Nuketown

Web Development

Rebuilding the Griffin's Crier

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Wed, 11/25/2009 - 12:58pm

The Blackrazor Guild -- my local gaming group -- has had a web site since 1997. It's gone through many iterations over that time, usually in tandem with some project I needed to research at work (being a gamer means never wanting for large reams of test data for web apps).

The site's known as The Griffin's Crier, and for the longest time it was the archive for our Dungeons & Dragons campaign. However, over the last few years our group's changed. Our primary campaign's now Star Wars, half the group is blogging, and we've created a small galaxy of spin-off sites supporting our different efforts.

The GriffCrier needs to reflect these changes. To that end, I'm redesigning the site using Drupal. The new site will serve as a gathering point for our various interests; it will include campaign and group news, links to the latest blog posts from group members (using the Feed API and Views modules), and serve as a jumping off point to our various wikis, web sites, and forums.

Comparing TinyMCE and CKEditor

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Wed, 07/23/2008 - 11:55am

TinyMCE and CKEditor (formerly FCKeditor) are two of the most popular open source WYSIWYG editors for web applications. I'm researching which would be the best to implement at the day job on a campus-wide basis; ideally I'd like to pick one editor, and then use it with all of our web apps. Here's a run down of what editors are available for what apps:

Advice on building a Second Life Island?

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Mon, 07/07/2008 - 12:29pm

So I find myself in the position of needing to buy and help build up a Second Life island for the day job. I'm excited in about it insomuch as it's a new project, and something I've never done before. Plus, hey, it's almost virtual reality. Granted, it would have been far, far cooler if the college had gone ga-ga for World of Warcraft instead, but hey, I'll take my virtual worlds where I can find them.

In the meantime though, I find myself having to work through questions I don't really know the answers to. Specifically:

  1. Preferred Grid Location: I know we want our island to be on the public grid, but where on the public grid? Is it better to be off by yourself? Should you be next to another college? Or the New Media Consortium? Or does it not really matter, because people will be 'porting in, not wandering the wilds of SL looking for college islands to explore?
  2. What island shape do we want? Is one type of island better to build on than another? For example, we're thinking of either the "donut" shape, which is an oval island with a lake in the middle, or a mountainous shape, which sticks an mountain on one side of the island. Which is easier to build on?

Darwin Streaming Server: Lessons Learned

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sat, 04/26/2008 - 8:30am

I spent a couple of days messing around with Darwin Streaming Server, the open source port of Apple's Quicktime Streaming Server. Here's what I learned from my poking and prodding of Darwin installed on a Redhat Linux box:

  1. Darwin streams over port 7070 by default. There's an option to have it stream over :80, but since Apache also uses :80 to serve web pages the two servers will conflict if you're planning on running them on the same box.
  2. Darwin will stream .mov and .mp4 files, but the movies must be hinted. I'm not sure how one goes about hinting an .mp4 file; I assume you can add such hints via Final Cut Pro.
  3. Darwin will not stream individual MP3s, but it will stream MP3s as part of a playlist. The Quicktime Streaming Server under Mac OS Server may appear to stream individual files, but in reality it just pretends to do that by by creating playlists for each individual file. You could do the same with DSS, but it's cumbersome via the web interface; it's likely something you'd want to script. On a related note, there is "muse" add-on for Icecast (another open source streaming server) but it has the same playlist limitation; there's no streaming of individual files outside of a play list.

Debugging Firefox Extensions

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Wed, 04/16/2008 - 8:30am

I got to spend too much time the last two days fighting the good fight while trying to update and redeploy a Firefox extension that creates a toolbar of popular links for the college where I work. Firefox toolbar are nifty creatures, but they can be finicky.

To start, in order to even offer one on your web site, and to have it be downloadable as more than a page of digital vomit, you need to make sure your server's configured to serve the Firefox extention document type, as documented in Mozilla's "Extension Packaging" instructions.

Web 2.x: The Scratchpad

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Tue, 04/15/2008 - 9:01pm

I'm giving a brownbag presentation on what's new on the Web at work tomorrow, looking at the best of what's come out since this time last year. What follows are the rough draft of my notes. I've persnally used about half of these sites; the rest were suggested by the Tribe on Twitter. I'm still looking for suggestions, so if you have any, please feel free to post a comment.

DrupalCon Boston: My Session List

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sat, 03/01/2008 - 3:53pm

DrupalCon Boston I'll be at DrupalCon Boston from March 3 through March 6, which I'm attending for the day job. While I'm keeping an eye out for stuff related to higher education, most of the sessions deal with developing Drupal for any environment, be it a campus blogging platform or a science fiction webzine. If you're curious about DrupalCon, or just want to follow along at home, check out it's Twitterfeed Here's what I've got lined up so far.

Snoopy's RSS Hell

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Thu, 11/01/2007 - 10:36am

I've been fighting the good fight against RSS bugs in Moodle 1.8.2. The problem isn't actually with Moodle, but with Snoopy, the PHP class that emulates as a web browser and which Magpie RSS library uses to fetch the feeds.

It seems that the current version of Snoopy has some issues with redirected URLs. It has trouble following 302 Page Moved messages and has an annoying habit of putting the port number into redirected URLs. While it's not technically wrong to do this, not every web server thinks that the urls foo.com and foo.com:80 are the same (strange but true).

Case in point: The Wall Street Journal. The following feeds involve redirects (apparently served through FeedBurner, so I'm betting any feed using FeedBurner would have the same issue):

http://online.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7011.xml
http://online.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7014.xml

Essential Free Software for a new Mac

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Mon, 10/01/2007 - 10:30am

My new MacBook Pro arrived Friday, and the first thing I did (after basking in the beauty that is a new Mac) was to start loading my “must have” applications on it it. Of these, the Quicksilver fast app launcher is probably the single most important tool I have -- using it has become as instinctive as breathing, and it’s disconcerting for me to work on a Mac that doesn’t have it installed.

A close second, at least in terms of productivity, is iGTD, a tool for implementing “getting things done” style lists on the Mac. I’m not a convert to the GTD cause (I never read the book) but I find some of the concepts useful and this is the first program that proved itself capable of replacing the paper “to do” lists I’ve been using for years.

CNET: The ironic rise of the Mac among open source developers

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Tue, 07/31/2007 - 12:30pm

Matt Asay discusses the seemingly incongruous rise of the proprietary Mac in open source community. He makes a lot of good points, including the ability to quickly evoke terminal and run Unix apps while at the same time maintaining an attractive desktop interface, but I think this statement sums up why many have switched:

At a certain point, I just want something that works well.