Category: technology

WordPress tags etc

For a while I have been adding tags to my posts. Tags are good. People who tag things are good. I am Web 2.0.

Only thing is they seemed to be going in to the ether, that is to say, users (that is you) had no way to see them or browse them. I was suprised that there aren’t any real options in the WordPress admin website, and considering they were only introduced in version 2.3 I was suprised I didn’t find more information on the web as to how to make use of them. I had read that WP supports things like tag clounds out of the box, but couldn’t see how to make one for my blog.

I suspected part of the problem was that existing themes hadn’t been updated to make use of them (but it seemed the ‘Default’ theme lacked support for them as well, at least the version on Dreamhost seem to).

Anyways, I found a few things:

  • You can create special pages like Archives and Sitemap. I actually found this as a theme I was playing with (Copyblogger) had a link at the top of the page called Archives but it didn’t work. This page on Andy Sylvester’s blog explains how to fix this. You basically create a page (not a post) called ‘archives’ or ‘sitemap’ etc, and under ‘Page Template’ (near bottom of the composistion page) you can select templates such as ‘archives’ or ‘sitepmap’, these seem to be dependent on your theme. Finally save it blank. He mentions to set the ‘slug’, but I can’t couldn’t see an obvious way to do this with the new composistion interface in WP [update: while writing this very post i have just noticed you just have to click on the ‘Permalink’ underneath the Title].
  • I also found this page on Rich Gilchrest website (at the time of writing it wasn’t working and had to use the Google cache copy), which explains how to add code to existing templates. So I’ve added some code to index.php and archives.php for this theme (Greening) – which doesn’t have a ‘sitemap’ template, which others seem to.

This is the code I added to archives.php using the theme editor within the admin interface for WP. Note I added a line-height as the larger tags seemed to overlap tags on the lines above, though even with this, there seems to be problems clicking small tags that are directly above larger tags.

<h2>Tags</h2>
<div style="line-height:210%;">
<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=36&'); ?>
</div>

And the code I added to index.php

<?php the_tags("Tags: "); ?><br />

So now I have a tag cloud and archives page here. And you should be able to see (and click on… you know you want to) tags at the bottom of this post.

Of course, as is the law, on finsishing this I find two pages on the wordpress site that for reasons unknown I was incapable of finding before.

Posted on by chriskeene 1

JISC Library Management System Review

The JISC and SCONUL have just released a Review (Horizon Scan) of Library Management Systems (LMS or ILS). Intersting stuff. A lot of stuff to be expected, and some interesting findings:

  • Dire need to embrace web 2.0 and to get OPACs out of the 90s
  • The need to intergrate with campus systems such as Financial and registry systems.
  • Open Source is used within current systems, and as systems in their own right, the latter have no real penetration in the UK market and are unlikely to do so in the short term (lack of advantages), and are not currently more ‘open’ than other systems.
  • Most major systems are much of a muchness (they put it far more elegantly, though after glancing through 100 odd pages I’m not much inclined to find each quote), little reason to change system at the moment. Especially as…
  • It is a good time for the role and definition of a LMS to be looked at.
  • We are already moving away from the ‘one big system approach’ i.e. Aquabrowser, ERMs and Metasearch are all separate products. Almost certainly going to move in this direction, and this is a good thing. This requires standards and cooperation for different systems to talk to each other.
  • UK market is small compared to global market, though not that different to the norm, except for BL ILL server and our concept of Short Loans.
  • Libraries have not made good use of looking at how users work and interact with their systems.
  • There is a need and movement to liberate data (silios and all that)
  • LMS may become a back of house system (though this should not be seen as a bad thing)
  • Recommends that libraries increase the value of their investment by implementing additional services around the LMS. Which is fine if these new services are using standard protocols to interact with the LMS, if their are using proprietary api’s or talk direct to the database then it is another thing to lock the library in to one provider (or at least, another reason why changing LMS will have a large impact).
  • Procurement process is overall expensive, especially when LMSs are more or less the same-ish.
  • Encourages libraries to review their contracts (ie not changing system, just getting more – or better value – out of the current system with better contract).

One thing that interested me were the Vendor comments (and something the report reccommends to libraries) on the lack of consortia in the UK, and noted that other countries make good use of this (ie this is best practice). I can certainly see scope for this, especially as (like the report notes) the software has already been designed to handle consortiams.But what would the consortiams be? geographic based (London? South East? M25 group? Scotland) or perhaps using other groupings (Russel group, 94 group, CURL). Or perhaps smaller groupings based on counties or similar institutions.

I’ll quote two bullet points in their reccommendations:

  • The focus on breaking down barriers to resources is endorsed, involving single sign on, unifying workflows and liberating metadata for re-use.
  • SOA-based interoperability across institutional systems is emphasised as the foundation for future services and possibly the de-coupling of LMS components

The report also says “Libraries currently remain unconvinced about the return on their investment in electronic resource management systems.” Not really, we’re just waiting for a good one to come to market :)

I like a comment from one of the reference group “Since around 2000 there has been a growth in the perception of the library collection not as something physical that you hold, but as something you organise access to.” Nothing new, but nicely put.

Report can be found here [pdf], took ages to find where it is on the JISC website (JISC website? confusing? surely not!), but it is here (and the key item – the report – is at the very very bottom of the page (why?). I originally found the report via Talis’ Panlibus blog.

Posted on by chriskeene 3

or08: live blogging experiment

Today – as you probably have seen – I posted some badly written notes that meant nothing to no one, and interested even fewer. This was my experiment in live blogging. I’ve seen others do it quite a bit recently and always thought it worked well, so wanted to give it a try.

Some thoughts:

  • Using a different tense is a little weird. Normally we write in the past tense if reviewing an event, when blogging as it happens I found myself switching between current and past tense (the latter out of habit). This wasn’t helped with no internet access before coffee, so i was writing in to a text editor (not that you wanted to know, called Smultron) something I planned to paste in to a blog post in the future, which when posted will be talking about the past, but i wanted it to read as if it was live!
  • I looked up at one point while switching between wordpress and twitter and saw two laptop screens of people in front of me, one had twitter across the screen, the other had the wordpress composition window. Am I boring or with the in-crowd?!
  • Perhaps the biggest point was my difficulty in note taking. I wanted to write stuff that other people not there would find useful. However, my notes were largely rather basic, not meaty enough to say much, someone reading would get a general idea what the talk was about. It would give someone a feel of the outline of a talk, but not what the key points were, something which I think is a crucial difference.
  • As well as taking notes, I had various tabs open, including the excellent crowdvine conference site, twitter, bloglines, google blog search (searching to see what turned up for ‘or08’… oh look! me! god I’m so vain). At times the note taking, twittering (and learning about tags on twitter) and checking out crowdvine, I would occasionally look up and have no idea what the presenter is talking about (I’m a man, I have evolved to be an expert single tasker). Must try and ensure I’m not being distracted from the actual reason I’m there.
  • My notes were rough. Not helped by the fact that the lecture hall was very full (and it wasn’t one of those poncy MBA lecture theaters with big wide seats), so I was being careful of my elbows – which limits typing, and for me, using the shift key. Does the embarrassment of badly typed, ill thought, ungrammatical notes get trumped by their potential interest to others and timeliness?
  • Timeliness is an important point, I could have waited until the end of the day but wanted to get them out straight away.
  • After morning coffee I had the internet. I sat down with next to two people I had met before, while there were quite a few with their laptops open, they were not, and I felt a little self conscious. They were trying to listen to the talk, and here was this guy next to them mucking around on his laptop the whole time. Actually I don’t think they were bothered.
  • While talking about being self-conscious, does posting things as quickly as possible look like attention seeking and ego massaging? Never thought that about anyone else doing it so hopefully the answer is no (but then I love this sort of thing, so I wont).

So will I do it again. Yes, and I like having the web to hand while at these things. I think I need to improve my note taking, and perhaps take more time writing up points (and my thoughts) on the things of interest rather than writing lots of little snippets. I basically need to take notes anyway (whether notepad and pen, MS Word or a blog), and it does make it stick in my head better than just sitting there, so I may as well make my notes open to others. The timeliness (thats time – li – ness, not Time Lines!) is perhaps harder to argue, but I like the idea that things are hitting the web the moment they happen, so think I will continue it.

I remember last year a couple of years a go when the www 2006 conference was taking place (can’t believe it was two years a go), I was sitting at my desk watching flickr, blogs, and just about everything else being updated – a lot – in real time. The ability for me to see photos, watch videos and see notes of things that happened a couple of minutes a go amazing and really help capture the feel for the whole event.

Other bits

Battery was running low (why didn’t campus designers in the 60s think to add plug points in lecture theaters for laptops) so had to revert to pen/paper for session 3. All good talks, but the SWORD talk by Julie Allinson was excellent.

Didn’t stay for the poster session minute madness but of the few posters I did have chance to see, the one for feedforward really got my eye and just looks excellent.

Crowdvine (link to or08 on crowdvine)

This is an excellent tool, and I recommend it to anyone setting up a conference. Though I think web savvy crowds will get more out of it (e.g. integration with twitter and web feeds). It helped to put names to faces, but it also helped to get a feel for who are some of the more prominent people. For example: If Les Carr talks about Gnu Eprints, I know to listen as he manages the thing, and if Bill Hubbard talks about IRs I know to listen to what he says because he Manages Sherpa in the UK. However I couldn’t tell you the same about the Dspace or US equivalents. I still can’t tell you their names (I don’t do names) but I certainly recognised faces of those who seemed to be very active in their area. I know this sounds a little elitist or hierarchical, but it really isn’t meant to be.

Handy hint: if you want your profile page to be at the top of the conference homepage, just make superficial changes to it every few hours!

As someone mention on twitter, this, and every social networking site, needs much more than just ‘friend’. Perhaps: ‘i have seen a few emails from them on mailing lists and I may have even replied to one’, ‘I kinda stood in the same group as them during a coffee break at a conference once’ and ‘I read their blog and see them mentioned here and there so we are a little like friends’. I felt a little unsure when clicking on a few people as friend, but then they all added me back (except Christophe Gutteridge, bastard). Of course this is no different to facebook, the amount of people who have requested me as a friend who I swear I have never spoken to, even if they new a girl who lived in the corridor above me at the first year of University (that’s a real one).

(PS I used too many brackets and exclamation marks in this blog post!)

Posted on by chriskeene 3

Google Books API

Google released an API for their Book Search at the end of last week. You can implement this in two ways: static (just linking to a URL with a ISBN inserted) or dynamic, which basically means using javascript, which will check to see if Google have the book available as the page loads and can show a link accordingly.

The (very rough and basic) ‘catalogue’ I recently created already had a link to Google Books for each item. This was just a very simple URL with an ISBN stuck on the end, e.g. http://books.google.com/books?as_isbn=0596003722

Tonight I have made the first steps in adding links to items using the Google Books API using both the static (simple) and dynamic methods.

You can see an example here http://www.nostuff.org/tdn/6b/item.php?item=0596003722.

You can also do a search via http://www.nostuff.org/tdn/6b/

The layout is currently very rough, and the dynamic search is broken in that it will only show a result for the first ISBN for a given item (I know why but don’t have time to fix now).

I have to confess I know very little javascript. The examples from Google only use a few lines of code but not really understanding what it did, did not help. For example, for the dyanmic display, I found it did not work at all, until I added a second paragraph tag for every ISBN. I can’t see what in the js makes this so :(

Posted on by chriskeene

nostuff library catalogue using the Talis Platform

You may have already seen that a while a go I had a little play with the Talis Platform, and specifically a ‘store’ on the platform called ukbib which holds bibliographic records. I’ve written some pages on learning about the various parts to the platform. I had seen on the Talis Developer Network (TDN) various web services, but they all blurred in to one, the pages linked to above first work out the simple ones (e.g. linking to catalogues, holdings etc), this helped clear up the different bits that are available.

The pages then move on to playing with the ukbib ‘store’ which returns XML, you can then use XSLT to turn this in to (x)html.

So, after playing with XML, XSLT, and improving my CSS along the way, I can show the very first ‘work in progress’:

demostration of the library catalogue search.

[update: see here for an updated version]

All very early days, layout is quite basic and a number of things don’t work.

Things that don’t work (or sometimes don’t work):

  • The options on the right are based on the first ISBN found. Some recordshave several ISBNs andthe first one may be a ‘odd’ one, therefore searching Amazon, Wikipedia, libraryThing based on the unusal ISBN will probably produce either no result or the wrong item.
  • “See Books by” Author search on the bottom right hand side doesn’t work. The formating of the author’s name is probably not helping, and because this is being done in XSLT I can’t call [the php function] urlencode to turn the author names in to nice strings for the URL.
  • Some of the Subject searches don’t work or return odd results. This will hopefully be simply to fix.
  • holdings from libraries are not there yet.

Things you can do:

  • in the google-style search box you can prefix any field name to the front of a search term, e.g. Title:”programming perl”

  • title:programming title:perl author:wall

  • subject:”DDC: 005.72″

  • You can basically use any field name, I didn’t write this, it is part of the way the platform works, see here for more.

  • link to the same item (if we have the right isbn, see above) on a number of other web sites, including wikipedia, Amazon, LibraryThing etc (let’s face it, this isn’t rocket science).

This is very much a work in progress, will hopefully have another update soon.

Now I need to find out why the above search uses “author:wall” when the underlying xml uses ‘creator’ not ‘author’. hmmm.

Posted on by chriskeene

Rss and PHP

I was recently asked to set up a blog for a group at work. They wanted the latest headings from the blog to appear as a small list on a intranet page. I used MagpieRss to do this. By using the example in its readme file I had it all done with 10 minutes :)

Posted on by chriskeene

Welcome back

In August I signed up with Dreamhost.

Until now I have used Freedom2surf’s web hosting service. I originally signed up with them as they seemed a good company (and still do, though now owned by pipex) and were cheap, £25 a year. When I first started using them they transferred my domain to them (it was all a bit new to me so I just presumed this was a required step) and their domain name costs were not cheap (£10). A few years later I wanted email as well (another £25), and the cost started going up. The service was stable, but I was started to need more. They offered just one database, not much when you are playing around with different software, such as Joomla, running WordPress and trying to experiment with your own silly web apps which require a DB, plus the quote for the database was tiny (10mb). Plus their web stats were crappy, and the log files were fiddly (kept for a few days on a secure website, no ftp and wget didn’t seem able to get them which made automating difficult, plus each file would download with the same filename by default).

During the summer I ended up at the GoDaddy website. I had heard bad things about them, but they did seem to offer an awful lot for a very cheap price. But I wouldn’t get that warm cosy feeling having my website hosted by them, so I waited. Dreamhost were recommended but not the cheapest. However after seeing just how much you do get (shell account, cron, etc), and that it would still be cheaper that my current setup, I went for it.

So far impressed, a lot of nice things and a lot of stuff (databases, email addresses, easy to get logs, easy to upgrade WordPress, etc). There does seem to be an awful lot of login requests when using their backend, each service and area seems to have it’s own username and password system, but this isn’t a huge problem. Plus I seemed to join them at a bad time, and there has been some downtime of late.

nostuff.org has been down for the last couple of weeks, and this is just down to me. I tried to transfer the actually domain across, though the move was rejected (I may not have set the new DNS servers up right before putting in the transfer request). I then basically did nothing for a few weeks. I finally got around to it yesterday, the transfer this time went fine and now everything seems good again.

So, hopefully this is still on some of your RSS feeds and you haven’t all deserted me! Welcome back.

Posted on by chriskeene

Talis Platform

A few days a go I was bored. I had read loads about the ‘Talis Platform’ a open standards ‘you can talk to it with an API’ type thing that holds data, and shares it with you (or more to the point, shares it with your application).

Could a non-programmer like me make use of this? Hello No! but I did wonder if a non-programmer like me could cut ‘n’ paste their examples and play for myself.

Read my experience of it (though it is a little like watching the slow boy in the corner trying to read Roger Red Hat)

As an aside, I wrote this article using WordPress, but as ‘pages’ not blog entries – WordPress has basic Content Management features like creating standard pages. (Richard: that’s why it didn’t show up on RSS!).

Posted on by chriskeene

laptop

In 2002 I bought a rather shiny sony laptop. FX705 I think, can’t remember. Sony had a wide range of laptops at the time. this was the budget range. It was/is heavy, looks less sexy than the average sony laptop, but had a good spec for the price.

As a geeky tech type person I have rather surprisingly never re-installed it. I think I was resisting partly for sub-conscious reasons: at University we spent our entire time installing, re-configuring and generally tweaking (i.e. breaking, breaking and more breaking) our computers, I wanted to prove to myself that I had moved on, grown up. Now it was a tool, for listening, communicating, reading (there are some pages on wikipedia I still haven’t read) etc. Spending hours at a computer simply to break its registry and reinstall the OS again was unproductive. And I am a productive person. I know, I keep telling myself so it must be true. well okay, actually, I just read BBC news and slashdot. But the thought was there.

Anyways. After over 5 years of use it had gradually crawled to just-about-quicker-than-stationary. I think people should do research in to this, it fascinates me, how can a system, which didn’t have that many applications installed, had minimal stuff running at start up, etc, end up at the point that running anything took 30 seconds or so. Start IE, or Firefox, or Word, or even the sodding volume control (there is nothing more annoying in Windows that the bloody time it takes to allow you to change the bloody volume) and then sit back and relax (or sit back and get stressed, I normally went for the latter).

How can a system just become like this? I had pruned and cleaned and done all the things one can think of (and the thing you are thinking of, yup tried that and all). We all take it for granted but why. I was trying to explain to someone why I was doing this, and failed to give a good explanation. I tried to explain things about registry bloat and lost of dll files – but can’t you clean them out, and do they really make it that much slower – well ummm sort of. I didn’t do a very good job of explaining which made me realise that I really had no idea why installing the same OS from scratch should make such a difference.

Sometimes I feel that all computers should just be shipped with a Knoppix CD-ROM, and the Harddisk just used for storing docs and user files. An OS is much more secure and will be consistent over time in its responsiveness if it is on a read only CD-ROM :)

So I now have a new installed computer, made possible partly due to the external USB drive I was given recently (though my laptop’s two USB ports are v1 and so it is very slow).

Software installed (for my own reference, and in case you see anything of interest):

  • Opera – the alternative, alternative web browser (why spend time using loads of Firefox plugins when Opera has it all built in).
  • Thunderbird – never seems to get the fame it deserves (and it is disappointing that it is being split apart from the Mozilla organisation, they had loads of cash (thanks to Google ads) and Thunderbird could do with some of it. There’s no real alternatives on Windows, except Eudora and OE.
  • Firefox
  • Killcopy – Get annoyed when copying loads of files and it fails halfway through because it doesn’t like a file, but you have no easy way of knowing what directories/files have been copied and which have not? killcopy sits as a option in the right click menu and makes copyinig and moving files far less painful
  • Picassa – Google’s picture viewer
  • Thumbnails Plus – another image viewer with a few more options, purchased a licence a few years a go.
  • XNview – yet another image viewer, but some good batch processing options
  • Notepad++ For years Windows was lacking a good free text editor, there was PFE, which was ok – not wonderful – and no longer updated. For a while I used Text Editor, but Notepad++ seems to work very well with no configuration required.
  • Itunes – for the Ipod!
  • BBC Iplayer – just signed up for this.
  • Quicktime, flash, realplayer, Java.
  • Foxit PDF viewer – much quicker than Adobe Acrobat reader, and doesn’t try to run at startup.
  • May yet install: 7zip, ‘command prompt from here’ powertoy, ActiveState Perl, Google Desktop (just for replacing Windows crappy search facility), Office, MeetingMaker, Putty, Filezilla, Skype

Quicktime, Realplayer, Adobe Acrobat Reader all hit two of my pet hates. These are applications which for most people are just there to help them access content on the web, yet they all try to run when Windows starts – Why do I need a PDF viewer running when it can just run when I require it. Secondly they all put icons on the desktop, and often in ‘Quick Lauch’, most people will never need to run these manually so putting an icon on the desktop is just silly. It promotes their product at the expensive of annoying the user (or for the average user, they will not know if it is ‘safe’ to delete the icon even though they know they do not use it, which in my book is reducing the user experience). Itunes, Picassa and others are also guilty but at least these are applications the user may want to run and have a slight reason why they want to run at startup.

Posted on by chriskeene 1