It's been about a month since I made the switch from WordPress 2 to Drupal 4.7 to power my blog. There have been some ups and downs, but I have to say that I have absolutely no regrets about the move, nor do I plan on moving back any time soon.
Some things I still miss from the WordPress days though -
- commenters able to subscribe to a thread of comments via email. sounds old school, but it REALLY helps keep conversations going.
- actually, that's just about it.
There are some little niggles, like not being able to use the Flickr.module to integrate my Flickr sets here, but that's a limitation of DreamHost's security setup (disabling fopen), not of Drupal. If that REALLY bugs me, I'll look at hacking the Flickr.module cache code to not require fopen…
Once Drupal has been configured, it's no harder to run than WordPress. It performs as well (or better) once caching has been enabled. The threaded comments are great. The custom node types are really handy – I'm not using them so much on this blog (yet) but am using them quite a bit on some project sites.
The set of modules I'm using has evolved over the past month. I think I've come up with a pretty decent set of modules for a blogging platform in Drupal. It's not perfect, but it does the job quite nicely.
I'd recommend WordPress for new bloggers, but I'd wholeheartedly recommend Drupal for people that want to take advantage of some of the more flexible content management stuff available in a higher-end app. Not a shot against WordPress at all – the two platforms serve slightly different (and complementary) roles.
I took my Canon Digital Rebel XT to Evan's soccer practice/game on Saturday, hoping to get some shots of him and his teammates playing the game. I also wanted an excuse to fiddle around with some of the settings and modes on the XT to see how they perform.
Wow.
I turned on rapidfire/burst mode, which can pump out 14 shots in about 3 seconds. Absolutely perfect for capturing the right shot in a game of soccer. I wound up shooting over 150 pictures during the 25 minute game! 99% were deleted, but the 1% that I kept were amazing – and likely impossible to have captured without this mode.
Also, I switched to AF Servo mode – which causes the autofocus system to keep tracking a moving target to maintain focus. So, as Evan and his 'mates were running to and away from me, they were kept in perfect focus at around 5 fps. Absolutely amazing. Check out this shot from a sequence that I shot as Evan ran past me (maybe 10 feet away) with the ball.
Have to say – I'm absofrigging loving this camera… I probably shot 500 pictures this weekend – keeping only about 75 in total. But the ones I kept are pretty cool photos, IMO. I've still got SO much to learn about the XT, and photography in general (especially customizing exposure and aperture settings – many/most of the soccer photos were a little blown out due to the bright morning sun), but I'm looking forward to figuring that out.
Also, a few things I realized after taking this many pictures.
- USB 1.0 connections are painfully slow when dealing with several hundred megabytes of images. I need to pick up a PCMCIA compact flash reader until I have a home computer that has USB 2.0 on board. Ouch, that's slow…
- A 1 GB card may not be enough – I went through a good portion of the card in a 25 minute game. Imagine what a full game/event would take…
- The faster CF cards would be worth it if shooting in rapidfire/burst a lot. I skimped, and just got the el cheapo 1 GB card. If I'd have sprung for the faster one, I could have extended the rapidfire sequences a bit more…
Patti and I were discussing our ePortfolio project the other day, and we were basically throwing back and forth various versions of "the students won't it because (a) they don't have to, and (b) it's not theirs."
The "they don't have to" part could be misconstrued as meaning "their profs didn't make them do it." That won't work, either. The students have to feel that they want to do this. That they have to do it themselves to make sense of what they're learning and doing.
And, it needs to be modelled successfully. If they see their profs as not "having to" maintain an ePortfolio, why on earth would the students do it? It's not some contrived evaluation tool, it's an internally driven amplifier and archiver of the learning (and teaching) processes.
Helen Barrett just posted a piece that describes this much more coherently, and in much greater depth. The mental picture of the graduation portfolio bonfire should be a big reminder about what can happen when there isn't a healthy sense of ownership fostered within students (and teachers). I remember burning my notebooks at the end of grade 9 – they weren't MY notes, so it felt awesome to toss them on the bonfire… Stephen's commentary is worth a read, too.
This is all about ownership. But ownership can't be given, it has to be built by each individual. It would be so easy to just say "it's a requirement to complete this course/program. you must maintain an ePortfolio." But that won't work. It will just lead to a lot of busywork, and one helluva bonfire at the end of the course/program.
I think the more effective (from a teaching/learning perspective, not a sheer volume/metrics perspective) is to model the ePortfolio as a teacher. "This is how I gather my thoughts together to track what I've done, what I'm doing, and where I'm going in my career as a teacher". If it's not relevant to a professional, why would it be relevant to a student?
Offer ePortfolios as an optional service across the curriculum, to every student on campus. If 1% of them start using them as effective tools, it will spread from there. Not instantly, and maybe not in the same cohort, but it will spread.
If it doesn't spread, it's not an effective tool, so let it die on the vine. The goal is to foster critical thinking about experiences, not to force yet another tool on anyone.
In another episode of my new All-Drupal-All-The-Time mandate… After downloading the latest build of Flock (Beta 1), I went to the Flock website to create an account to provide some feedback and suggestions.
And I realized that it looks like the whole Flock website is now powered by Drupal. It's not blatantly obvious – they're not using a stock theme, or anything like that, but you can see the DNA in some of the URLs, and in the CSS linked on many of the pages.
If anyone asks me for an example of a great, dynamic, community-oriented website that still delivers on the more conventional aspects of a corporate/organizational site, I'll point them to Flock.
Now, it'd be really cool if they wrote up an article describing how they set up their website in Drupal. Modules? How many custom themes? How did they implement the various sections? I'd bet that Will Pate had a hand in this – maybe he'll write it up as part of his role as Community Ambassador?
Update: Yeah. Will played a part – by working on the Drupal architecture of the site, and recruiting Bryan Veloso .
Flock hit beta 1 (or 0.7, depending on how you count) yesterday, and it seems like a really solid release. My favorite feature isn’t even part of the core Flock code – it’s got more Extensions enabled, including Mouse Gestures!
I’m hoping they nailed down the nasty memory leaks that plagued previous builds, and cleaned up the window opening code, which could take several seconds to spawn a new browser window. But it’s definitely on the right track.
Now to see if they managed to squeeze in category sorting/filtering in the blog posting interface (which, other than that, has been the best blog posting wysiwyg interface I’ve ever used).
Nope. It doesn’t sort or filter categories. Meaning that although it only took me 2 minutes to write this simple post, it’ll take at least that long just to select the proper categories from the menu provided…
I've been a pretty hardcore iPhoto user since the app was originally released several years ago. It's a pretty clean app, and has done everything I've needed of a photo management app. But, lately, I've been feeling like it's a little constraining. The photo retouching tools are a bit simple, and the viewing tools require a fair amount of manual intervention.
I made the mistake of viewing the Aperture online demo video over the weekend, and realized a more advanced app would really be nicer. My home machine can't run Aperture, so I downloaded the latest beta of Adobe Lightroom and imported all of the images I've taken with the XT.
The interface is quite good – it's really different from iPhoto's more modal interface, providing drawers to get at deeper functionality without adding clutter, and having keystrokes for just about everything. I'll be playing with it more over the next week or so to see how it fits. Not sure how far I want to go down that road, though, considering it's beta software, and the final price has yet to be determined.
Adobe Lightroom Beta 3 – Gallery View: A screenshot of the cleaned up Adobe Lightroom Beta 3 gallery view – with some sidepanels hidden.
It's lacking some of the things I like about iPhoto (export to Flickr, set desktop, calendar view, etc…) but the more refined features it has may be worth it. The web exports are pretty sweet, too – including a pretty high-end flash website. I made a quick sample of a few photos I took around campus.
I'm a total photo software noob, so will be taking my time to get familiar with Lightroom, but it should be fun…
I've been running this blog on Drupal for a while now, and am generally quite happy with it. The one thing I'd been missing from my days powered by WordPress was a transparent and effective spam blocker. I was so totally spoiled by Spam Karma 2 that everything else just seems like a kid's toy in comparison.
I'd installed the Spam module shortly after I switched to Drupal, but it never seemed to actually block spam. It is pretty handy at removing it, but the URL and keyword matches didn't seem to actually stop spam.
Then, this morning, some spamass decided it would be fun to point his (I'm assuming this jerk is a guy) spambots at my blog. The spam was consistently getting past Spam.module, but it was pretty easy to clean up after the jerk. Still, it's no fun playing mop-up after a cretinous script kiddie, so I rolled up my sleeves to see if I could duct tape a better solution together.
Thankfully, the work had already been done for me, just not updated to Drupal 4.7. The Spam.module for 4.6 ships with a Spam URI Realtime Blocklist module, which will check incoming comments with 6 different realtime-updated shared lists of known spammers.
So, I fired up the Form Updater module, converted the spam_surbl.module code to 4.7, and deployed it. It seems to work so far – of course I'm jynxing it now… I've attached my hack update of spam_surbl.module, which I'm using on Drupal 4.7 here. I'll send a copy to the developer of Spam.module in case he wants to include an updated blocklist module (I didn't convert the .mysql file to an .install autoinstaller, so you may need to run that manually to get the module ready).
I went for a quick drive this evening, through the Bearspaw region/community just a couple minutes from my house at the far northwest corner of Calgary. I think this was the first actual dedicated photography expedition I've taken – certainly in the last couple of years, anyway. I wound up taking 46 shots in about 45 minutes, from a few locations spread over the Bearspaw community. After throwing out the shots that sucked, were uninteresting, or really badly exposed, I was left with 9 shots that didn't make me cringe .
I was hoping to get some shots of the mountains and foothills, but some impending weather got in the way of that. So, I explored a bit, hoping to find something interesting to shoot, with the green scenery as a backdrop.
I found a great old wagon left on the side of a hill overlooking the Bow River valley, so parked nearby and took some shots. I'm actually quite happy with the shot below – with the cows in sharp focus, and the wagon slightly blurred.
I have to say – I'm so totally happy with the new Canon XT. I've got lots of room to grow with it. I wound up exchanging the XT I got last weekend for a new one, due to the noisy sensor. The new one seems much cleaner – a few spots on the test exposure, but nothing worth worrying about. I also opted for the black body this time, and am really happy that I did. It just feels like more of a "high end" or "professional" rig. Of course, neither term applies to me, so it's mostly just to help me pretend to be a real photographer 
Evan was helping a neighbour assemble a wheelbarrow this afternoon, and I was messing around with the autofocus servo mode and the rapidfire mode (fires off 14 shots in about 3 seconds) to try to catch some action. I think that combo is pretty impressive – the AF Servo keeps moving subjects in sharp focus, and the rapidfire makes it easier to capture the right shot (and then delete the extra 13 shots…)
More places I’d rather be…
I hinted at this in a previous post, but it wasn't "official" yet so I didn't provide any details. It's now official. The University of Calgary just finished the official CMS selection process, including input from ~140 web folks on campus and 6 presentations on 6 different CMS options. I was asked to present on Drupal, drawing on what we've done on some projects, and how it might fit into a larger community and workflow on campus.
The technical committee recommended Drupal last week (followed by Joomla – the only 2 solutions recommended were open source!), and the CMS group (including our IT department) approved that recommendation this week. The Teaching & Learning Centre abstained from voting to avoid any appearance of pushing one solution over the others.
So, over the next few weeks, our IT department will be getting up to speed on hosting Drupal. I'll be working with them to transfer information about our experiences in the Teaching & Learning Centre, and they'll merge that with their enterprise plan.
The short term goal is to provide an easy and effective way for faculties and departments to manage their websites without needing geeks in-house. If they can view a web page and use MS Word, they have the skills to maintain a website with Drupal.
Since this is now an officially supported CMS on campus, our IT department will be setting up servers, providing tech support, and keeping the gears meshed. The TLC will likely be providing project-specific support, and perhaps more general pedagogical guidance (what to do with it, what not to do with it, how to use it to enhance blended learning, etc…)
The longer term goal is to take advantage of some of the more social/community-oriented features, and open it up to individuals on campus. No timeline on that part of the plan at the moment, though, but that has me more excited than migrating the quasi-static websites into a CMS.
There are even longer term (and much grander) plans being discussed, but I won't mention details except to say that this could be a very big thing, both on campus, and for Drupal.
We've also begun investigating how Drupal may play a part in the U of C's podcasting (and larger digital media sharing) strategies. Ideally, we'd have a combination of iTunesU, Blackboard and Drupal, each playing to their respective strengths.
I've ranted about the IT department before, but I have to give them full props now. They went the extra mile to support an open source solution, when commercial packages might have caused them less grief (but also provided less flexibility and control). Sometimes the good guys do come out ahead…
