Archive for March, 2009

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A stand-alone wiki is tempting

Friday, March 27th, 2009

While browsing through the zillions of MediaWiki extensions, it occurred to me that WikiStudent could be built entirely with wiki software, since MediaWiki is a stand-alone CMS and all these extensions provide as much functionality as Xoops.

Some examples: you can extend MediaWiki to include things like calendars, polls, quizzes, forums, maps, and there are also extensions for Google AdSense and Google Analytics. When you look at how Wikipedia is used, you might think all you can do on a wiki is edit text and add photos. Not so! You can make a highly interactive site using MediaWiki and these extensions, and that is what I intend to do!

I still want to use Xoops as the ‘main’ site though, especially for the profile options that people fill in when they register (e.g. what you’re studying, your city…) MediaWiki doesn’t seem to have extended profiles, but maybe there’s a suitable extension? I’ll have to look. Will be spending the entire weekend trying out various versions of extensions and keeping the ones that work!

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Battling to give up control

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

Towards the end of last year, when WikiStudent was getting too big and out of hand for just me to manage, I told Unisa students that I was looking for an admin team, and came up with a few areas where help would have been nice.

About 15 members offered to help with admin and dozens more offered to test the new site. I sent out an email to all the ‘admin’ people with a list of modules to find prescribed textbooks. The trouble, I found, was that even though other people were doing the work, I ended up wanting to check that everything was correct. So it was just as though I’d done all the work myself!

I’ve always done it all in the past, and it’s hard to hand over stuff and not get involved at all. I’m not sure I can do this… I’m sorry, but for the moment I’m going to continue to work on my own (It’s not that I don’t trust people – I’d just like to know what’s going on too!!).

What I’m working on now is a database table of all Unisa modules that WikiStudent is going to cater for (there are over 500 of them and I’m expecting this list to grow a bit more!). I installed Open Office on my new pink laptop and am trying to update a little bit every day.

open-office
It is So Much Work! For every Unisa module, I’m adding entries for the course code, module name, subject, department, Textbook details, and quite a bit more! (stuff to do with stats). I think it would be difficult to share this work somehow…

But to everyone who so generously offered to help, Thank You! I still have your details and will get back to you. And if anyone else wants to help out, just let me know. I know this is the way forward, and one day I’ll come up with a proper plan.

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WS moving to a new server :)

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

An email I received from my hosting company two hours ago:

As part of a continuing effort to provide the highest quality service for our valued customers, your hosting account, wikistudent.ws, will be migrated to a new server in 24 hours.

If you are using external DNS servers or your domain was created under a separate customer number than your hosting account, then you may need to modify your DNS setup with your new IP address:
…
Please note that your control panel will be unavailable for 24-48 hours. We also recommend that you do not make any changes to your hosting plan during this migration process.

Ok. Fine by me. This is the first time that GoDaddy have ever needed to move me, so we’ll see how it goes! There shouldn’t be any visible downtime for visitors, but I will be checking the availability of the control panel tonight!

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Nice, but not necessary

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

A while back I was contemplating having a section on WikiStudent where students could upload photos of the Unisa campus closest to them. I thought it would be nice to see what the different exam venues look like. Here are some photos I took of the Cape Town campus:

The Cape Town computer lab - where students do their practical ICDL exams

The Cape Town computer lab - where students do their practical ICDL exams


Block A - this is the building where you'll find the Library and lecture rooms

Block A - this is the building where you'll find the Library and lecture rooms


Block B - some more lecture & exam rooms at the Cape Town Parow campus

Block B - some more lecture & exam rooms at the Cape Town Parow campus

The thing is, this is not an essential feature for the site. Yesterday I wrote about the seven main sections of WikiStudent. Seven is quite enough already. I don’t want to clutter it up with things that are ‘interesting’ to only a few people.

I learnt this from the old site. It was very busy, and had things like pages for Alumni (where you could list yourself if you’d graduated), sattelite maps of Unisa campuses (where you could plot a campus by zooming in and giving the address), a game called FrozenBubble (where you could compete against other Unisa students), and an application form for a free email address @wikistudent.ws.

These were among the least popular pages, so I decided to scrap them. I still like these ideas though and maybe, just maybe (like in 2 years time or so!) I’ll try bringing some of them back :-)

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At last: a schedule!

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

So far I’ve been working on all aspects of the site at once, without having a specific due date in mind. Because it might eventually seem to take ‘forever’ and members will start getting impatient if week after week there’s still nothing to see, I’ve come up with a plan for the launch: Instead of waiting till the whole site is re-done, I’m going to release one feature at a time.

Here are the 7 main sections of the new site, in the order that they will appear:

  1. Wiki (It’s coming first because that’s the main part of WikiStudent, and it is also not reliant on the main database tables (besides the users table of course) which will be created later on.
  2. Student Jobs (Because this is so easy to implement. Just a bit of RSS and Ajax and it will be done!)
  3. Study Buddies (This will also be relatively quick, since Xoops has a built-in profile search tool that I must just modify slightly…)
  4. Download Study Notes (It’s not going to be a simple install this time round, because of the coding involved in capturing notes requests for notes that are not yet available).
  5. Unisa Past Papers (This will be a custom-written plugin. Again, I’m putting off coding till as late as possible!)
  6. Unisa Textbooks (People will only be selling books after the exams, so this one’s not so urgent. It’s also going to be the biggest job and the more time I have to think about it, the better).
  7. Discussion Forums (Just to prevent the forums from being used for any of the above 6 points, they’re coming last!)

Somewhere in between I’ll also have to fit in creating a nice-looking html newsletter.

With all the public holidays next month, I think it’s safe to say that by the end of April there will be a website up and running, with a wiki that has 100 Unisa modules ready to be populated by you!

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