Here is the abstract and the slides for a talk I'm giving today at the Rocky Mountain ASEE Conference. The 2008 ASEE paper I refer to in the presentation was discussed in an earlier post: Developing a Concept Inventory. I hope to have a new animated circuit simulation ready for public release this summer. It will be free and open source. I'm developing it in scala.
Like I mentioned in an earlier super feeds post, I finally got around to seeing the value of friendfeed - it ties together all these different social services such as delicious.com, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc. into one combined feed. I even tried out some services friendfeed supports I had not heard of before, too, such as goodreads for sharing what you are reading. Friendfeed also has tools to selectively forward your friendfeed activity to twitter, and instant message you when new stuff appears on your 'friends' friendfeeds.
Below are some of the social service sites I've been using:
Some things missing from the list that haven't been very useful to me professionally - wikis (wikiversity/wikipedia/citizen..), ning (I'm on quite a few nings but haven't really gotten into any of them), facebook (walled garden more for sharing informal stuff with friends), news sites like digg/reddit/newsvine. I started http://ed-tech.newsvine.com/ but it never took off.
How do I tie it all together to follow all this and everyone else? I've got it down to just 2 tools - google reader to follow blogs, and pidgin, a free open source instant messaging client to follow twitter, identi.ca, friendfeed and google talk, and IRC (I usually keep some irc channels open when I'm developing like #drupal-support, #scala, #ubuntu etc.).
What are my thoughts on twitter? I have some misgivings signing back up for it, but really when I thought about it, they were the same issues I've had with virtually all social networking tools I've used - I tend to personally get out of it less than I put into it. But really that's true of blogging and bookmarking and writing and so forth too, and it doesn't bother me. I like contributing even if it's mainly anonymous readers or google searchers who might actually use it (like those trying to figure out how to use R in Ubuntu or set up a server or learn about discovery learning). I've written before about Google as your blog audience. And as I've said once before, if it's not on Google, it doesn't exist :) Right now though, most of twitter is not on Google, and even with 100 followers already links don't really generate traffic, but you can search twitter itself to see what the current buzz is for various topics. I used tweetgrid for example to create a control panel searching multiple topics & tools that interest me. And one other thing nice about twitter that is also nice about blog reading - you can turn it off, ignore things for days if you want, or unsubscribe from people/blogs who are clogging your reader or twitter feed, it doesn't matter. So you don't really get overloaded like with email, which constantly piles up if you ignore it for even one day.
I updated my earlier instructions on setting up a secure Ubuntu server. I added notes about setting up fail2ban, which protects your server from repeated login attempts or brute force attacks.
In the course of setting up some new sites on a server, I realized there was a gap between those notes on initial setup of the server, and my other notes on configuring and getting started with drupal. So here here are some notes on configuring apache and drupal 6 with multi-site support and support for secure logins using the securepages module.
This assumes you already have an ubuntu or debian server up and running with apache2, mysql, and php installed as seen in these earlier instructions.
sudo apt-get install php5-gdEnable the apache2 mod-rewrite module (required for clean url support in drupal):
sudo a2enmod rewriteEdit the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/default, and in the "Directory /var/www/" section, change:
AllowOverride Noneto
AllowOverride allMake this change also to the /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl file when it is available. If you aren't familiar with how to edit a file on the command line, use "sudo nano (filename)" to edit.
sudo gunzip /usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/README.Debian.gz more /usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/README.DebianTo enable SSL support, run these commands:
sudo a2ensite default-ssl sudo a2enmod sslRestart apache2:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restartHere's another tutorial on this too if you want to sign your own certificate. These "self-signed" certificates will cause firefox to throw an error, and you'll have to tell firefox to make an exception. For me that's acceptable, but if it isn't for you, you'll have to purchase an ssl certificate. Otherwise, to regenerate the default ssl certificate: (if apache2 gives you an error when you restart it or if your hostname changed)
sudo -s make-ssl-cert generate-default-snakeoil --force-overwrite exit"sudo -s" switches you to the root user, and "exit" switches you back to your own user.
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin(configure for apache-ssl if given a choice)
Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.confRestart apache2: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart and visit the ssl version of your site to see phpmyadmin: https://yoursite/phpmyadmin
Remember you need to tell firefox to make an exception for your self-signed certificate. You'll be able to login with username "root" and the mysql root password as soon as you specify it in the next step:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure mysql-server-5.0Enter the password you want to use (twice), and make that password a good one. Write it down or save it somewhere safe.
Click on the link to "Privileges" and then the link to "Add a new user".
Fill out the form. You might call the user "drupalsite1" for example or "moodledb". Generate a strong password (write it down), and under "Database for user" check the radio button to "Create database with same name and grant all privileges". Don't check any global privileges.sudo chown -R root.admin /var/wwwIn the instructions below though, I use sudo. To download and install drupal:
mkdir ~/downloads cd ~/downloads wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.10.tar.gz tar xzvf drupal-6.10.tar.gz cd drupal-6.10 sudo cp -R * /var/www/ sudo cp .htaccess /var/www/ #remove old index.html file (replaced by index.php) sudo rm /var/www/index.html #create upload folder that server can write to: cd /var/www/sites/default sudo mkdir files sudo chown www-data.www-data files sudo cp default.settings.php settings.php sudo chown www-data.www-data settings.phpNow visit your site (http://yousite/) and run through the drupal installation. Enter the database name and password you created just for your default drupal site.
cd /var/www/sites sudo mkdir second.domain.edu sudo cp default/default.settings.php second.domain.edu/settings.php cd second.domain.edu sudo mkdir files sudo chown www-data.www-data files sudo chown www-data.www-data settings.phpVisit http://second.domain.edu and install drupal again. This time using a different mysql user and database name. It is possible for multiple drupal sites to share one database though, by entering a different table prefix each time (see advanced options in drupal installer).
Find the right tar.gz drush file to download. At the present, I have to download the cvs HEAD version for drupal 6:
cd /var/www/sites/all sudo mkdir modules cd modules sudo wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drush-HEAD.tar.gz sudo tar xzvf drush-HEAD.tar.gz cd drush #see the README file sudo ln -s /var/www/sites/all/modules/drush/drush.php /usr/bin/drush
Now you can run "drush help" on the command line to test it. To actually install modules, you'll want to prefix drush with "sudo " unless you ran my earlier "sudo chown -R root.admin /var/www" command.
To install a module, change to the root directory of your drupal site [/var/www or /var/www/sites/(sitename)] run "drush dl (modulename)". For example to install the pathauto module:cd /var/www sudo drush dl pathauto
If you are in /var/www when you run the command, it will put the module in the sites/all/modules/ folder. That means all your sub-sites can use that module. If you want a module just for one sub-site, create a 'modules' folder under sites/(sitename) and cd into sites/(sitename) first before running drush.
See the drush page for more commands that work. In drupal 6, that's the only command that works at the moment.securepages backup_migrate mollom poormanscron (if you can't run cron) print pathauto globalredirect path_redirect comment_notify ed_readmore fckeditor IMCE htmlcorrector webform date calendar advanced_help cck views contemplate panels? og og_mandatory_group wikitools? diff talk? freelinking interwiki? rules google_analyticsOnes I'm less certain I'll be using in drupal 6:
image feedapi autologout autotimezone import_html invisimail jstools jq ldap_integration ldap_provisioning logintoboggan nodetype node_import user_import nice_menus prepopulate private similarterms site_map site_tour smtp tagadelic video_filterSee my Getting of the Ground with Drupal post for more info.