Category Archives: Blogging

Selected Works™ & BePress

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Bepress is an internet based service from Berkeley Electronic Press. They basically allow a user to display their work. i.e. a Professor’s CV which has a list of publications, those publications are then displayed by Selected Works™ & BePress as downloadable PDFs. These works can then also be described, downloaded, their bibliographic references can be downloaded, etc. Berkeley Electronic Press archives the Documents and presents them in an understandable, accessible, usable format. They have integrated Google search. Seems like lots of Love all around.
This kind of thing would be really good for an organization like the one I work with.


This is a picture of a page. See this page live.


This is a picture of a page. See this page live.

BePress has a lot of features, it integrates with a lot of other services too. One service which looked really cool was their service for working with the editorial process used in working papers.


ProfDev Data Tracking

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My wife has been tasked to be the Professional Development Coordinator for the company at which we work. Her task has several interesting things about in the area of data tracking. One question needing to be asked is: “what are the experiences and skills of our current employees?” This suggests that a databases with cross sections of professionally related events, people and skills is needed. These data then need to be able to be viewed by various stakeholders so that the data can be read and analyzed and understood; eventually to be acted upon and incorporated into company strategies for doing business.

One of the things that is obvious from the start is that a web based collection system is need for the data. A storage solution is also called for. And finally an web based analysis tool for presenting the data in a variety of manners for final use is needed.

So in an effort to help my wife out I have been looking a OpenSource implementations of Resume databases and CV building Databases. It has been my experience that when it comes to IT solutions that people need unique implementations and have unique criteria to meet but do not have unique problems. I think I even found a service that provides some professional development tracking called Onefile. But for our company it makes sense to approach this problem with an eye to integrate it with other corporate IT infrastructure, rather than silo it as an outsourced the system.

Summaries of Goals

This effort to take a strategic look a professional development of employees is part of an effort to look holistically at the corporation’s pool of human talent. The motivation is to be able to strategically deploy our skills in a manner where there is the largest return on investment. It is also important for us to be able to present our talented people and the products of their efforts to the world; both for credibility and for marketing.

Difficulties in the business world

There are quite a few legal challenges for companies (working in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere) retaining these kinds of records, let alone sharing them with business partners.

Social networks are notorious for being able (if they are successful networks) pull information from users easily.

The data to be tracked

Facebook CV/Resume Creator apps

Easy CV Creator EasyCV Curriculum Vitae

Example YouTube video: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egEadu5EUjI
CV Creative

Not popular…

My CV
Works with the http://moncv.com/ service.

Resume Factory

My Resume

1.5 of 5

Resume Central

Captain ResumeCaptain Resume
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?ref=sgm&id=23892177864
3.5 of 5

LinkedIn:
Share it on facebook
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=6394109615&ref=appd

Opensource stuff:
http://www.kite-eu.org/kite/en/download/
http://digitaldisruptions.org/rhizome/

http://www.margaperez.com/2009/08/resurfacing-the-kite-europass-cv-plug-in-for-wordpress/
http://digitaldisruptions.org/rhizome/2009/10/12/updating-the-application-profile-of-the-europass-cv-based-on-hr-xml-candidate-specifications-3-0/

http://digitaldisruptions.org/rhizome/2009/08/06/resurfacing-the-kite-europass-cv-plug-in-for-wordpress/comment-page-1/#comment-158
HR-XML:
http://www.sarmsoft.com/product/resumebuilder/

Plone:
http://plone.org/products/faculty-cv

Java:
http://gestcv.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gestcv/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lusid/

hResume:
Could not find a creator which worked

Conference Management
http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ocs
http://www.conftool.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wcmt/
Conman
http://github.com/herlo/ConMan
http://blog.utos.org/2008/01/31/utosf-hacknight-a-grand-success/
http://conman.utosc.com/pages/home/
http://code.google.com/p/utos-conman/
registration
http://code.google.com/p/scalereg/

Coraga
http://corga.sourceforge.net/

Drupal conference registration
http://drupalmodules.com/module/conference

Social Network
http://www.boonex.com/dolphin/
http://www.patrick-opitz.com/projects/facelift/about/
http://www.xoops.org/ This is an open source social network which looks interesting but I am not sure how much momentum is behind it.

4.5 out of 5
This social network looks really cool and targets the e-portfolio
http://mahara.org/

Services:
http://en.easy-cv.com/

People Exist in Space and Time

The situation though is that everything that goes into a resume or a CV after biographical information is an event in which the person was involved, a skill they have or a resource they have helped to create. So if we could automatically pull information from the events and resources and then organize them according to Who then we would almost be there. (I am not sure how our company is tracking these kinds of information. It is most likely in a MS Word document.)

Events have several attributes one of those is time.

This is course management software: with calendars and DHTML in Video.
http://www.olat.org/website/en/html/about_features.html

NO CALENDAR….
http://www.davical.org/
http://www.bedework.org/bedework/update.do
http://trac.calendarserver.org/wiki/CalDAVTester

So How do we pull data from the container which holds our resources?
Well the container holding our resources is DSpace.
But these options work with wordpress….
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wikindx-macro-plug-in-for-wordpress/
http://wikindx.sourceforge.net/
http://refdb.sourceforge.net/features.html

http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Citeline_Developer%27s_Guide
http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Citeline_User%27s_Guide

Example resumes
http://matthewlevine.com/resume

Why do we need a Resume now that I have a Job?
http://optional.is/required/2010/02/01/have-gun-will-travel/

Making a recipe blog

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My wife, Becky likes to cook. I like her to cook. She recently started to blog. So I talked her through the MySQL database set up and the installation of her own copy of WordPress on our Dreamhost account. (I must admit that it was a happy day.) One of the things she is doing is writing about what she cooks, with pictures of how it turns out.
“Cool”, says I. But how does one keep track of all the recipes? So I asked her why she was blogging. And she said that one of the reasons was that if she had a fixin’ to use a certain ingredient she would have a place to search to see if she had cooked with that ingredient before and how it turned out.

So I am on the hunt for a recipe plugin or recipe management CMS for her.

So far I have come across OpenEats.
And for Using WordPress itself there is hRecipe.

Javascript Charts…

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These are some really cool looking Javascript Charts from Highcharts.

Highcharts Javascript charts

Another opinion on Highcharts.

They run off of JQuery, which is already used by WordPress and K2. It would be nice if someone could wrap this into a WordPress Plugin with a cool way to add / manage data from the WP admin panel. Let me see if someone did….

For WordPress there is WP-Table by alex.rabe. This project was handed over to another developer, Tobias Bäthge and retitled WP-Table Reloaded.
Tobias says

[one] can have both wp-Table and WP-Table Reloaded installed in your WordPress! They will not interfere (as they are not using anything together). They are completely independent from each other. If WP-Table Reloaded finds the wp-Table database tables, it can import the found tables into it’s own format, so that you can completely upgrade from wp-Table to WP-Table Reloaded.

There are some updated instructions for version 1.5, which didin’t seem to make to the WP plugin repository.

There is another jQuery plugin, called Visualize, that takes data from an HTML table and displays it as a chart. Cool. I wonder which, Visualize or Highcharts is better and why?

After we graph these data, is it possible to also make the data drive a SIMILE chart/timeline?

It looks like one can add data sets to be graphed with the WP-SIMILE plugin. Why not pull these directly from the current display table? or make SIMILE / TIMEPLOT graph time depth change. i.e. if the data displayed in the HTML table is propagated from a MySQL table then why not have several entries in the MySQL database with a time code to change? in a way tracking momentum. That is over time how much have these data changed? i.e. Display the same data set from 1945, from 1950, and 1955.

Why should we still use HTML tables instead of CSS?

ASIDE: My next question is: How do I keep track of all the jQuery plugins I use?
Is there an efficient way to do that?

FYI: There are several other Charting options currently available for WordPress. Most of these involve managing your data somewhere else and then using an API to bring that data to your WP install. The truth of the matter is that it is most likely that you are going to manage your data somewhere else anyway. However, I do not use Google docs to manage my data so I can not pull data from that source directly into my my WP install.
However, there is a plugin Easy Chart Builder. This plugin does not have “nice” admin section for creating the charts but does create an image from a data set inserted with a short code.

PS
Some solutions when using google apps to present data, but if Data Ownership is an issue. Then why use google apps?
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/html-tables-and-the-data-web/
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive/014014.html
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/data-scraping-wikipedia-with-google-spreadsheets/

Multi-WordPress Blog Management

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I run several WordPress Blogs.

I would like to:

  • Write content for different blogs from the same admin section.
  • Allow users to on various blogs access to my other blogs with a single sign on.

http://techblog.touchbasic.com/html/single-unified-login-for-multiple-wordpress-2-8-installs-in-subdirectories-using-cookies/

Will this plugin help?

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/root-cookie/

How about this one?

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/kish-multi/

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164758

Update: 2012… WP 3.5. It seems that for what I am doing that a WP Multi-site is the way to go.

Radiant a CMS developed in Ruby

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I was browsing – cause that is what I do. – And I came across this very flexible, yet young CMS. :: http://radiantcms.org/

One of the cool things that I liked off the bat:

  • Update the data on display from an XML feed.

I immediately thought of a site I consulted for : scriptureearth.org that this could be a solution for that. (The site is in production but I am not sure how easy it is to update the data it displays. The connivence of a XML feed is that the site would be able to be updated from an app based in the workflow of the publisher.)

CSS Alert Messages

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I found this great css messages code here (read about it for a fuller explanation):

/* CSS messages */

.alert { background: #fff6bf url('exclamation.png') 15px 50% no-repeat; padding: 5px 20px 5px 45px; border-top: 2px solid #ffd324; border-bottom: 2px solid #ffd324; }
.info { background: #f8fafc url('information.png') 15px 50% no-repeat; padding: 5px 20px 5px 45px; border-top: 2px solid #b5d4fe; border-bottom: 2px solid #b5d4fe; }
.download { background: #cfc url('download.png') 15px 50% no-repeat; padding: 5px 20px 5px 45px; border-top: 2px solid #3C6; border-bottom: 2px solid #3C6; }
.german { background: transparent url('de.png') 15px 50% no-repeat; padding: 5px 20px 5px 45px; }
.english { background: transparent url('gb.png') 15px 50% no-repeat; padding: 5px 20px 5px 45px; }

Or more Explicitly here:

http://www.bioneural.net/wp-content/themes/k2bn/styles/bioneural/bioneural.css

OpenSource MicroBlogging

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I have been given a book to read about Social Media and one called Twitter Power. I am beginning to think that Twitter is not something I can ignore any more.
I am not yet convinced that I need an account but I think I should be informed about how it works and how the system of communication can be used.

I was wondering today what our office communication might look like if we were to use a twitter like tool to announce office news or meetings and tasks completed. So I took a look at OpenSource options. Because in an office environment we already have the community created but we don’t want the world to follow our office “tweets”. Here is what I found:

Automattic Came up with a solution for their office in 2008 and released it as a theme for wordpress. They call it P2. http://p2theme.com/

The only other thing I could find in the OpenSource community was http://status.net/. I have not looked into either of theses to see how they work or compare with twitter.

Making your WordPress site iPhone friendly

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What are the crucial questions to ask when I think: “I want to make my site mobile friendly.”

How do I do it?

What tools do I use?

Useful links:
http://speckyboy.com/2008/06/29/7-amazing-plugins-to-view-your-wordpress-blog-on-any-mobile-device-iphone-pda/
http://freepressblog.org/2007/09/25/wordpress-mobile-admin-ui-for-iphone/

WordPress Mobile Pack

http://mobiforge.com/running/story/the-dotmobi-wordpress-mobile-pack
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-pack/

WordPress Mobile Edition
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-edition/

A mobile/phone/PDA friendly interface for your blog with progressive enhancement for advanced mobile browsers. You can see it in action by visiting this site in a mobile browser.

I have tried this on this thejourneyler.org. The plugin only works with Carrington Mobile theme 1.0.2. However, the Carrington mobile theme is currently at version 1.1, which is not compatible with this plugin (as far as I can tell). CMT 1.0.2 is not compatible with PostTabs, a plugin I use extensively to display multiple layers of content on a single page.

A nice feature of this plugin is that the user of an iPod Touch can “opt out” of the CMT. And once they have opted out they can “opt in” again with a link on the bottom of the post or page.

WordPress Mobile Admin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-admin/

It uses Wapple’s advanced web services to produce perfect markup whilst at the same time maintaining the familiar look and feel of WordPress. You can write and edit posts, moderate and reply to comments as well as updating and managing pages.

I have also tried this. It is not compatible with Block-Spam-By-Math. That is not in and of itself a deal breaker. But to use this I would have to find a bot blocking plugin that does work with WordPress Mobile Admin. This plugin is great for managing the commenting process or adding new text content. There is a lack of support for controlling WP settings through the mobile interface.

iPhone Control Panel
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/iphone-control-panel/
The iPhone Control Panel Plugin allows you to easily configure how iPhones and iPod touches “see” your site. It gives you the ability to add custom css, a home screen bookmark icon, change the viewport, or even redirect iPhones and iPod touches to a different url.

WordPress PDA & iPhone
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pda/

This plugin helps the users to view your blog in a pda and iPhone browser. iPhone is still in beta testing state. Soon more updates will follow.

http://www.bravenewcode.com/wptouch/

iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme
http://iwphone.contentrobot.com/

Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wapple-architect/

Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to mobilize your blog in minutes.
Every single mobile device is detected and all aspects of your blog are tailored to the visiting handset. Sites aren’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator but instead use the features and functionality that advanced phones offer.
Devices are detected by using Wapple’s advanced web services instead of relying on inferior 3rd party tools. If you view your blog with a brand new, never before seen handset, it’ll still work perfectly!
Any theme you’ve installed and have styled for web will be carried across to mobile giving you a consistent look and feel for each and every one of your visitors.

iPhone / Mobile Admin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mobileadmin/screenshots/

Mobile Admin adapts the WordPress admin UI to be more friendly to mobile devices, specifically phones.
The iPhone / iPod Touch browser was the first target, but most other mobile browsers are supported at a basic level, and plugins can be used to customize for specific browsers where desired.
A plugin for the iPhone/iPod Touch devices is included, as well as a more basic plugin for Windows Mobile browsers. (Consider the latter a “beta”, but it’s mostly intended to be another sample for how to write a plugin.)