links for 2008-01-05

Organising my feeds

I recently undertook the task of organising all my feeds into folders in FeedDemon – before this I had just the one (very) long list of sites I checked, not broken up in any way. This had become unmanageable.

So, here are the folders I have created, in order of the attention I give them.

  • Must Reads
  • UK
  • WordPress
  • Search
  • Software
  • PR, etc
  • Blogs about blogs
  • News, etc
  • General
  • Books
  • Software
  • Del.icio.us (also including other links feeds such as Google Reader shared items)
  • Flickr

If a feed falls into more than one category, then generally I stick it in the one that appears the highest on the list above. So, for example, Neville Hobson‘s blog could fit into PR, etc or UK but I in fact have it in Must Reads.

The General folder is heaving though – I need to go through that again, I think!

Building Online Communities with Drupal

Drupal

Drupal is an open source content management system which is fully extensible through a huge range of community developed modules. It’s the system which powers the demo site I put together for The Information Authority last year, and it is as happy providing a platform for personal blogs as it is multi-user social networks. I will be focusing here on how it can be used to create a social media based community, allowing the sharing of various types of media including text, audio, video and images.

The open source nature of the platform means that not only is it cost free, but you also have carte blanche to edit the source code however you see fit, as long as you are willing to make the changes available to anyone else who might want them. So, if Drupal doesn’t do what you want, all you have to do is edit it so that it does – or get someone else to.

Some well known uses of Drupal include The Onion and Spread Firefox.

Basic Functionality

Drupal comes with a number of functions which are operational without having to track down additional modules. They include:

  • Stories – the ability to post short news items to the site
  • Pages – static pages with content that won’t change much
  • Blogs – every user on a Drupal has their own blog, which can be viewed separately or aggregated together
  • Forums – built in forum system allows for discussions on different topics
  • Books – collaboratively author online collections of pages
  • News Aggregator – built in aggregator which pulls together RSS feeds under various categories, making the latest news available to users
  • Polls – simple polls on which users can vote
  • Tagging – the powerful taxonomy feature allows all content to be tagged and presented as a tag cloud
  • Profiles – you can specify fields for users to complete to build up a profile on the site
  • Document uploads – all types of content (blogs, stories, pages, forum entries) can have file attachments added

On top of this there is a comprehensive user rights management system to ensure that only certain members can produce or view certain types of content, ensuring that your community is as secure as you need it to be.

There is, therefore, quite enough functionality available out of the box to get a community up and running very quickly.

Extra Modules

There is more that Drupal can do though, and all you need is to find the right modules to do it. Here are some of the ones I’ve picked out as being useful for community building:

  • Photo gallery – whilst photos stored on public services like Flickr can easily be added to site posts, having your own photo gallery can be useful for privacy purposes
  • Video – as with photos above. If a video isn’t on YouTube, they can upload it to your community site instead
  • Audio – as above!
  • Organic Groups – create groups within the community. Members can make posts visible only within groups or site-wide. Groups can be created by any user or just administrators
  • Buddy lists – allow users to mark others as their buddies to help track their content etc
  • Invite friends – allow users to send invites to friends not already registered
  • Interests – tracks the tags employed by users to display other users with similar interests, as well as potentially interesting content
  • TinyMCE – adds a wysiwyg editor to make creating content a little easier – no need for HTML tags!
  • Links – create a social link directory with weblinks identified, described and tagged so others can find them

Themes

You can also change the look of your community with the freely downloadable themes from the Drupal website. Those included by default are all pretty good, especially Garland, but if you want to have a more individual looking site it might be better to find a less well known theme and customise it. Some good looking themes include:

Note that some themes require certain modules, or ‘theme engines’ installed to work properly.

What’s Missing

Drupal lacks a proper wiki module, which is a shame. The one that does exist is Liquid, which allows you to make any content as a wiki – in other words, making it available to edit by other users. However, this is a confusing solution and not one that is recommended at this stage. The only other option is to use the books module to collaboratively author content, but again this isn’t really perfect.

Drupal is also rather confusing to administer, and the learning curve is pretty steep. The best option is to play around with it first, and take your time. Once you become used to the way of doing things will Drupal, you’ll be amazed at the power and versatility of the system.

Conclusion

Drupal is a free out of the box solution to creating online communities that will have you up and running in no time. The learning curve is relatively steep, but it is worth it for the power and flexibility of the system.

This post has been shamelessly regurgitated from my old blog, FEConnect 😉

links for 2008-01-04

Seariki

searikiSeariki (a conflation of search and wiki) is a new China based search engine which provides a way of finding information in Wikipedia. The Wikipedia search itself can be slightly frustrating, in that if it can find an exact match for your search term, it takes you straight to it, rather than returning a list of potential results.

Seariki provides a very Google-esque interface, and returns lists of results just as you would expect. It also provides a directory approach using categories on the home page. It’s also possible toview cached previews of content by clicking the “scrape” button next to a result.

It’s a pretty useful addition to ways of finding information within Wikipedia. Interesting that there are Google ads down the side of the results – people are finding ways of monetising Wikipedia content even if Jimmy Wales refuses to.

Wikis – which is best?

Well, it’s a question. Wikis are funny things, and building communities around them can be quite tricky (although advice like this helps). More than any other types of website, wikis demand community interaction, indeed, they are nothing without it.

There are a number of different ways a wiki system can be operated. One is by using a hosted platform, where you register your wiki at a site, and they host it for you. Unless you want to spend some money, the chances are that you will have to put up with having adverts on your wiki, and you’ll be limited in how you can customise it.

On the other hand, you could register a domain (i.e. www.yourwiki.com) and install a wiki yourself. This makes you responsible for maintenance, support etc, but also means you can completely customise the wiki for your own purposes, whether in terms of style or functionality.

So, which should you choose? As so often is the case, the answer is something along the lines of ‘it depends’. However, to help you decide, here’s a number of points to consider when working out what you want to do.

1. Have you a clue about coding?

If the answer to this is ‘no’, then please get a hosted service. You don’t need to be a skilled coder, able to generate reams of perfect PHP at will, to get a wiki up and running, but it helps if you know a little bit about these things. Otherwise, you are likely to get irritated very quickly, and that’s no good at all.

Wikispaces

2. Do your users know what they’re doing?

If your intended user base are wiki working wonks who like nothing more than to collaboratively edit websites, then you are fine with either the hosted or self-hosted option. However, if the concept of wikis is new to your users, the hosted option might be the better one. Why? Well, they tend to be easier to use. Take Wikispaces, for example, which provides an easy to use wysiwyg editor for all page edits. This is much easier than using traditional wiki markup, which many of the self-hosted options rely on, which involves putting any number of ***asterisks*** or [[square brackets]] around words.

Mediawiki-logo-01

3. Will you need heavy customisation?

If your wiki will be a collection of basic web pages, with lots of text and maybe the odd image or embedded video, then most hosted wiki options will suit you just fine. However, if you want to have different methods of entering or presenting information available – for example by using a specific form for a certain type of information – then you will probably need a self hosted wiki which you can customise to your heart’s content (though remember point 1, above).

Stikipad

4. Traffic

Is this going to be the wiki of the century? Are the numbers of visitors to your wiki going to eclipse even those of Wikipedia? Probably not, but if you are planning on hosting your own wiki, do bear in mind that you are likely to be responsible for paying for bandwidth, especially if your site starts to gobble a lot of it up. Generally speaking, if you have a hosted wiki, this will be the provider’s problem, not yours. This is also true about uploaded content – if you will have lots of videos on your wiki, do bear in mind that you will have to pay for storage on a self hosted wiki. With all hosted ones, you should get a certain amount of free storage.

PBWiki

5. Instant networks

How about attracting people to use your wiki? One of the major problems a lot of platforms suffer from is the fact that they require users to have yet another account with yet another password to remember. This will be the case with any self hosted option, unless you are very clever (see point 1 again). However, if you put a wiki on a hosted network of wikis, then there is a good chance that some of your users will already be using that network, and will therefore already have an account there. Wikispaces is a good example of this.

PMwiki

6. Integration

The look and feel can be an important point for many sites – what’s the point of having a stylish theme for your website if when people click to visit your wiki it looks totally different? Some hosted wiki solutions will let you pay to edit the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets – a way of setting the design elements of your website) of the site, which will allow you quite a bit of room to customise the look of your wiki. But to retheme the guts of the wiki, you’ll really need to have a self-hosted one, where the source code as well as the CSS can be altered to suit your every whim.

WetPaint

So, there’s plenty to be thinking about. My basic rule would be to go for a hosted solution unless there are really good reasons not to, and my personal favourite platform for this is Wikispaces. However, if you really need to go for hosting a wiki yourself, then the best in terms of features and usability for me is MediaWiki, the system which powers Wikipedia.

Below I set out some of the options available. If yoy know of ones I have missed, let me know in the comments and I will update the list.

Hosted Wikis

Self-Hosted Wikis

Perfect online collaboration

What does the ideal online collaboration model look like? Much of the work I am involved with at the moment concerns helping people work better with one another using online tools, both in local government and (once we have the technology in place) in further education. This means sharing information, which could be in a number of formats, discussing it and then editing it as a group.

A discussion that Steve Dale and I had at the Online Information Conference concerned what the environment would look like. The method used in the Communities of Practice platform for local government is by making blogs, forums and wikis available as separate entities. This means that the user can choose the medium that best suits their material, or which allows for the type of collaboration required. The problems with this approach are that:

  • Folk don’t always know which one to choose in the first place
  • The manner of collaboration can change throughout a discussion

So, maybe what’s needed is a system that has all of the best bits of blogs, forums and wikis in one, without making the user choose at any point. They don’t really care what the precise definition of the tool that they are using, they just want to get on with things. Does such a tool exist? Well, almost.

WriteWith does most of what we want, I think. It’s based around document collaboration, in a very wiki-type way (notably in the excellent handling of versions and edit history), and it lets you start by uploading an existing documents, which makes things easy to get going. There is a comments feature right next to the editing area for discussion, and then you can publish at the end in a number of formats, including a blog.

writewith1

The collaboration side of things is excellent too. You can invite people to read, comment on and edit your document, and even set them tasks with deadlines. There are email alerts so you can keep up to date with what is going on with your document, as well as RSS feeds.

There are downsides though to this as the complete platform I described earlier. WriteWith is document-centric, so if a user just wants to start a conversational thread, they can’t. You need the document to begin with. It would be nice to be able to start a discussion and then begin work on the document all within the same platform. Also, you invite people to documents individually. It would be nice to be able to create groups with whom conversations and documents could be automatically shared.

And of course, the perfect solution would be for a white label version to be developed!

The 5 most annoying programs on your PC

Are, according to Download Squad:

  1. Acrobat Reader
  2. iTunes
  3. Real Player
  4. Internet Explorer
  5. Outlook

Some pretty easy targets there. I use only iTunes out of this list on a regular basis, which I have to because I have an iPod, as far as I am aware. Otherwise I occasionally use IE for sites which don’t like Firefox, but that’s more or less it.

Instead of Acrobat Reader, which I agree is a total nightmare, I use Foxit Reader; and for Real Player I use GOM Player. My email is handled by Google’s Gmail interface.