mamamusings: January 6, 2004

emergent vocabularies

As I was showing del.icio.us to my students last night, I realized that it’s an amazingly useful tool for information architects. I regularly tell my students that asking people is a generally bad way to find out what they want, or how they want it organized (and point them to Cory’s Metacrap article for examples). But if you’re trying to figure out what set of labels to use for a set of domain-specific content, and you don’t have a multi-thousand dollar budget for studies and consultants, how do you create a usable, appropriate vocabulary?

Here’s how. Add a site to your del.icio.us bookmarks, and then look to see who else has added it. What descriptive tags did they use for it? As an example, here are the current links to Metacrap in the del.icio.us system. I used the terms metadata and semweb. Other terms used include taxonomy, ontology, ia, humanFactor, and xml. That’s a great start for thinking about how to make it part of a collection, and how to organize/label that collection.

It’s also interesting to watch how people’s tag collections grow and change. VirtualTraveler has started using a pseudo-hierarchical tagging system, by including a / character in some tags (e.g. ComputerHistory/Books, ComputerHistory/DesignReports).

Would the system benefit at all from a collaborative thesaurus, I wonder? As an optional rather than require tool? How hard would it be to implement that?

What a great sandbox…

—-
Update: Just found an equally enthusiastic assessment of del.icio.us (through what else? somebody else’s del.icio.us bookmarks….) on the Robin Good site:

And as rapidly learning and collaborating ants you can admire how fast this growing web of contributors learns and evolves without any top-down coordination.

Through delicious you can actually see patterns evolve over time as information miners learn rapidly how to select, reference, categorize and post information resources of their own interest.

mt courseware, step-by-step

I’ve had a lot of requests for the templates being used in my newer courseware. And after helping a couple of colleagues through the process of setting it up, I’ve decided to take a stab at writing step-by-step directions for setting it all up. So if you want to give it a try, download the zipped archive of template files, and give these instructions a shot.

Caveat: this is not intended for total newbies. It assumes a solid understanding of MT templates and HTML, and, ideally, basic knowledge of PHP as well.

Preliminaries
For this to work, you need to have your blog on a system that supports PHP4. You also have to install Adam Kalsey’s SimpleComments plug-in, which treats trackbacks as “remote comments” and intersperses them with the comments in chronological order. If you don’t use this, you’ll have to manually put in links for comment and trackback pop-up windows, because my links take people straight to the individual entry when they click on the comment or trackback count for the entry. The advantage to this is that it doesn’t break on browsers that aren’t javascript-enabled (like my sidekick, for example), and that comments are always seen in the context of the original entry, which I think is important (an idea I got from Joi). The downside of this is that trackbacks don’t automatically trigger a site rebuild, so new trackbacks are shown on the main page, but not on the individual entry until the entry is rebuilt. This problem is discussed on Phil Ringnalda’s blog, and he provides a solution that I’ve implemented. However, it’s not for the technologically faint-hearted, as it involves modifying the perl code in your MT software. (FWIW, I am not a perl programmer, but still found the instructions easy to follow.)

First Step: Weblog Config
Create a new weblog in your Movable Type installation, and fill in the appropriate information in the Weblog Config—>Core Setup section.

In the Weblog Config—>Preference section, leave the default post setting to Draft, since most posts will be created in Draft mode so that you can manually set the date after you’ve saved them. Your preferred archive type should be Individual, and the file extension for archives files should be .php (not .html). I recommend not notifying blo.gs or weblogs.com until you’ve finished setting everything up.

In the Weblog Config—>Archiving section, make sure the Individual, Daily, and Category Archives are checked. I like to use post titles as file names, and I like having the daily archivs in a year/month/day directory, so I use the “Archive File Template” info to do that. Here are the settings: Individual archives: <$MTEntryTitle dirify=”1”$>.php ; Daily archives: <$MTArchiveDate format=”%Y/%m/%d/index.php”$> . If you don’t use these archive settings, you may have to adjust the include path for sidebar.inc in your daily archive template, since it’s based on that directory structure.

Second Step: Add Categories
Now you have to add the required categories. I’ve included a PDF “printout” of my Category screen for this; all categories listed there are necessary for the site to function properly.

Third Step: Create Templates
My templates are shown in the TemplatesList.pdf file. You will need to change the output file name for your Main Index to use .php rather than .html, and you’ll need to add several new index files—Outline, Sidebar, and Syllabus. You’ll also need to add a Template Module called heading (down near the bottom of the page).

The contents for Main Index, Outline, Sidebar, Syllabus, the three archive types, and the heading module are all in the .tmpl files in the zipped archive; you should be able to replace the contents with cut and paste.

Fourth Step: Editing Templates
Most of the content for the site is in entries, which are covered in below. But at the minimum, you’ll probably want to change the calendars in the sidebar template (and if you’re not on a 3-month quarter system, you’ll probably want to add a fourth minicalendar). You have to manually change the text label for the calendar to show the month name. Then change the MTCalendar month=”YYYYMM” value to the YM value you want. (January 2004 would be 200401) Repeat for each calendar, and just do a copy and paste to add additional months.

You should also change (or remove) the div near the top of the Main Index template that says “This is the web site for Professor Lawley’s…”, for obvious reasons.

Fifth Step: Test What You’ve Got
At this point, try a site rebuild and make sure everything gets properly generated. Tweak and try again ‘til it works. If you’re beating your head against the wall at this point, leave a comment here with as much detail about your error messages as possible. Comments are automatically emailed to me, so I’ll see your plea and help as soon as I can (or perhaps a passing reader will assist you if I’m otherwise occupied…).

Sixth Step: Adding Content
If it builds properly, it’s time to add some core content. Start with the syllabus components. The syllabus is generated automatically from all items that have the (surprise!) “syllabus” category. Because it doesn’t display date information, you don’t have to worry about what day you create these. However, it does order them by date (oldest to newest), so you should either create them in the order you want them to appear, or modify the dates after you create them so that they’re in the order you want. One of the syllabus items should be information about you—name, contact info, etc. After you’ve created that item, add an additional category of “instructors” to it, so that it shows up automatically in the sidebar.

Now you can start adding your class topics. The Outline template retrieves all entries with the category of “Class Topics,” and orders them by date, providing a link to that day’s material. You should also add a second category of “calendar” for each class topic, which will cause that day to be clickable in the sidebar calendar. (Calendars can only be limited to one category. I didn’t use “class topics” as the trigger category because sometimes I want a day to be clickable—say, a review session or an exam—without having it show up in the class outline.)

Anything else you add for a specific class—readings, resources, etc—will show up when you click on that day in the calendar, but not in the outline of topics.

The “news” “projects” and “discussions” tabs in the navigation each point to category pages that are generated from those categories.

— — —
Okay, that’s all I can think of. I’m sure I’ve left something out, or made something more complicated than it needs to be. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments, and I’ll edit this entry as need be. Have fun! And do let me know if you’re using the courseware, so I can brag about it in my annual self-evaluation. :)

(Anybody feel like making me a nice little courseware button that people could add to their sites when they use this to link back to me?)

Update: I’ve made a button, and added it to the archive, as well as adding code for it (and the link) to the sidebar template. Here it is:

The image needs to be placed in your main blog directory.