October 2008 Archives

This is probably totally brain-dead, but the other day I needed to whip up a quick wireframe to capture the ideas from a meeting on the interface for providing usuage stats to podcasters that use PSU's iTunes U.

For some reason I ended up trying google docs, and produced what you see below as a slide in a presentation.


I really didn't want the software to get in my way, and I don't know how to use any kind of fancy vector-based drawing programs. This wasn't really that hard. My other option was drawing something on a sheet of paper and taking a picture of it with my iPhone.

After creating this slide, I realized I could create more slides to storyboard how a user might interact with the interface. Google docs allows me to share it and allow other developers and myself to create revisions. Not too bad.  Probably not the best tool that could exist for this use. But it wasn't too hard, it was at hand, and most of us already use it.

Check out the latest usage stats for blogs@psu.

At some point this week blogs@psu surpassed 4000 blogs and 20,000 entries. Nearing the 4000 user mark too.

I pieced together a template from various sources to display comments in a threaded fashion. With the upgrade to MT 4.2, blogs@psu has supported replying to a specific comment, but the comment listing was still purely chronological. My blog now displays comments in a threaded fashion.

One drawback of a threaded view I can see is that it is not immediately clear what the most recent comments are, since they can appear anywhere in the stream. If you want to re-visit a blog entry on the web to see if any more comments have been added, it could be difficult if there are many comments.

What do you think?

P.S. To get this on your blog, replace your "comments" template with the contents of this file:
threaded_comments_display_mtml.txt

Just testing out posting a photo to my blog via Flickr from my iPhone.
This would be my preferred way of posting since I use Flickr to manage
my photos. I'll have to try out some of the iPhone apps that look like
they'll actually upload the photo to your blog to see how well they
work.

I have found that a low barrier way to add new features to people's blogs here at blogs@psu is to use tags.

For example, today I was confronted with a screencast explaining how to change the banner image in the professional template set, more or less demonstrating these instructions. The complexity of what we were asking users to do inspired me to whip up a little code for the styles.css template that will automatically add the style for the banner image using the URL for the newest asset tagged @banner. You can look forward to this template making its way into the blogs@psu professional website template default soon. It's just a couple lines of template code. Here it is:

<mt:Assets lastn="1" type="image" tag="@banner">
#homepage-image { background-image: url(<$mt:AssetURL$>) !important; }
</mt:Assets>

Took me about 1 minute to get working and about 5 minutes to test.

If I didn't want to use tags, I could have written some perl code to make a plugin that would add a checkbox to the asset  edit screen or perhaps some code to implement a banner chooser interface. Seems like overkill. The great thing is that any user of blogs@psu can edit their templates to take advantage of tags like this, to add new features to their blogs, but they can't (for obvious reasons) write and run their own plugins to run as part of blogs@psu.

The "@" tags are called private tags because they are meant for internal use like this. They don't show up in your tag cloud or on your published pages or entries. The professional template set makes use of these private tags to get content into the static homepage , about, and contact page. It also controls what appear in the top nav bar using the @topnav tag.

Perhaps students could use an @portfolio tag to select which artifacts from their blog-repository they wish to include in their blog-portfolio.

My question to you is this: Is this too hard for most students to grok? Do we need to implement custom fields and checkboxes to do the kind of things I mention in this post. If students are be exposed to blogs as part of their education, is this tagging part of it? Is it really that difficult? I admit at first glance it may seem kinda kludgy, but I am starting to see a certain elegance to it. What do you think?