Will’s Similiblog

I’m trying out a navigation solution to my featuritis dilemma. As I’ve got 3 major features on my site - [1] a community blog, [2] aggregated news feeds, and [3] an aggregation of forums postings from selected forums in an associated Moodle course support platform (I’ll describe this, and the reasons for it, in a subsequent post) - each with multiple views - the comprehensive navigation for all 3 features together was growing cumbersome, with a rather lengthy side column of menu blocks.

So - I’ve created a front welcome page using a “Page” node, with a menu block linking to each of these 3 sections of the site; and added links as well to my 3 sections in the “primary” menu, which displays below the header on all page views.

The side-column menu blocks relating to the Community Blog should show up on the various views of the Community Blog “section” of the site, but should not show up on the views relating to Aggregated News or the Aggregated Forums, & v/v. To accomplish this, I’ve set up custom block visibility for these views.

On the Blocks Administration page, to manage block visibility, click on the selected block’s configure link. At Show block on specific pages:, select Show if the following PHP code returns TRUE (PHP-mode, experts only). Paste in the equivalent of:

<?php
$match = FALSE;
$types = array(’blog‘ => 1);
if (arg(0) == ‘node’ && is_numeric(arg(1))) {
$nid = arg(1);
$node = node_load(array(’nid’ => $nid));
$type = $node->type;
if (isset($types[$type])) {
$match = TRUE;
}
}
$url = request_uri();
if (strpos($url, “blog/“)) {
$match = TRUE;
}
if (strpos($url, “tagadelic/list/1“)) {
$match = TRUE;
}
return $match;
?>

The first criterion - $types = array(’blog‘ => 1); - will include this block on all single-node pages where the node is a blog entry.

The second criterion - if (strpos($url, “blog/“)) { - will include this block on all pages where the URL contains the string blog/. I’ve set up the various Views of the community blog, in their Views settings, to have the url blog/… (e.g., blog/communityblog_listview, &c.).

The third criterion - if (strpos($url, “tagadelic/list/1“)) { - will include this block on the tagadelic tag-cloud page that lists my blog-specific taxonomy (but will not include it on the tagadelic pages displaying taxonomy specific to news aggregation &c.)

This was repeated for each of the side blocks that I want to see displayed on the Community Blog related pages of my site; these will now show up when the user is navigating through pages related to the Community Blog, but will not show up if the user is in other “sections” of the site.

Side-column menu blocks for the other sections of the site are similarly configured, to display menu items specific to the News section only on the pages dealing with aggregated news, &c.

I like it - it works ;^)

Without a few tweaks, posts will be identified as authored by “xena123″ or similar usernames. To make this a truly social experience, I’ll need to have real names resolve as authors; and to add a carbon-based element to the user experience, I’ll need user pictures to accompany posts.

Online conversations can be of very high quality, and can be quite human in character - my little Rosie (the Bernese retriever / golden mountain dog puppy in so many of my postings) came to me through an online friend, as a case example. But I am convinced that there is unique character to face-to-face conversations in the hall or library or the coffee shop across the street, and I’d like to see this platform act as a nidus around which such conversations can form. For this, we need to be able to hang our conversations around names and faces.

For this, we’ll need to configure drupal’s built-in user-picture support; enable and configure the core Profile module to provide a real name field; and install, make a minor hack on, and configure the 3rd-party Authorship module to substitute users’ full names for usernames in posts.

For pictures -

In Admin > user settings, check the Picture support - Enabled radio button.
The picture image path field needs to be designated (e.g., pictures)

In Admin > Themes, click on the “configure” tab; check the Display post information checkboxes for Blog entry and Feed item

Users can upload pictures at “My account”/edit
At Admin > user settings, you can post user picture guidelines - explaining that for the purposes of this site, these need to be real, recognizable photos; and not photos of the user’s dog, “avatars” of Xena Warrior Princess, &c.
I’ve found it handy to bring a digital camera to the first week of classes, and delegate to a student the task of getting pics of their classmates; these can be distributed for users to upload, or as admin, you can spend an evening getting pics up for a more cyber-confidence-impaired user population.

At Admin > Profiles, create a single-line textfield profile_fullname in category personal information. Check the public field - shown on profile page & on member list pages radio button, and the checkboxes for visible in user registration form and user must enter a value.

The Authorship module needs a small hack; as is, it will substitute the user’s fullname for the username in teaser view and in single-node page views, but not in views with multiple full-nodes on a page. To fix this:

open authorship.module, and edit line 157, to read
if( $page || $teaser || $node) {

At Admin > Content type > Blog entry, find Enable authorship module functionality and check the enabled radio button.  In the The profile variable name used to store the real name: field, enter profile_fullname.  Do the same at Admin > Content type > Feed item.

Done.  Now posts - both Blog entries and aggregated distributed user content - will now be identified by the user’s full name, and will be accompanied by the user’s photo.

I’ve just been playing around with an elaboration of using commenting information as an algorithm for surfacing community blog posts (see #15 in this series) - and came across what looks like an elegant interface for this.

I’ve installed the Node Cloud module; cloned my Community Blog view (make sure that the Fields section is blank - this is required for Table or List view, but will interfere with a Node Cloud view; filters should be cloned from the Community Blog view); selected Node Cloud as the view type; and set for sort order #1 Comment: Last Comment Date (descending), and sort order #2 Comment: Comment Count (descending).

Blog posts (and imported distributed content) which have been most recently commented on will now float to the top of this cloud page (these will be listed by post title in the cloud); and font size will reflect the # of comments/replies made to a post. My rather visual mind wraps around this display nicely.

Check it out, in my sandbox site at http://sandbox.similibus.org (set up a user account and play around on the site).

I’ve been thinking a lot about effective strategies for surfacing material of particular interest to the learning community, in an active community blog.

For small communities - and ours, at 500+ students, is likely on the cusp re this - a river of news format, with author tagging and tag cloud display, may well suffice without the need for other surfacing methods. For larger communities, it may become essential to provide a method to surface material of particular interest to the community at large.

As I’ve noted earlier, I’m a bit reluctant - in part on the advice of some test users - to introduce social rating of peer-contributed content in this context (of a community blog for a small, closed learning community). I certainly can see some potentially positive aspects of peer ratings of contributed content - inspiration to make contributions constructive to the group’s collaborative learning, with positive reinforcement for doing so; along with the learning opportunities implicit in offering and in receiving peer review.

But I am concerned about some possibilities - that this could become a popularity contest either in fact or in perception; that ratings might have more to do with agreement with a student orthodoxy than with a post’s contribution to community learning; that poor peer ratings might serve to disenfranchise some students rather than to inspire continued effort. Although offering and receiving peer review may be a valuable learning opportunity and may contribute to maturation of both parties, these lessons likely require more interaction than can be effectively communicated thru an up/down vote.

In less personal settings - e.g. surfacing of aggregated 3rd-party news items, or in more disseminated communities such as those driving Digg - social ratings seem to be the ticket. Am wondering tho if other algorithms for surfacing of content might be better suited to a community discussion.

Gardner Campbell wrote a recent post in his blog, titled Mistakes as Portals. Got me thinking about this question specifically - is the voted-up post necessarily a more interesting learning opportunity than the voted-down post? I’m recalling a forum discussion from a class last fall; unable to find anyone to cover my class, I was forced to teach 2 weeks of a course at a distance, while teaching in Europe. I assigned readings, and set up forums on our class Moodle page for discussion, weighing in on my end from cybercafes while traveling. One student posted a comment that struck others - and me - as rather offensive. By the time I read it, given the timezone difference, there were already several reactive comments posted. I nudged gently with a reply, and watched the conversation shift to a productive learning opportunity that permitted the original poster some recovery of dignity, and incorporated some of her original thoughts into an understanding that transcended the original disagreements. My sense is, that in a Digg-like format, her initial posting would have been buried as unpopular, offensive and unaligned with student orthodoxy; she would likely have remained disenfranchised and we would have been denied a productive discussion.

So perhaps an alternative criterion on which to rate user posts, would be how much does it inspire community discussion? With this in mind, using the Drupal Views module, I set up a “most commented” page - filtering for posts which have received at least 3 comments, and listing these by descending order of # of comments received. Posts receiving active discussion will surface toward the top of this page. Promotion is based not on peer-review as such, but rather on quite objectively, how much did this post engage the community in discussion?

Here are the essential settings on the Views settings for this page, set up in “table view” format:

Fields:

I’m quite intrigued with the distributed discussion on the near-mythical ‘eduglu,’ and the work that some folks - notably D’Arcy Norman - are doing to create an ‘eduglu’ platform.

The notion here, as I understand it, is to create a platform capable of aggregating users’ distributed content from all manner of online publishing platforms, displaying this in a central location, and developing algorithms (e.g. social rating ala Digg) to surface material of particular relevance to the goals of the learner community. Threaded commenting on this aggregated material then can weave this previously widely distributed content into a community dialog.

This is truly amazing stuff! e.g., I could maintain my own blog, such as this one, in WordPress, using the WP Feeds widget to create context-sensitive feeds; and publish one or more context-sensitive feeds - e.g., the ‘dogs’-tag feed - to the ‘eduglu’ platform to be shared within that community (see my sandbox site, my ‘dogs’ feed from this blog is imported there). The user is not constrained, and does not need to be ‘brought over,’ to the community platform; does not need to duplicate posts made to a broader or selected audience. Users can publish on their platform(s)-of-choice, and have all this brought together into the learning-community platform.

The issue I face in my institution, is that very few of our students, and even fewer of our faculty, publish any distributed content. We have an older demographic, and due to the nature of our studies, likely have a less cyber-active population than many other learning institutions might have.

I see this changing tho. Progressively over the past two years, there are more & more shiny white boxes showing up in the classroom (our demographic does seem to lean strongly toward macs, much to the consternation of our microsoft-oriented IT department, and to my delight as a mac-fanatic). Students have been enthusiastic about my screencast lecturettes and podcasts, provided for class preparation & review. More of our faculty have been adopting forums in our Moodle LMS for blended discussion in classes and clinics. I can particularly see a wave of possibility here, as this increasingly cyber-capable population moves out into the world as alumni, spread out geographically and in need of accessible continuing education and peer support.

The question of algorithms for ’surfacing’ of information in a platform such as this comes up. Likely in a small institution, such as ours, the combination of a ‘river of news’ with tags (& the wonderful Tagadelic tag-cloud plugin for Drupal) and with buddies links and organic groups for niche discussions, would suffice. As noted in a previous post (#10 in this series), social rating might be problematic, with the potential for individual disenfranchisement (I would love to hear folks’ experiences with peer rating in this context!). Perhaps some creative use of social tagging (such as provided by the Drupal Community Tags module) could extend the benefits of author tagging of content, and provide some of the benefits seen with social rating of content.

On the Social Learning Platform I’m developing (sandbox version at http://sandbox.similibus.org), I’m using the Aggregation module to bring distributed content into the Community Blog. Of the feed aggregation modules available for Drupal, this is the best of the lot for this purpose - it imports the original article’s tags into the Drupal taxonomy, includes enclosures and inline graphics, and creates Drupal nodes from feed items, permitting organization and display of these using the Views module (see #9 in this series, where I set up a ‘community blog’ view which includes imported feed items as nodes in the ‘river of news’ alongside blog posts created within the social learning platform).

I wanted to include a place for users to upload/archive files (of all sorts), to serve as a simple ‘user portfolio’ section of the site. I played around a bunch with some of the file management modules for Drupal, and the site was getting more & more complicated; and I finally came around to the “keep it simple” mantra that I’m trying to use to dictate the rest of the site’s design.

Fortunately, the Views module came to my rescue again, here coupled in use with Drupal’s built-in taxonomy. I came back to the idea of providing users with a single entry type - blog posts (allowing attachments); and use Views and Taxonomy to provide ways of viewing and organizing blog-post attachments.

Below, are the Views settings for a “my public files” page:

filters:

____________________

I created an “exposed filter”, to permit the user to select their attached files by tag:

______________

and created a page layout in table form:

_______________________

This view collects all files that the user has submitted as attachments to blog posts, into a table on a single page; renders these sortable by name, upload date, tag; and searchable by tag.

The Views module will permit many different ways of viewing the collected files - e.g., views could be created for “my published files,” “my unpublished/private files,” “all users’ files,” “my buddies’ files,” &c.; and could include exposed filters to further parse display.

I’m quite happy with how all this worked out - it feels like a very organic solution from the users’ end. Rather than creating a dedicated file upload/archiving corner of the site, files are contributed through the blogging interface (as either public or private/unpublished blog posts); and are merely displayed and organized through this interface.

I played with the idea of setting up social rating of peer-contributed content on the site. The votingapi module sets up filter- and sort- fields which can be accessed by the Views module, to surface material which has acquired a threshold vote (average or accumulated score), sending these to a “promoted posts” page (filter e.g. VotingAPI points vote result (sum) ≥ 5); and/or to sort posts in descending order of voted score (using this same field as a sort criterion in the view).

However - a small number of trial users nixed the idea of peer rankings before it was out of the bag - with concerns of how peer rating of content might be perceived (esp. re the ability to “demote” or “vote down” ratings - or “offer low karma” in the language of the extra_voting_forms module). This latter concern could be avoided by selecting the “vote up only” option in extra_voting_forms, not permitting peers to demote the score of a contribution; or by using another ranking module, such as fivestar, which also integrates with votingapi. I can see their point - it does take a mature learner to be able to gracefully accept and profit from peer review (I’m picturing still another verse appended to Janis Ian’s At Seventeen …). I can also create terrific counter-arguments. Perhaps I folded to the democratic process too readily, before giving users a fair trial.

So here’s the deal. I’m a wimp on the issue. I would love to hear the experiences of others who have experimented with peer rating of user contributions. How have students responded/related to this? Have you seen threatened / disenfranchised / disillusioned users, and if so, how might this be addressed or perhaps even turned into a real-word learning opportunity?

The ability of this site to permit fresh-generated contributions, and integrate these with material aggregated from user contributions in other web-publications (via the Aggregation module), in part matches the work that D’Arcy Norman has been doing with his eduglu project; but without the added feature of social rating/surfacing.

I have retained the idea of social rating of content, but restricted to 3rd-party content; so am experimenting with social rating/surfacing of imported news feed items, using a separate aggregation module (feedapi).

A key feature of this site, is reliance on the wonderful Views module for Drupal. This permits display of the community blog with various filters applied (all posts, user’s posts, buddies’ posts, &c.), in various modes (full post, table/list view with various fields displayed), in variable sort-order, &c.

I’ve created several views of user-submitted material, as seen in the “Community Blog Views,” “Views of My Groups,” and “My Stuff” menus.

e.g., below are the settings for the Community Blog (list view) page:

access: authenticated user
Provide page view - checked
URL - blog/community_blog_listview
View type - table view
fields:

filters:

____________________________________________________________________

note that this will display both Blog posts and feed item nodes generated from the feeds collected by the Aggregation module. The latter is made available to users who have outside blogs, so that users can aggregate feed items from their outside blogs into our community blog. (The other aggregator module I have installed - feedapi - will be used for news feeds, which will not be incorporated into the community blog, but rather displayed elsewhere on the site).

sort criteria:

We made the decision to restrict access to our site to authenticated members of our academic community. I have to admit that I do find myself a bit muddled on the whole issue of transparency / transparent life. Perhaps having been raised in the rural Midwest, and spending much of my adult life in downeast Maine - geographic locales where personal privacy is perhaps pathologically emphasized - has unduly influenced this ;^). When introducing blogging/journaling/portfolio production into an academic community, further issues come forward, and frankly, I’m confused by it all. The issue of the transparent life has come upon us rather abruptly as transportation and communication technologies have become more sophisticated and available; it will be the task of the next several generations to sort out the hows/whys/ifs/whatnots/inevitabilities of this.

I’d love to see some discussion on this topic. I’m sure there’s a lot of it out there on the ‘net. Thanks to folks taking the transparency option :^).

But anyhow -

In Adminster > Access control, I’ve given “anonymous user” no privileges, including no access content privileges in the node module section. Non-logged-in users will see only an “Access denied” page with login fields.

Prior to denying “anonymous user” node module > access content privileges, it is important to assure that you will not lock yourself out of the site! This is easy to do with Drupal (or perhaps I’m just particularly skilled at this …), and you’ll find a lot of desperate “help” messages in the Drupal forum on this issue. (You can get to a login page using http://yoursite.com/?q=user , if you are so unfortunate). But before denying “anonymous user” access, activate the LoginToboggan module; then go to Administer > User management > LoginToboggan, and set the Present login form on access denied (403): radio button to enabled.

I have been playing around with Drupal 6.x. It is not yet ready to go for this application, as several of the necessary modules have not yet been made 6.x-ready. But its granular permissions structure may permit greater flexibility - permitting users to elect to make some content world-visible while holding other content within the authenticated-user community. It’ll be fun to mess with when module development catches up.

Access control for “authenticated user” should be straightforward. In the node module section, I’ve given permission only for access content, create group content, and edit own group content. In the Aggregation module section, I’ve given permission for manage aggregation feeds, manage aggregation items, manage own feed items, and view aggregation items. Users can post only 2 kinds of content - Blog posts, and imported feeds & feed items from their external blog. This reflects in part a decision to keep it simple. As a postgraduate school, we have many students of the cyberphobic demographic; too many options could discourage use. (also - the Books node is reserved for administrator use for Help pages; the Stories node is reserved for administrator use, for the 2nd aggregation module - feedapi - to aggregate news feeds for the socially-rated news section of the site).

I’ve given creation and attachment permissions for audio files in the audio and audio_attachment sections, so that users can post streaming audio into their blog postings.

User use authorship needs to be enabled in the Authorship section, to associate full names with posts, rather than usernames (this option will be configured in the Authorship module admin).

Override node publishing options needs to be enabled in override_node_options module section, to permit users the option of posting unpublished posts.

Other permissions should be intuitive, but I’ll visit a few of these in turn as I get around to discussion of specific functionalities of the site.

There are a lot of good themes for Drupal, but my needs were for something pretty clean and ‘academically professional.’ When someone ports the Mandigo WordPress theme (used on this WP blog) to Drupal I’ll jump for joy! But I found the Sky theme for Drupal, which I’m quite happy with. Find it in the Drupal project repository here.

Now there’s a trick with this theme - if all of your active blocks are configured in the right sidebar region, you’ll have a right-sidebar theme. However, if even one of your blocks is placed in the left sidebar, they’ll all show up on the left. (This is only apparent after you leave the blocks editing page; as on that page, all sideblocks show up on the left anyway, regardless of where you configure them).

I did a minor CSS hack on the theme, as I chose to close up the vertical height in the menu blocks a bit, so they’d look a bit tighter. So I opened up Sky/style.css, found all the line-height references in the sidebar section (starting around line 121), and changed these to 20px. Be sure to find the several references to line-height and change each of these.

The header image is bg-header.jpg, in Sky/images/ , and measures 120×960 pixels (note that the bottom 35px of this image will be masked by the primary links menu). I edited my pic in the most wonderful Graphic Converter, and saved optimized for web to minimize download time for users. (btw, the main header image on my Sandbox site is of the beautiful stream in Mostnica Gorge, near Stara Fužina, Slovenja).

After the theme was all configured and basic setup of the site was complete, I created several clones of the theme, naming each Sky-whatever, in the themes directory; differing from each other only in the header image. When Organic Groups are set up, the group author is able to select a theme for their group page from the list of activated themes; having a uniquely identifying header graphic for a group is a nice touch. But wait to do this until most of the rest of the site is configured, as some configuration steps will alter theme settings; and the voting module (for social rating of news feed items) requires a couple of minor hacks to your theme template files.