I check my email once an hour

This week I moved from the IT department into the Marketing department. I’m still doing web stuff, but from a significantly different perspective. I didn’t even realize how much of a change it would be until I sat down in my new seat in my new cubicle.

I will try to post here a little more often. My hope is to dump a few thoughts after each project, and share any hacks and tips I learn along the way.

This afternoon/evening, I kept beating my head against the keyboard trying to figure out how to fix our photo management app SlideShowPro Director. When we moved our server over to our new SAN, we lost the hard drive (HD) that held all our LAMP based sites. We were able to recover all the data, but we lost most permissions, groups, and owners of the many files.

I eventually just had to reinstall SlideShowPro Director in a new mysql database, import all the tables, and copy over all the media files. Ugly, but now it works.

The last two weeks leading up to the National Youth Gathering were a little insane. I think they’re pretty well wrapping things up so I can look back now and laugh about the whole process.

Read the whole story at IT Projects » Blog Archive » National Youth Gathering.

iTunesU is a large, ongoing, strategic initiative. Many people will be involved in the process of planning, designing, developing best practices, and creating content. Therfore, iTunesU has it’s own location to coordinate and document all the efforts.

Why is everyone more interested in the answer than the question?

When you have a problem that needs to be solved, you should be more interested in the questions than the answers. Solutions come from good questions, not prepackaged answers. I know you are pressed on every side and feel like you do not have enough time to worry about good questions. But good questions now, will save you exponential time in the future. If you allow many small under-pressure-solutions to stack up, you end up with a building that cannot be repaired, but can only be torn down and rebuilt.

There is a tendency in my field to provide a set number of answers, rather than taking time to consider the questions with people. I look forward to the day when we feel like we have time to ask the best questions and consider the best answers.

We’re working on developing a community site to better connect with prospective and accepted students. Many students are use to interacting with social networking sites, and college applications are well suited for a layout similar to profile creation. So we’re combining the best of both worlds to create a space where students can apply, get to know other students, and have all their questions answered. After a bit of searching, we landed on elgg, an opensource project which has a strong level of adoption in HighEd.

The install process was not too difficult, though I had to take two passes at it. I believe my issue was one of permissions or file ownership–something along those lines. The whole site was installed and ready to go, but the only thing that would load was a completely blank page with out any errors. So, I wiped the directory, walked through the steps again, and everything loaded.

The I.T. & Marketing crews are testing it out right now. On our side of campus, there weren’t any major errors, just a number of instructions and vocabulary hat need to be tweaked to reduce confusion. We will need to work out a few processes to bend elgg for our purposes, but it really is a solid platform with plenty of room to customize. I can’t wait to get in there and start hacking things up.

I just finished setting up all the regular backups for our LAMP server. We’re not going to wait until it’s too late to start backing up.

I just setup a daily cron job to mysqldump and zip each database, and tgz each web directory. Once our new server comes in, those files will be rsync’d to another server.

Here are a list of proposals I’m pulling together for
HighEdWebDev 2007: COLLABORATE • PARTICIPATE • INNOVATE, a web developer conference specifically for people in HigherEd.

Title: Head Toward the Bright Light: You too can setup a LAMP server
Type: 1-hour Track Session or 1/2 day workshop
Technical Difficulty: 3
Track: Technical or Applications

Title: Who Doesn’t like Free? How to Choose and Transition to Open Source Apps
Type: 1-hour Track Session
Technical Difficulty: 2
Track: Applications

Title: Skim the Bloat: Use Wordpress as a Mini-CMS in Your Next Project
Type: 1-hour Track Session
Technical Difficulty: 3
Track: Content, Design, Management, or Applications

I’m thinking about a few more, and Drew still needs to chime in.

There are things that are easier to point people to than to try to explain several different times to different people in different circumstances. And there are somethings that people might want to know about, but might not. For these times a blog makes more sense than email.

/enter this blog.

I’m not a professor, so I don’t get a cool faculty blog. But anyone at CSP can get a blog, so here’s my contribution to transparency and better communication at Concordia.