11 Oct 2010
I also wrote a few months ago about major developments in my theological ‘side’. Since returning from the Edinburgh 2010 mission conference, I have written about it for The Melbourne Anglican (not online, sadly) and given three presentations in ecumenical and theological education settings. I have three more presentations lined up before the end of the year.
I am starting to think about a minor (12,000 word) thesis next year with the Edinburgh 2010 conference as a starting point, analysing the different processes and forms of communication behind large global conferences. We spent a lot of time Debating Issues, but this conference also encouraged more informal and conversational interaction, both face-to-face and online. It’s a sign that Twitter has become mainstream when a church conference adopts an official Twitter backchannel (a practice that has become common in technical conferences). I think there is some kind of theological analysis to be drawn out of this, but I’m not sure what it will look like yet.
And so, as I see the possibility of my geek self and theological self reaching some kind of convergence, I am trying to integrate my online presence again. My Posterous blog is still online; I found it easy to update quickly from multiple locations while travelling, and I don’t want to lose the existing content. I’m hoping, though, that in the future I won’t feel the need to keep theology and technology so far apart.
28 Jun 2010
I went to a mission conference in Edinburgh, followed by a bit of sightseeing in London, then a few days of meetings and workshops in Hobart for the Founders and Survivors project.
We are developing the next stage of the Founders and Survivors website, which in my view has always been in ‘beta’ or ‘preview’ stage – but that’s not the language we’ve used in the project. We have engaged Robin Petterd (Sprout Labs) to work on interface design. He also has a lot of experience and interest in educational technology and digital humanities. I have found it invaluable to work with another web developer, not just to help fill the gaps in my own skills, but to have someone else on the team who ‘gets’ digital humanities and has a creative approach to using emerging technology in education and research. I will post more about the new site and the design process when it is ready to launch.
As my first sentence might suggest, there have been some major developments in my other professional life outside of my paid work. In fact, for the first time I can seriously think of theological study and church leadership as a real (not potential) part of my professional identity. For the time being I am keeping two blogs, this one for digital humanities, Drupal and other technical topics, and another for everything else. I would like to see these different areas better integrated in my real life, but I don’t think I’m ready for that yet.
11 May 2010
The Founders and Survivors website has to cater for users with a wide range of technical skills, though the primary audience is genealogists (who I think are largely self-taught, in terms of both historical research and computer skills). The data we collect has to conform to the expectations of this audience, but I also have to be able to generate data dumps (currently in raw XML format) that meet the needs of our researchers (who also come from a broad range of technical and disciplinary backgrounds).
I am currently being driven up the wall by challenges in date input. I should write up some proper issue reports for the Date project but for now I’m just trying to explain the issues to myself.
For our mostly Australian and British users, entering a date as day, month and year is natural and intuitive. However, any of the following could be natural and intuitive:
- 11 April 2010
- 11 April, 2010
- 11 Apr 2010
- 11 Apr, 2010
- 11/04/2010
- …
It doesn’t appear to be possible, at the moment, to allow different formats – Date expects the admin to enforce one format for each field. This does not assist me in my goal of making the site easy for non-technical, non-documentation-reading users.
The help text uses the current date as an example. For a month that is spelled out rather than numeric, ‘May’ is ambiguous – is it a three-letter abbreviation or a full month?
In historical and genealogical research, we must be able to accommodate approximate dates: the month or day might be unknown, or a user might not even have an exact year, only a decade. There is a patch to Date to allow flexible granularity (leaving out the day or month), but so far this only appears to work with y-m-d format. The geeks on the project understand y-m-d, but this may not be easy for our ordinary users.
One alternative to specifying a text input format would be to use the popup widget, but this is not really helpful because: (1) no one will want to click the left arrow >150 times to get back to the 19th century, where the majority of dates belong; (2) the date is filled in in m/d/y format which is really not helpful for our audience or project.
And I don’t know PHP (or have the time to learn it) well enough to find and fix these issues myself.
30 Apr 2010
I have the Simplenews and Token modules installed. I create a newsletter issue which includes links to other pages on the same site. I use the [site-url] prefix in these links. When I save the issue and send a test message to myself, [site-url] is expanded to the correct prefix for my domain. Then when I send the issue to all 600 subscribers, [site-url] is expanded to “localhost”. How embarrassing! Where do I begin to try to track down this error?
PS Short links above are using the cool new Drupal.org URL shortener http://dgo.to/
13 Apr 2010
The solution to today’s problem was the Node Reference URL Widget. It does exactly what I want: I was able to add a link to the bottom of a convict index node to create an ‘additional information’, automatically linked to the index node.
When the ‘additional information’ node is created, the reference to the index node and the back-reference from the index node to the additional information node are both visible.
I was confused at first because I was trying to add the node reference field from the index content type. To create the link in the right direction, I had to add the node reference field to the additional information node instead. Here’s the diagram of the relationship between the two content types, managed by the awesome Node Relationships module:
Thanks, quicksketch and markus_petrux!