Web Authoring

The Fixture Exchange, PHP Coding, Dreamweaver, MX Kollection

Hal

For quite a while now I have been helping to run a fixture exchange system for youth rugby clubs. It started off life as a phone based pencil and paper system, but we moved it onto the Internet in about 1993. More recently it has been database driven and we relied on a company to build it using .ASP

All has been well until the host company said they were no longer going to host .ASP and that I should get this converted to PHP.

Now, I am no web coder but for a few years I have been working with some very skilled people. Sadly they haven’t had the time to help build this for me, but have offered loads of suggestions and ideas. I really needed to get this done myself.

So I went to freelancers.com and looked for anyone who could do the conversion. As it turns out there are lots of folk there who thought it would be easy, but I needed to work fast!

I have for some time been using Dreamweaver as my HTML editor, along with BBEdit on a Mac. There are a number of in-built tools to help code PHP, but you need to know what you are doing before you understand when and how to use them. I have also bought a copy of Interakt’s ‘MX Kollection’ This is basically a framework that writes the PHP code from a library of functions. All you need to know is what function you are doing.

The online help system for this is pretty good, and there are dozens of tutorials to help. It handles just about everything you need for a fairly complex site, including registration, sessions, listing information, amending records and so on.

Have a look at http://www.fixex.com to see the site I built (if you are a youth rugby team, sign up!!), and check out http://www.interaktonline.com for the dreamweaver extensions. I notice the company has now been bought by Adobe (who also now own Macromedia) so perhaps even better things are around the corner. All I know is I couldn’t have built this from nothing to a fully working site in less than a week without this set of extensions, so many thanks to Interakt!

Birdseye Attacked, time to move blogs.

Hal

Aaagh!

It is like living on a knife edge when you have your blog on a server that is getting so many hits!

One of the Ultralab servers was hacked last week, and whilst not a great deal of damage was done, it did take it off line for a number of days. The worst part of this was the timing – just before a bank holiday weekend when no-one would be around to fix the problems.

SO it was that this blog was off line for five days. Sorry to all of you who tried and failed to get in whilst looking for Dension files, Limara info, stuff about cameras, the Highways Agency or DVD authoring in general. It really couldn’t have come at a worse time!

We are back up and running (as you can see) but it emphasises the point that this blog needs to move homes. Doing so will undoubtedly cause issues, not least we will lose google juice and people who have linked to these pages will lose the links. Hopefully we’ll be able to take enough time before moving to allow proper redirection and google bots enough time to re-link the pages.

Virtual learning Environment, Moodle, Using Moodle, WebCT

Hal

One of the projects I am involved in is working with the University’s Faculty of Science and Technology to create a blended or online foundation degree. Much of what we do with this is going to be informed by the BA Learning Technology Research degree we are developing in the Ultraversity project, but of particular interest to me is the use of an alternative VLE to the university flavour.

Currently, Anglia Ruskin use WebCT for this kind of online delivery. Many departments across the faculties use the software, and the university has invested heavily in it. However, there are some key issues surrounding it and how it is used/perceived and these have meant I have had to find an alternative to WebCT.

Having looked at many, and indeed spent the best part of a day with the computing department team who are to use the VLE, we settled on Moodle. A year or so ago Moodle wasn’t really the right kind of environment – it lacked certain features and made it difficult to see how it could be used. However, a year or so on and the open source community have done wonders – Moodle is now at v1.5 with 1.6 due out soon. It is a very different beast these days and actually offers a great deal more than most. Particular interest is in the integration with other VLEs, but I note WebCT isn’t on the list of those (yet!).

A key concern for us is how we would deal with the registration of students and integrate this with the University’s registration procedures… and this is going to form the basis of the research we are going to undertake. Additional elements of that research will be to investigate the way Moodle encourages a social constructivist approach to learning rather than the more didactic or top-down approach which WebCT seems to offer. I think that the days of filling ’empty vessels’ with knowledge are long gone – but I see little to persuade me that WebCT is moving on from that. I have had a brief look at ‘Vista’ (we are currently using ‘Campus’ edition) and this does seem to offer more, but I can’t get away from the notion that the WebCT approach does not move people towards the more powerful learning opportunities available.

What is going to be interesting is to see how Moodle does this. I know that it will be a bit of a struggle to get people to universally abandon any ingrained teaching methodologies, or to move inherently away from simply putting content and resources on line without offering dialogue too. My early impressions of Moodle are that it *can* operate in this way, but the emphasis is overwhelmingly on *not* doing so!

With luck, the research findings will be used by the university in any evaluation of their online learning provision. There are far too many bottlenecks in the way the administrative tools of WebCT are centralised and moved out of the reach of individuals in the faculties -probably for very good reasons – but what we need now is for the university to take a very much more open minded approach to online learning environments, and consider for a moment whether an open source solution which is in good stages of development can offer anything more than their investment (thousands of pounds worth) in WebCT.

Publishing multiple iCal diaries, Apple iCal, combining multiple iCal diaries, iCalPublish, publishing multiple diaries

Hal

If, like me, you use Apple’s iCal to keep track of a variety of different aspects of your life, and, like me, you need to share those aspects with colleagues, then you could need iCalPublish.

This nifty bit of software performs a vital job – it allows you to combine multiple diaries from within iCal and publish them on a .Mac or WebDAV server as a single calendar.

I used to publish several diaries from within iCal, and colleagues would have to open all of them to see my overall availability. Now, they simply open a single diary and in there are the contents of six others.

It is shareware, and well worth the fee, in my opinion. Once you publish your combined diary, you can also subscribe to it yourself and see it in your own local copy of iCal. You see it as others who subscribe to the published version would see it. Cool.

The current version is 2.3, and it is available from www.buddy.com