M.I.A

I have been missing in action from the blog for a few months ... it's been a busy time and I have been stretching the old brain muscles brushing up on my existing skills and developing some new ones.

So, what's new?

1. I took my first foray into print design and produced a new prospectus for my institution. It was a fantastic success and earned me a few brownie points with the new Head of school.
2. To go with the shiny new prospectus I redeveloped the school website too. That too was successful and further topped up the brownie points. I delved a bit further into CSS layouts (previously I had mainly stuck to the formatting side) and the result is something uber browser compliant and accessible. http://www.walsallacademy.com/
3. I had a little freelance project on the go to put into practice my newly developed CSS layout skills and is the first time in a while I have built a website that is to be updated by someone other than myself. All the images are dynamically (and randomly) loaded into the flash panels for easy updating ... ditto for the randomised quotations on the home page. It also has an RSS display on the homepage which was a first for me. http://www.urbanvoice.co.uk/
4. I have a new hat at work which involves me going round with a camera and taking photos every so often. In fact I have spent much of the last week photographing the new year 7 students and building up an image bank for next years prospectus (I struggled for imagery this time).
5. I also graduated my MA! That was a super fun day ... there was tapas and cocktails aplenty :D

The super busy period seems to be over now, the excitement is simmering down and it's time to get on with making sure I am on the ball with all things web and elearning (which includes catching up on blog posts and dropping into twitter more often than once in a blue moon as well as making an effort to reflect and blog for myself every once in a while).

EU Kids Online - Final Report

Something for me to sit and have a read of when I get five minutes ... the EU Kids Online report from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

With 75% of European children using the internet, some observers celebrate children’s youthful expertise while others worry that they are vulnerable to new forms of harm. Policies to balance the goals of maximising opportunities and minimising risks require an evidencebased approach [...] Funded by the European commission’s Safer Internet Programme, EU Kids Online (2006-09) is a thematic network that aimed to identify, compare and draw conclusions from existing and ongoing research on children and online technologies conducted in Europe.

Click here to go to the report.

How Twitter will Change the Way We Live

How Twitter will Change the Way We Live is an article that was published on Time.com this morning. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was alerted the the existence of the article from twitters new-ish feature 'Trending Topics' that appeared on the site a few weeks ago. There have been other articles along the lines of Why-Twitter-Isn't-Pointless-Crap recently but I thought this one was rather convincing and elequent. I especially liked that it admitted that we actually do quite like to hear about what our friends had for breakfast (for the social warmth) as well as the deeper more useful effects it can have for professionals.

Urgent Drupal Security Update

Ok, so after spending most of yesterday swearing under my breath at my Drupal test site trying to get the getID3() module to install properly I arrived at work today to discover it had fixed itself while I was away. Well, more likely is that my cache had cleared and my attempts to fix the problem were finally visible but it was annoying none-the-less.

So then I get told to run "Cron" (which is what searches for updates on your behalf I believe) and discovered an URGENT SECURITY UPDATE!!! needs to be made to my drupal site. I have to say, I am going through the instructions and it does seem rather labour intensive. So much so that I think I must be reading the instructions wrong. The go something like this :

Step 1. Make a back up of everything (common sense so far)
Step 2. Turn off all of the custom themes and modules that you spent hours, nay make that days of your life trying to get to work in the first place.
Step 3. Delete pretty much your entire site and upload the new version
Step 4. Re-Upload and turn back on all of the themes and modules that you spent hours, nay days, getting to work as mentioned grudgingly in step 2.

There must must be an easier way than this. I am making this hard work, surely?

Anyway ... I've just completed step 3. I'll keep you posted.

UPDATE: It worked, my drupal site didn't die and all is well in the world.

Drupal Update

So far my Drupal site consists of a Gallery module (using the open source Gallery2 software) and a Glossary (a module that uses Drupal's Taxonomy to provide mouse-over definitions of key words). They are both potentially very useful for teachers. I have also managed to quite successfully manage to fiddle with the CSS and image files from one of the download-able themes to create something that fits the school 'branding'. I'm going to spend some time now looking at podcasts and embedded video ... excitement!

What I haven't seen yet in the book is how to create a new home page ... or in fact any page that isn't module driven. Sometimes when you create a site you just want a plain old page that doesn't do anything fancy, just a bit of text and a few images. If the rest of the project is any indication, it can't be too difficult ... once I got over the whole mySQL database fiasco at the start of the project things have been pretty plain sailing.

At the moment it's just taking me a long time to do anything with Drupal, which I suppose is to be expected when learning a new workflow ... although not as long as it would have taken to build that image gallery or glossary from scratch I suspect!

Why Don't You?

I've got the tune of an old 80s TV show from my childhood going round in my head.

Whyyyyyy don't you ...
Whyyyyy don't you ...
Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set
and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead?

Well in my case it's probably the eeepc that needs turning off rather than the tv ... but I'm trying to think of something less boring than watching hubby play on his new toy (a Ps3 with the jollily titled 'Killzone 2') while waiting for facebook to get through with its 'maintainance' and twitter to recover from the fail whale while everyone tries to tweet about facebook being down.

So far my favourite less boring activity would be to bake something but that causes a) washing up and b) inevitable eating. I can see a stack of junk mail that needs shredding, am I that bored? I think not. I could blog something, although it would be an extreeeemely dull post ... oh.

;o)

Drupal Update - Days 1 and 2

I have spent the majority of the last two day's having my first look into the Drupal content management/development platform. My first impressions are that Drupal could actually be something quite useful for me when building sites that need to be maintained by somebody else. In fact, after a recent meeting with the Design and Technology teaching staff I'm using some of their ideas and requirements as a Drupal test subject. They want a gallery and a glossary and Drupal has modules for both - hurrah!

I have to admit however, for almost two full day's of work I don't have much of a site yet :$ If I had been using my usual photoshop / dreamweaver combo I would have at least had decent page template and some kind of site architecture. Alas, that has not been the case with Drupal.

Day 1 - Setting up a database and installing the core codebase. You would think that would be the easy part huh? Oh my god. I can not tell you how long it took me to set up that bloomin' database. I feel that the process was hindered by the fact that I actually read and followed some instructions. I spent an absolute age trying to run some kind of script in phpMyAdmin which I never actually got to work properly. I did a bit of asking around and decided to ftp the codebase to the server and see what happened anyway. It worked ... well, kind of. I spent a couple of hours trying to get the php.ini file working properly because my hosting isn't very Drupal friendly. I gave up and went home.

Day 2 - After giving up on the php.ini file on Day 1, I managed to get it working in literally moments on day 2. Typical. I then started playing around with installing new themes (easy peasy) and modules (easy peasy install to the back end but still no sign of them on the front end website). At one stage I found a seemingly very useful feature ... a site maintenance option that essentially turns off the site and displays a we're-working-on-it type message. This is all very well and good until you consider that you need to be IN the site to edit it and if you close the admin area while you are still in site maintenance mode you can't get back in. Well, after searching the Drupal Support forums I discovered that there is a back door, obviously, but you do need to be able to remember your password which I couldn't for a while LOL. I was horrified at the time but it is reeeeeeeally funny in hindsight.

So, today is Day 3. I'm going to try and get the modules actually working properly. One of them is a gallery2 module which means I get to play with some other open source goodness :o))