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New books purchased today: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (to read with Evan), John Szarkowski’s The Photographer’s Eye, and Frank Warren’s compilation Post Secret. Looking forward to reading every page of each book.

It’s not a full examination of every technical aspect of RAW vs. JPEG, but I show some of the reasons why I try to shoot RAW almost all the time, as well as some reasons why I sometimes shoot in JPEG instead. Some of the subtle differences didn’t really translate into the compressed video files, but hopefully you can get an idea of what the extra data in a RAW file is handy for.

Episode 003: 10:43 duration, 320×240 11.4MB or HD 15.2MB

I’ve been struggling with this problem for some time now, and am a bit stumped. Bits of it are trivial to solve, but when I start hooking things up, there’s a pretty big gap and disconnect.

On the surface, it’s a simple problem. I’m using Drupal, and am building a website to store things like profiles for individuals. That’s easy. I need to add lists of the degrees they’ve been awarded. Like this:

D’Arcy Norman

• Bachelor’s of Science, 1992 (University of Calgary)
• Bachelor’s of Education, 1994 (University of Calgary)

Sounds easy. Could just be a CCK content type, with a text field that allows multiple values. Enter whatever text you want.

buuuuut…

I also need for the site to be organized such that I can list everyone who’s earned a BSc in Zoology from UCalgary, or everyone that’s earned a Bachelor’s Degree in 1992, or just people who have earned a BEd from UBC in 1998. Or potentially any combination or permutation.

So, simple text fields don’t cut it. They solve the display problem but not the data modeling and querying problems.

Taxonomies seem like the natural way to store the data – I can set up a Taxonomy vocabulary to represent the full hierarchical structure that is needed.

The problem with a hierarchical taxonomy is that I can’t seem to get it to actually display the hierarchy, with the full lineage shown. On the node display page, I get something like this by default:

First, that shows all terms from all vocabularies. In this case, “calgary” and “ucalgary” are from the Tags vocabulary, and “Bachelors” “Education” and “Science” are all from the Degrees vocabulary. Except they’re all munged together. And the hierarchy is completely gone.

With a bit of custom code, I can separate the vocabularies, like this:

Getting closer. But the hierarchy is still gone. I can’t get it to show something like:

Degrees:

• Bachelors > Science
• Bachelors > Education

The specifications call for the end result to look similar to this:

And there’s perhaps an even bigger problem – I can’t associate a year or institution with the degree. Under this strategy, there is no easy way to say Bachelors > Science (University of Calgary, 1992) and have the data be stored in such a way as to be properly searchable and meaningful as opposed to be essentially for display purposes only.

The other thing I’m hitting my head against is the need to keep data entry as simple as possible. Some really nicely designed forms have been sketched out with ease of use as the primary concern. But they’re going to be pretty darned difficult to implement in Drupal without writing custom modules. If ease of use wasn’t such a big concern, I could probably just use text fields for display so I could enter whatever text I wanted to represent the degrees, and have a set of Taxonomy vocabularies to be used to represent the data for querying and filtering. But that’s redundant data entry, and would be very confusing to anyone actually entering the data.

One other idea I had was to model institutions and degrees as nodes (using a custom content type) and use the node relation CCK field to tie it together. That could work, and we’ve used that technique on other projects (like the Great Teachers website) but I’m not sure that’s the best angle to take in this case.

Any Drupalistas out there with some ideas on how to properly represent multiple bits of hierarchical data to store and display things like sets of degrees granted in given years by given institutions?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about publishing things individually, on my own, as opposed to scattering stuff across the various services out there. Partially, it’s because of some sense of wanting to retain control and ownership of what I do. Partially, it’s a thought exercise to help figure out what it would really mean for an individual to fully maintain their own digital identity as opposed to relying on any number of ephemeral third parties to enable that. It’s all still quite unformed in my head, but here’s a really basic and oversimplified diagram of what I’m thinking about:

“Scattered” publishing involves a bunch of people navigating a bunch of services in order to find relevant bits published by the people they care about. “Individual” publishing involves individuals managing their content in one place, and letting the people they care about have access in any way they need.

Aggregators play important roles in both models, but in “scattered” the aggregator’s primary role is to pull decentralized bits of a person’s various bits of content back into the context of that person, and then in the context of the reader’s personal network. In “individual” the aggregator is primarily pulling people together, and filtering the subsets of a person’s content to meet the needs of each reader.

still struggling to find a way to properly represent a complex hierarchical taxonomy along with paired year data in Drupal, to do something like allowing a contributor to specify that someone received a UBC: Bachelor’s Degree: Bachelor’s of Science: Zoology in 1998 – in such a way that I could use the UBC, Bachelor’s, BSc, and Zoology levels of the hierarchy, as well as the year. It’s not just a simple Taxonomy vocabulary because the year pairing throws it off… It’s not just a simple CCK field, because it needs to be more flexible…

AsideShop should be able to provide some almost-Drupal functionality in WordPress. Without the content types stored in the database, and just at the presentation layer, but still this could be very cool for building websites where you want to display different bits of content in different ways. Could have different templates for podcasts, videos, presentations, blog entries, etc… Interesting…

but, can asides be posted without having to enter anything the Title field? asides aren’t big enough to need titles… Update: YES! No title necessary! It’ll use the post ID in the slug, and looks like it works just fine. Rock.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of publishing all of my content in one place – what would that look like? What would be lost, with respect to the social network effects that exist in other hosted services? It seems strange to be posting blog entries here, short updates to Twitter, photos to Flickr, etc… I’ve been wondering what it would look like if I just posted everything here, and then looked at ways to get it out, to rebuild the social network in a distributed, decentralized way.

One thing I’ve been struggling with is how absolutely trivial this would be if I was still running Drupal. Define some content types, slap in some templates for them, and decide which nodes get promoted to front page. Done. But WordPress doesn’t work like that. There’s not a clean and easy way to define something like a “Twitter Update” content type, or a “Photo” content type.

Well, actually, there is a clean and easy way. But it involves adding a couple of plugins. First, I added the AsideShop plugin. It’s pretty cool, and lets you define what are essentially templates for each of the categories on a WordPress site – superficially emulating the different node templates you can create in Drupal. I created an “aside” category, and told AsideShop to display it differently than the default posts. But… If I was to keep posting Twitter-like updates, my RSS feed would be pretty polluted with garbage that 99% (or more) of the remaining subscribers just wouldn’t care about.

Here is a screenshot of what asides look like currently:

The AsideShop configuration looks like this:

So, I added the Advanced Category Excluder plugin, and told it to remove everything in the “aside” category from the main site feed. Easy peasy.

All I have to do is write a regular post, and select the “aside” category. Everything else is handled automagically. I can expose all of the asides on their own page, and through their own feed. Wonder what I’ll wind up doing with that…

I was missing riding my bike – having parked it for 2 days following the second freak spring blizzard of 2008 – so decided to ride this morning anyway. Fun, in parts. Not so much, in others. Slush froze into clumps of sharp, crunchy ice, making some of the road sections difficult. The paths were all fine, but some of the side streets were downright scary. Not sure if I’ll be riding tomorrow or not…

yeah. the flames choked. again. defense was stuck in third gear. offense was shaky. we got outplayed. again. “blue collar work ethic” only goes so far – you have to show up, too.

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