Posted by Instructional Technology on 30th October 2009
For many of the posts we were able to recover the comments from Google’s cache. If you would like the comments for your posts please e-mail instructionaltechnology@wooster.edu and we will send you the copy of Google’s cache for your site. We have no way of entering comments as the original commenters, but you can ask your classmates to reenter their comments.
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Posted by Instructional Technology on 30th October 2009
As of 4:50 PM on October 30, 2009, all blogs that were in the system on September 10, 2009 have been restored to their state on October 27, 2009, or as close as we could get with what was cached on Google. Special thanks to John McCreight for helping us save cached copies from Google. We are now beginning to recreate the accounts and blogs of users who registered after September 10, 2009. So far we have heard from 9 of the 19 users. We still need users to claim the following blogs and provide the information below so that we may recreate their accounts:
If your blog is missing or missing posts here is what you need to do:
We will search Google to try to find a cached copy of your site and posts. (You can do this yourself by entering site:yoururl into Google) Once we find a cached copy we will send you an e-mail letting you know and we will restore as many posts as we could find on Google. If you would rather restore your posts yourself just indicate this in your e-mail and we will send you any cached pages we are able to find. Our hope is to have most blogs restored by next Tuesday.
If your blog was not deleted you can continue to add posts. We will be able to add your older posts even if you continue to add new ones.
You can read Setbacks to find out what happened.
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Posted by Instructional Technology on 27th October 2009
We may not be able to recover the data from the database backups, but since we have had Google Analytics installed from day one, Google has caches of some of the blogs. It may even have caches of all of them. Users can visit the tool provided by it exchange and input their URL to see the last date Google cached their site. If a cache date is returned then the user can go to Google and do a search for their site. Clicking on the Cached link will take the user to a cached version of their page from which they can copy their posts or which they can save using the Save Page As… option in Firefox. For example there is a cache of The Gothic Imagination which contains all of the posts from Aug 24 through Oct. 26. Users should feel free to contact a member of the Instructional Technology Department if they need help in recovering their posts from a Google cache. We are not sure how long the cached pages will remain. We are trying to save any class blogs we find and will help the faculty member with reentering the posts.
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Posted by Instructional Technology on 27th October 2009
Some of you may have noticed that your site is missing posts. Others of you may notice that your blog is completely gone. Both are the result of a very unfortunate accident that occurred when the Systems Group tried to restore the Voices site to its state at 6 AM this morning.
As you know we were upgrading the software this morning. This afternoon it was discovered by Dr. Hayward that some users could not post to their blogs and we began investigating the issue. In the process it was decided that a reversion might be necessary. When the Systems Group restored the database containing all the user and post information, they discovered it was corrupt. As they looked for a clean backup they discovered that all backups after Sept. 10 were corrupt and so the earliest version they could restore to is Sept 10.
We are aware that roughly 40 users and hence 40 blogs were lost in this incident. Unfortunately it looks like there is no way to recover the lost users and blogs. It also means that all posts written between Sept. 10 and this morning are gone. We know that this means that several class assignments that were written as blog entries are also gone. We will continue to work with the Systems Group to try to recover as much data as possible, but be aware that it is not likely any more data will be recovered.
In the coming days we will be working with the Systems Group to develop procedures to ensure that such an accident does not occur in the future. Once these procedures have been determined we will post them to this site for the community’s benefit.
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Posted by Randy on 27th October 2009
I am finding the open source NetBeans development tool really great for my PHP programming work. It really saves time by catching the simple typo and syntax mistakes I commonly make. Please to code suggestions and other elements are helpful too. Part of what makes it so great is the connection that the project developers have with the programming community — as an example of that read this post. It is exactly this type of close connection to a user community that makes open source so powerful.
I spent talking about PHP development in NetBeans almost whole session. After the session there was a long discussion (more than 1 hour) and some people complained about formatting…As a result I have decided to look at this and to try to fix as many bugs as possible. Because there is not much time for NetBeans 6.8, I would like to ask you for help.
NetBeans 6.8 Beta Coming; Does Oracle Care? | NetBeans Zone
PHP
* PHP 5.3 support including syntax highlighting, code completion, code folding, and navigator
* Symfony Framework support
* FTP/SFTP improvements
Posted in Open Source, PHP, PLE, Technology, Web, blog, project | Comments Off
Posted by andrea on 26th October 2009
Here’s a plugin complete with a widget that lets the site admin pick and choose which posts to feature. A backend menu is created where the admin can input a sitewide feed. In MU, the menu item is under site Admin, and in regular WordPress, it’s under Appearance.
We recommend using this in conjunction with Sitewide tags, then use the feed from the tags blog. Each item from the feed has a checkbox, and when selected, the post is moved over to the “Featured” column. The widget will display the featured post excerpt as well as the user’s avatar.
Screenshots:
The admin area.
The widget in action.
Currently, if you want to change some options, you will have to edit the code of the plugin. The widget is in a separate file if you wish to remove it. Also, the widget is set to display one post, but that is easily changed by editing the plugin. Find the function call and change it thusly:
<?php ra_featured_show(10); ?>
Where the number 10 is the maximum amount of posts to show. You can also use this same function if you want to hardcode it in your theme. There are also options in the code for default avatar sizes, and some CSS classes around the post and the avatar, so you can adjust them to your liking. Feel free to fold, spindle, mutilate and enjoy the heck out of it. Since we are going to WordCamp New York, we wanted to get this plugin released before then. We’ll add more options for backend configuration after we get back.
© andrea for WPMU Tutorials, 2009. |
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Posted by andrea on 26th October 2009
When you install WPMU by default the subdomain option is checked. This is for blogs in the format of username.yourdomain.com.
There are two steps that need to be done to your server in order for this to work.
In Apache, there needs to be a line in the domain’s virtual hosts section as follows:
ServerName yourdomain.com
ServerAlias yourdomain.com *.yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /your/doc/root/
ServerAdmin webmaster at yourdomain.com
The Server Alias line with the *.yourdomain.com is what controls this. If you do not have access to change this, ask your webhost for support. More and more hosts are enabling this by default.
The second thing that needs to be done is adding the DNS record. Where you add it depends on your domain hosting. Basically, you need to add a line like this:
*.yourdomain.com in A YOURIPADDRESS
These wildcards mean that any subdomain request will fall through to the WPMU install, where MU will look up the name in the database. If it finds it, it serves up the blog.
Note: if you choose the subfolder option on installation, you do not have to do either one of these steps.
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Posted by Randy on 26th October 2009
Educause just released their 2009 study of undergrad technology use. Here are some highlights that caught my attention:
Personal use of web 2.0 technologies is pretty strong:
Compare this to how actively these same technologies are used for instructional use:
It is not clear why the use is so much lower in instructional settings, but perhaps the low opinion of instructors effective use of technology has bearing here.
The study also finds a sharp rise in communication via mobile texts and social networking sites. Around this time of year I always wonder how the new class of students are communicating with each other electronically, and how that has changed over time. With the increased use of mobile text messages, plus tools like Facebook and Twitter, how important is email? We have had a student list-serve mailing list since 2004. Has use of this list changed over that time? The short answer is no as far as total messages are concerned, but those are being sent by fewer people — details are below. I have differentiated messages sent by staff/faculty from those which are student-to-student. I wanted to see if perhaps student use dropped while staff/faculty use rose.
| Total email messages sent to list by type | ||||||
| Messages | Business | B% | Student | S% | ||
| Sept-20004 | 235 | 83 | 35% | 152 | 65% | |
| Sept-20005 | 200 | 89 | 45% | 111 | 56% | |
| Sept-20006 | 194 | 90 | 46% | 104 | 54% | |
| Sept-20007 | 192 | 65 | 34% | 127 | 66% | |
| Sept-20008 | 238 | 77 | 32% | 161 | 68% | |
| Sept-20009 | 200 | 58 | 29% | 142 | 71% | |
| Total Author count by type | ||||||
| Authors | Business | B% | Student | S% | ||
| Sept-20004 | 87 | 23 | 26% | 64 | 74% | |
| Sept-20005 | 85 | 20 | 24% | 65 | 76% | |
| Sept-20006 | 88 | 26 | 30% | 62 | 70% | |
| Sept-20007 | 71 | 21 | 30% | 50 | 70% | |
| Sept-20008 | 76 | 19 | 25% | 57 | 75% | |
| Sept-20009 | 68 | 19 | 28% | 49 | 72% | |
Note that only 25 – 30 % of our students actively email to the list. But as the results show, email is still as popular for our student-to-student communication as it was 5 years ago, but fewer people are actively participating. So maybe they are communicating more, but email is still a strong part of that. Almost every student at the school is subscribed to the list. My guess, (and with quick look over the email subject lines supporting), is that the list is being used for school business (lost/found, get-your-tickets-for, etc), and not classroom or socializing purposes.
The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009 | EDUCAUSE
Since 2004, the annual ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology has sought to shed light on how information technology affects the college experience. We ask students about the technology they own and how they use it in and out of their academic world… In addition to studying student ownership, experience, behaviors, preferences, and skills with respect to information technologies, the 2009 study also includes a special focus on student ownership and use of Internet-capable handheld devices.
Posted by Randy on 26th October 2009
The WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin scans system files, posts/comments and plug-ins for suspicious stuff. If you have a blog site that you think may have been compromised it can’t hurt to give it a try. I ran it on a couple of blogs I administer and I’m happy to report that everything looks fine. One of the things the plug-in looks for is hidden code in your site, especially hidden style elements. This is a way that spammers can insert code into your site — but there are lots of legitimate reasons for these elements too. So the report can look a little alarming or overwhelming at first, so run it when you have some time to scan over the output report. A good tool to keep handy for when needed.
This plugin searches the files and database of your website for signs of suspicious activity. It will not stop someone hacking into your site, but it may help you find any uploaded or compromised files left by the hacker.
WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.8.5: Hardening Release
We recommend that all sites are upgraded to this new version of WordPress to ensure that you have the best available protection…If you think your site may have been hit by one of the recent exploits and you would like to make sure that you have cleared out all traces of the exploit then we would recommend that you take a look at the WordPress Exploit Scanner.
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Posted by boone on 22nd October 2009
I posted about this a while ago, but I have ported _ck_’s bb_attachments plugin to BP 1.1.x. I took some time today to clean up the readme files and submit the plugin to the wordpress.com plugin database. Nothing about the plugin itself, or the hooks you’ll have to put into your theme, has changed since my last post; but at least now you’ll receive the file with full documentation and can use the WP plugin installer to install and maintain this bad boy.
Get it here or by searching for “forum attachments” on WP’s Add New Plugin page.
Bug reports (and especially patches!) are welcome.
Related posts:
Posted in BuddyPress, WordPress, attachments, bbPress, dev.wpmued, edtech, forums, plugin, wpmu | Comments Off