just a lowly edtech geek, mumble mumble university of calgary
From the monthly archives:
I was poking around in my Aperture library after importing the latest batch of game photos from Evan’s U5 soccer team today, and I realized that I’ve kept 2345 photos so far this year (on pace to keep well over 6000 in 2007). At the average ratio of keeps-per-deletes, that means I’ve shot well over [...]
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I have a lot of categories in this blog. 542, to be exact. I use them like tags, rather than a rigid hierarchy.
The WordPress Categories panel in the “Write Post” interface sucks with this many categories/tags. Having to scroll through a verrrrry long list to hunt for keywords is tedious. Here’s a screenshot of Drupal’s [...]
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I migrated my blog from Drupal 5 to WordPress 2 nearly 2 weeks ago. The process wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be, thanks to a handy howto via vrypan.net. Another resource I refer to every time I get into tweaking MySQL rows is UrbanMainframe’s MySQL search and replace tipsheet. Thanks to both [...]
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I got really frustrated with how painfully slow Firefox gets when opening new tabs, so went through my seasonal try-every-browser-known-to-mankind phase last night and today. At the moment, I’m in Flock. It’s based on Firefox, but doesn’t seem to suffer from the glacially slow new tab/window creation problem I get in Firefox. I think I’ll [...]
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I’m wondering (out loud) if I’m guilty of taking the Small Pieces Loosely Joined concept for granted. It’s one of those things that can be talked about at length, but isn’t really understood until a gulp of SPLJ Kool-Aid has been swallowed and the approach has been tried on. Conceptually, it makes sense to talk [...]
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It’s always bugged me a bit that my SL avatar was a plain-vanilla human. I mean, here’s this awesome metaverse, where the rules of physics don’t apply, and you can change your appearance at will. And I was walking around, looking much like I do in real life. How creative and interesting.
So, today while watching [...]
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Efficiently whiteboard dynamic content without cross-unit channels. Distinctively implement plug-and-play manufactured products with open-source innovation. Proactively integrate goal-oriented paradigms before best-of-breed internal or “organic” sources. Energistically network multimedia based markets rather than diverse convergence. Enthusiastically implement wireless web services without standards compliant platforms. Globally embrace enterprise-wide ROI rather than cross-unit applications.
Compellingly expedite prospective imperatives and [...]
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I’ve been using Drupal for my blog for just over a year now, and it’s been a really great platform to work in. I use it pretty much all day for projects at the U of C as well. But it just feels a bit lacking in the area of managing a personal blog, compared [...]
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I gave a presentation this morning as part of Faculty Technology Days 2007. I was asked a few weeks ago if I'd like to talk about weblogs and wikis, and I couldn't come up a reason why not, so they slotted me in. In the meantime, I've been doing a lot of thinking about weblogs, wikis, academic publishing, and being Open, Connected and Social. So I decided to try to subvert my presentation slightly, into a more open-content-is-good kind of talk (but still based on blogs and wikis for much of it). What better way to do that, than to present directly from a wiki? It's worked very well for Brian Lamb – all of his presentations are wiki-driven.
Yesterday, I came across a link to some Firefox Greasemonkey scripts for use with Mediawiki. (aside: I'd thought I'd seen the link via Twitter, but can't seem to find who said it there – I remembered it being from Scott Leslie, but it could have been through del.icio.us, or via a comment he made on a blog somewhere…)
Anyway, on scanning through the list, one jumped out at me. Not literally, but that would have been cool. The "Wikipedia Presentation" script sounded very cool. I'm a big fan of the wiki-as-presentation style, and this mashed up a Mediawiki page with the awesome S5 html presentation engine. By installing this script, it automatically enables viewing any Mediawiki page as a full-screen slideware presentation.
So, I installed it.
And it failed. The current version of the script has been updated for the current version of Mediawiki. I'm using an older version (because my server doesn't have the latest PHP bits to run the latest MediaWiki). Older Mediawiki pages use div elements to mark sections of a page, while newer versions use spans. After some extremely complicated editing of the Greasemonkey script (changing the 3 instances of "span" to say "div" instead) I was off and running. My modified (i.e., reverted) version of the Greasemonkey script is available here.
The cool thing, if you're using a Mac (and, really, what ISN'T cooler if you're using a Mac) is that you can install an application called Mira to enable using the Apple Remote to control Firefox. I bound the back/forward buttons on the remote to the left/right arrow keys, and I was navigating through a Mediawiki page as a full-screen presentation, using a wireless remote.
With the script installed, the wiki/presentation page for this presentation should show a "Start Presentation" link right beneath the article title.
There was one minor tweak I needed to make. By default, the content of the slide starts too far down the screen. When using a projector, you may be stuck at 800×600, and a bunch of that was sucked up by empty space at the top. So, I overrode one of the styles to make it start higher up. There are a couple of ways you can do this. If you have the Web Developer extension installed, just add a new User Style Sheet containing the style below. Otherwise, edit your Mediawiki skin (in my case, the file at /skins/monobook/main.css ) to add this:
#wikipedia_presentation { margin-top: 0 !important;}{ 14 comments }
