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Make. It. Stop.

The group of WPMU rockstars at UBC’s OLT just whipped up a fantastic new plugin for administrators of a WPMU site to get a feel for the growth of the community. It generates a graph to display growth in numbers of blog posts and comments over time, and uses the Google Data Visualization API to let you interactively define data ranges to be graphed.

Here’s the growth of UCalgaryBlogs.ca graphed for the last 2 semesters:

Another fantastic job by the OLT blogging platform crew. Now, to just add users and pages, and it’ll be perfect…

I love Creative Commons. Because I tagged my photos with a CC license, a small and local magazine found some of my photographs, and was able to use them in a recent issue. I didn’t make a penny, and it didn’t cost them a penny. But they were able to find good images for what they needed, and I get to say my photos are in a magazine. Win/win.

I’m working with a class of 250+ geology undergrads, split up into 53 groups. They’re using a WordPress site to publish online presentations as the product of a semester-long group project. I’m using the great WP-Sentry plugin to let them collaboratively author the pages without worrying about other students in the class being able to edit their work (I know – but it makes them more comfortable so it’s a good thing to add).

The premise is this – I created a Page called, creatively enough, “Winter 2009″ – and each of the groups is to create a page (or set of pages) and add them to the site – and selecting “Winter 2009″ as the parent page for the main page of their presentation. They are free to create as many other pages as they like, and can set those to use their first page as the parent, thereby generating a table of contents.

Works great. Except that the WP-Sentry plugin hijacks the “Private” state of pages, and the tree of Pages available in the Parent selector is based on “Published” pages.

Conflict. Confusion. Frustration.

The students could either collaborate on the pages, or organize them in the tree structure.

Of course they could create the pages and add them to the tree structure and THEN enable the WP-Sentry-managed group editing controls, but YOU try explaining that process to 250 undergrads, all stressed out about building web pages as part of a geology course.

So… I dug into the code to see what was yanking “Private” pages from the Parent list. Turns out, it’s in wp-includes/post.php, waaaay down on line 2618 (as of WPMU 2.7). All I did was remove the " AND post_status = 'publish'" bit, and it now appears to be listing all pages.

I’m quite sure I borked something else, but for now I’m leaving the Parent list wide open until the students are done publishing their presentations.

Update: Unintended consequence #242: Looks like with the tweak, Private pages show up where they’re not expected. I’m disabling the tweak for now until I can find a better way (if that’s even possible).

I tried the promising new iPhone / iPod Touch app “Blackboard Learning” hoping to have a cool and efficient way to connect to Blackboard from my pocket computer. No such luck. There’s always something in the way of making the LMS experience fun…

Error

Your institution is blocking Sync for the iPhone.

Doh.

I don’t know if this is a version mismatch – are we running the wrong version of Blackboard? – or if it’s just a new building block that needs to get rolled out on campus. Either way, frustration.

hrm. the Links category is _supposed_ to be yanked out of the main RSS feed, but it looks like the last Links post still made it in. I don’t know how it snuck through. Grumble.

Jim Groom linked to a post by Patrick Murray-John with an interesting summary of the activity on UMWBlogs.org – and I was curious about what activity patterns are on UCalgaryBlogs.ca – so I fired up Sequel Pro and dug around in the raw data stored by the blog_activity plugin in the wp_post_activity and wp_comment_activity tables. The tables include aggregate and anonymous activity data for the last month.

There is a relatively new Reports plugin that could do much of this in an automated way, but it only supports generating activity reports for individual users or blogs, not aggregate reports.

Following is the MySQL code I ran to crunch the tables into usable data, which I then (cringingly) copied and pasted into (wincingly) MS Excel to generate tables and visuals.

Posts per Hour of Day

To get the number of posts published by hour of day, I ran this:

select distinct from_unixtime(stamp, "%H") as hour, count(*) as numberOfPosts from wp_post_activity group by hour order by hour;

Posts per Day of Week

select distinct from_unixtime(stamp, "%a") as day, count(*) as numberOfPosts from wp_post_activity group by day;

Comments per Hour of Day

select distinct from_unixtime(stamp, "%H") as hour, count(*) as numberOfComments from wp_comment_activity group by hour order by hour;

Comments per Day of Week

select distinct from_unixtime(stamp, "%a") as day, count(*) as numberOfComments from wp_comment_activity group by day;

Combining some of the data

Now that I’ve got the data out, it’s easy to combine sets to see what’s going on. Comments and Posts per Hour of Day:

and combined posts and comments per day of week:

What’s it mean?

I don’t know what it means. Mostly, I just like shiny graphs with lines that loosely correspond to something. Am I going to read anything into it? Nope. But if nothing else, it’s interesting to see that activity isn’t tightly synchronized with in-class time

Now, it’s clear that we’re nowhere NEAR the activity level of UMWBlogs, nor do we have the sustained activity (we don’t have The Reverend, after all), but I was surprised and impressed that the aggregate activity was much higher in “off” hours/days than I’d have guessed. Actual activity, outside of classroom hours. Who’d have guessed?

I’m still mulling over the finale – at first I had mixed feelings^[1], and now I’m really liking the direction they went.

I think the perfect closing line would have been for God Six to turn to God Balthar and say:

“Double or nothing this time?” [cut to black]

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Footnotes:

1. as in – I FRACKING HATED IT AT FIRST, and then thought about it and really, REALLY liked it [↩]

Oh, COME ON!

I’m torn on whether to split the Links posts from the main feed. Is it too noisy? Do the Links posts drown out the “real” posts? Does that matter?

I’m really just pulling the daily links here to make a single place for me to search stuff – posts, links, etc… – so I suppose there’s no real reason to have the Links posts also going out on the main feed for the blog. Asides are already completely separate (don’t show on main page, don’t show in main feed, having a separate feed just for them) so it’d be pretty easy to set Link posts up to do the same.

Thoughts? Much babbling about nothing?

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