Posted by Reverend 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 Reverend 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 Randy on 28th October 2009
From the Chronicle of Higher Education to Popular Science writers are exploring the future and place for OpenCourseWare. The Chronicle reviews the ongoing costs, and that with budget cuts continued funding for open courses is tough. Popular Science is writing from the perspective of an interested adult learner, wondering how interesting the courses are. The conclusions from both perspectives indicate that the opencourseware movement is still trying to find its way. And I think that until opencourseware initiatives are integrated into the core activities of universities and colleges, their future and purpose will remain uncertain.
Look at the standard web 2.o model — give away something that doesn’t cost you much, hook in users, and offer higher levels of service for a price. Who are the primary audiences at a traditional college? Current student and faculty. If opencourseware efforts are not FIRST serving their needs, then why bother? For instance:
Opencourseware needs to be at the center of the organization’s sweet spot. While these programs remain a side show they will always be vulnerable to cancellation as funding cuts and new funding priorities come up. Build them into the core services offered to current students and they will continue to grow, enhancing the on-campus teaching environment and continuing to enrich off campus audiences as well.
Free Online Courses, at a Very High Price – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education
“With the economic downturn, I think it will be a couple of years before Yale or other institutions are likely to be able to make substantial investments in building out a digital course catalog,” says Linda K. Lorimer, vice president and secretary at Yale, which is publishing a 36-class, greatest-hits-style video set called Open Yale Courses.
How Much Can You Really Learn With a Free Online Education? | Popular Science
The world’s most prestigious universities have begun posting entire curricula on the Web—for free. Is there such a thing as a free higher-education lunch? I enrolled to find out
Some students say they prefer the free videotaped lectures to the live lectures they are paying for at their own institutions. Others say they use the online talks to focus on topics they didn’t quite get when they first heard them in their own courses. And some high-school students use them to get a jump on material they will encounter when they get to college.
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Posted by Randy on 28th October 2009
Who doesn’t love an Apple rumor about their next genre-changing device? The latest floating around on Apple’s new tablet basically what sounds like a 10″ version of the iPod touch. With access to the iTunes apps store, and a version with 3G (basically a 10″ iPhone) this would have serious implications in the burgeoning mobile reader market. When compared to the Kindle there is no way the new device will be able to match in a battery-life contest — and the Kindle’s no trouble wireless connection is pretty good. But as long as Apple can offer decent battery life, the color touch screen plus Apps-store is going to significantly shake up the marketplace.
Everything We Know About Apple’s Touchscreen Tablet | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
Even if you’re sick of Apple tablet rumors, we promise you’ll like this one. The latest update comes from a tipster with a solid track record, which reinforces previous reports that Apple will deliver a tablet in early 2010. The tipster also shares details on the rumored product’s specifications.
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Posted by Randy on 28th October 2009
Twitter and other companies are smart enough to let their users innovate — see what catches on — and then integrate the successful features. At the university can we empower students to do the same with classroom technology systems and course management/learning systems? Why not? Our users are certainly a cut above the average Twitter user — at least more selectively chosen!
Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Users – NYTimes.com
Ford Motor noticed that people were modifying Sync, its voice-activated system for playing music and getting directions. Ford has invited university students to come up with new features for the in-car system.
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Posted by Reverend 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 Reverend 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
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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.
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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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