once you join you’re asked to provide a website where you would like to use the service. Once you supply a URI and advance, you’ll be presented with some javascript to copy and put in the head of the pages using the fonts. After pasting the code into your webpages you can return to the Tyepekit site and select the fonts you would like to use. You can do so by browsing the appropriate library for your plan and then clicking the ADD button next to the font. Doing so will try to open a Popup window (Firefox complained and I had to allow an exception). At this point you will find directions on how to use the fonts on your site and you’ll be able to disable weights and styles that will not be used in your design so that the payload of the javascript is as small as possible. When you are finished here just click on the Publish button to make the fonts available to your site.

Overall I was very pleased with the way the service operated and the fonts that were available. I didn’t see any Adobe or Linotype designs in the Trial Library, but there were plenty of good fonts. Hopefully Typekit can get the traction necessary to attract larger foundries to use the service. I so want to use my beloved Helvetica and Myriad Pro. For now I’ll go with Liberation Sans for headings and such and M +1c Garogier Liberation Sans for the body text. If you are browsing in the most recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera or Safari then you should be seeing the site with my Typekit fonts. I’d encourage everyone that has a blog or website to check them out.