dkeats.com

Mowing the pitch at Soccer City Tweet
73 days ago

Worker mowing the grass at Soccer City in Johannesburg, just before the Argentina-Mexico game. When we got to a big game at a facility such as this, during the world cup, we often forget that the boys who kick the ball are not the only professionals that make it possible. There a lot of people with a lot of different skills involved it creating the 'beautiful game'.

This is true of the work that all of us do. As a DVC at a top university, I could not do my job, and achieve anything without the support of many bright, talented, dedicated people. So, instead of showing the Argentinian goal, I thought I would share a photo of this gentleman, in appreciation of all who make great things possible through their dedication behind the scenes.

---

The #Chisimba dynamic canvas: the simple version proposal Tweet
74 days ago

Following on from the refactoring I have been doing, I have made a proposal to simplify the Chisimba templates using what I call the dynamic canvas. This proposal is only partly dynamic, in that the blocks that are rendered on the template can be changed, but only by the module author. A full dynamic canvas would allow for editing the blocks displayed by any suitably authorised member of the site. This will come later. Meanwhile, the use of blocks with the dynamiccanvas module can greatly simplify Chisimba templates, with a typical template looking as below:

Basically, a template renders into the canvas, and there are two kinds of blocks, those that belong to the module, and those that belong to another module. The format is MODULE:BLOCK, or just BLOCK for blocks from the module which owns the template.

It makes use of the output buffering features of PHP, and sends the output to a parser that parses the template for the block codes.

---

Bee gathering pollen on an Aloe flower Tweet
74 days ago

A honey bee gathering characteristic orange pollen from Aloe plants at the Johannesburg Botanical Garden. This time of the year, the Aloes are in flower, and are visited by large numbers of bees, as well as sunbirds such as the Amethyst sunbird, grey louries, speckled mousebirds, black eyed bulbils, cape whiteeyes, and others. It is well worth spending some time watching the life of the Aloes if you are in the Joburg gardens.

---

Johannesburg burning (blogging to #Chisimba from Flickr) Tweet
74 days ago

This time of year, we get a lot of grass fires. This one is at Mellville Koppies, a nature reserve just north of the City. Also nearby is the Johannesburg Botanical Garden, where we often go for walks. The city is visible in the background, with the Hillbrow Tower.

---

Testing the new #Chisimba canvas on dkeats.com Tweet
99 days ago

This site is now being a guinea pig for the new Chisimba canvas system. See previous posts for more. I have not yet made a dkeats.com canvas, so I will just change from time to time to show what the canvas system can do. This is a simple blue canvas that took less than 2 minutes to make. Yea, I know, it shows!

---

A sample personal canvas for #Chisimba Tweet
101 days ago

Here is a nice example of how to distribute personal canvases. Download my simple green canvas from http://www.dkeats.com/usrfiles/users/1563080430/canvases/green.zip and then upload it to your canvases directory using file manager. Click on the uploaded file, and then unzip it on the server. Set your personal canvas to green as explained in my previous post, and you will have this canvas as your default except in places where personal canvases are disallowed, where you select an alternative canvas from the querystring, or a canvas is set programmatically.

See www.dkeats.com for more.

---

The new Chisimba canvas: phase 1 complete Tweet
101 days ago

In keeping with my previous post on the idea of a Chisimba canvas, I have committed the first skin that starts to implement the canvas proposal. It still needs quite a bit of work, but it is good enough to give the basic idea of the canvas. So far, it only implements the most trivial features.

To test it, make sure that your core is up to date, install the canvas module. Select the skin 'Chisimba canvas POC' from
the dropdown or from the system configuration parameter. Then open your site as follows:

http://localhost/pathtochisimba/index.php?canvas=yellow
http://localhost/pathtochisimba/index.php?canvas=blue
http://localhost/pathtochisimba/index.php?canvas=red
http://localhost/pathtochisimba/index.php?canvas=_default

where pathtochisimba is the path to wherever your Chisimba install is located. Notice how the width changes in the blue one, and the layout changes in the red one. Notice the use of different images in the yellow one. Blue is a fixed width canvas within the canvas skin, and it is achieved by doing:
  .Canvas

within the stylesheet.css inside the blue canvas.


These are just skins within a skin right now, until the canvas code is more fully developed. However, you can get a feeling for the basic power of the canvas approach by creating a personal canvas.

To create a personal canvas, go to file manager in your Chisimba instance, and create a directory (folder) called canvases. Then, inside that directory, create two more directories to represent two canvases that you are going to test. Let's call them purple and green. On your computer, create a file called stylesheet.css and inside it, add  the following:

html, body

Upload it to the green canvas directory that you created above. Then change it to:

html, body

and upload it to the purple directory. Then, open your site as follows:

http://localhost/pathtochisimba/index.php?canvastype=user&canvasdir=purple

and then

http://localhost/pathtochisimba/index.php?canvastype=user&canvasdir=green

See what happens? OK, that is not very permanant. To select one of them to replace the default skin, select 'User' from the menu, and then 'User Configuration'.  Add a parameter called 'canvas' and enter its value as 'green' (or purple) and save. Now, browse to any place within your site, and as long as you are using the canvas skin, your site will display with your preferred personal skin.

Of course, your personal canvas doesn't have to just contain the body modifications, you can make it a full Chisimba skin with all the bells and whistles. Store your images in subdirectories off the canvases/canvasname directory, and use normal CSS to include them in your skin.

In the canvas, you have some layers that wrap the page, and that can be styled before and after the content container. They are:
.Canvas {
}

#Canvas_Content {
}

#Canvas_BeforeContainer {
}

#Canvas_AfterContainer {
}

In addition, the footer is wrapped in a layer with the id 'Canvas_AfterContainer'. Other container elements are still under development.

---

Using PodderLive! with #Chisimba Tweet
109 days ago

This is the last of my three posts about PodderLive! PodderLive! is designed for use in the classroom, but it can also be used to quickly and easily create podcasts from your desktop and publish them to a Chisimba server for example a Chisimba blog server such as http://www.dkeats.com or an eLearning server such as https://elearn.wits.ac.za/ or http://philippines.chisimba.com.
 
Podcasting with PodderLive! consists of a very simple process:

1. Set up your server connection details
2. Record
3. Add a title and tag
4. Publish

Unlike other tools for recording podcasts, there is no separation of recording, editing and uploading. This makes it ideal for classroom podcasting because the recorded lecture is available almost immediately to students.

In the instructions below, the steps refer to the numbers in the following image.

STEP 1: Set up your server connection details

Click the left-most icon or select configure from the menu. In the window that pops up, enter the URL for the server to which your podcast will be posted, as well as your username and password for that server. Note that if your Chisimba installation is in a subdirectory (something after the URL), it must be included and there must be a trailing slash. Without the trailing slash it will not work.

STEP 2: Record

Guess which button is the record button? Yes, you got it, the red one. When you click it, you will be asked for the location and filename to save. You can save it anywhere, but remember where you put it because you will need to browse to it in order to complete the last step.

STEP 3. Add a title and tag

Click the icon with the letter "a" on it, to get a popup window to add various metadata. At least you should add a title. Click OK to save it.

STEP 4. Publish

Click the icon with the up-arrow on it to publish your podcast.

Then you are done, and the podcast will appear on your server. You can also add it to your class, but you will need to do that from the Chisimba web interface for podcasts, as the uploader does not know about courses on the Chisimba site.

---

Next step in #Chisimba podcasting: installing #PodderLive! Tweet
117 days ago

Yesterday I wrote about a netbook-based podcasting system that can post easily to a Chisimba based server. It made use of the desktop client for Chisimba that we call PodderLive! Here I give a little more information about PodderLive! and show you how to download it and get it working on an Ubuntu machine. There is a Windows version, but I don't know anything about it, so I am not going to try to include it here.

PodderLive! is a Python application so it doesn't really need any installation, but it does need python and wxpython for it to work. You can install them from the Synaptic package manager or using the simpler command line:

      apt-get install python python-wxversion

Download PodderLive! from http://www.chisimba.com/usrfiles/users/9448100319/downloads/podderlive-3.1.1.tar.gz and save it somewhere, for example in your home directory. Using the command line, this will be:

      cd ~
      wget http://www.chisimba.com/usrfiles/users/9448100319/downloads/podderlive-3.1.1.tar.gz

Using file manager, move the file into your bin directory within your home directory. If you have no bin directory, make one. Using the command line, this would be:

      mkdir bin
      cp podderlive-3.1.1.tar.gz ~/bin/

Using file manager, right click on ~/bin/podderlive-3.1.1.tar.gz and choose 'Extract here' or use the command line:

      tar -xvzf podderlive-3.1.1.tar.gz

Now you can delete podderlive-3.1.1.tar.gz unless you want to keep it.

Next download http://www.chisimba.com/usrfiles/users/9448100319/downloads/podder and save it into you bin directory. Using the command line this will be:

      cd ~/bin
      wget http://www.chisimba.com/usrfiles/users/9448100319/downloads/podder

You can start it from a terminal by typing podder at the command prompt. Alternatively, you can add it to your menu. You can grab an icon to use for it as follows:

cd ~/bin
mkdir podder-icon
cd podder-icon
wget http://www.chisimba.com/usrfiles/users/9448100319/downloads/podcast-icon.png

Go to your menu editor, and add the programme /home/$USER/bin/podder
and use /home/$USER/bin/podder-icon/podcast-icon.png as the icon.

Thats it, now you are ready to use PodderLive! I will write some more about using it in my next blog post.

---

A portable classroom podcast system with #Chisimba and #PodderLive! Tweet
118 days ago

 

---

Proposal for a #Chisimba canvas Tweet
120 days ago

Currently in Chisimba, the model-view-controller architecture has been perverted from its original design. With the idea of a Chisimba canvas, I am proposing bringing back the sorts of ideas that were in the original design of Chisimba as conceived by Sean Legassick back when it was still called KINKY (Kinky Is Not KEWL Yet).

Apologies for the bullet points. Please note that this is a first stab, not a finished design.

The ideas presented here will mean that there is one way to interact with the Chisimba interface, and that it is consistant across all modules. It will mean quite a lot of work on modules that do not currently use this approach, but because the ideas are already implemented in some modules, it can be done initially as a dirty hack for some of them. Aside from functional improvements, this will make it a lot easier to make Chisimba skins, and to make flexible skins.

I have not elaborated on the idea of dynamic templates, but those would be templates where the design can change according to circumstances such as context, individual preference, etc. Dynamic templates would be saved in XML or database format.

---

Avoid bullet points Tweet
120 days ago

I try to avoid bullet points if at all possible. Here's why:

---