Tag Archives: Google

Google Wave and WordPress

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Hello All!  This is just me testing out my new Google Wave WordPress plugin called wavr.  Below is a test wave I set up.



and if you don’t have a google wave account, here is what it looks like.  What’s nice about it is that you can customize the look with different backgroWave-Accessund and font colors.  Also pretty cool, I can edit the wave from within my blog post.  I have to be logged into my wave account (either in another browser window or the same browser window if i’m using tabs).

I can definitely see the usefulness of this.  I’ve seen some conferences try to figure out ways to aggregate information.  By adding the twitter bot and other bots, I may be able to use wave as a quick and easy way to aggregate information.

A few bummers:

  1. default colors are less than ideal, but luckily you can change that. so for example right now my code to embed the wave reads: wave id =”your-wave-id” bgcolor=”#FAEBD7″ (enclosed within brackets)
  2. people that don’t have a wave account can’t see the wave.  here is what they see:No-Wave-Access this is kind of a big let down.  it would be useful if they could at least view the wave…but unfortunately that’s not the case.

Using the Cloud to Develop Your App

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I’ve been a bit busy and unable to blog. Right now I’m waiting for other people to do stuff so I thought I would write.

Recently I’ve considered taking an in house app I’m working on and making it an open source app to share with the world. I was thinking this would help me in a couple of ways:

  1. it would improve my code.  admittedly it was the first php code i wrote since taking a 2 year hiatus from writing php code.  right now i go back and think to myself: “what the heck is that?”  hopefully opening up the app to the world would help me improve the code (and the app).  i’m one of those crazy people that believe my code shouldn’t be perfect before releasing it.
  2. it would help other libraries that don’t have a dedicated me to write programs that will collect statistics.  there is another app out there called libstats that does something similar, but not on the individual librarian scale.  i was even considering merging libstats with my app (of course i will need to speak to the owner of said project before actually doing anything of the kind).

All of this got me thinking about what services I should use to share the development of the app.  There are quite a few tools out there that can help me do this.  I’m actually considering doing an environmental scan of the different tools that can be used to develop apps via the cloud.  Maybe look at some of the big open source projects to see what they use while also keeping an eye out for how smaller projects do the same thing.  And just for clarifications sake, I’m not just talking about using AWS or Google App Engine to write the program.  I’m talking about BaseCamp, Google Code, github, etc.; you know, the tools that help you develop the app and organize the project.

The idea I have isn’t just born from my head (I’m not that smart).  I was reading The Tower and the Cloud and in it Ira H. Fuchs talks about the “Challenges and Opportunities of Open Source in Higher Education“.  It seems to me that the inclusion of this article in the book says that the cloud isn’t about just servers without actual hardware, but that its also about how we work together to use the different services available to build open source applications for higher education.

I’ll be sure to share more as I find time to review all the different tools out there.  Maybe one day I’ll have a “How to Develop your App in the Cloud” seminar or something (to go along with my fellowship).

NITLE Moodle Exchange is a bit Cloudy

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I’ve been scouring academia for cloud computing projects and came across one that I myself am looking to get involved in (and not because its cloud computing).

NITLE hosts a Moodle Exchange (NME).

For faculty, technologists, and librarians at participating campuses that use or are interested in using Moodle. Participants in this collaborative user community focus on the use of Moodle at smaller, independent colleges and universities, sharing ideas and best practices and helping each other troubleshoot technical or use issues specific to liberal education and undergraduate colleges and universities. In the NME, Moodle-using or Moodle-interested campuses share strategies and ask and answer questions about implementation, evaluation, migration, customization, and other Moodle-related topics.

NME also works together to develop a Liberal Arts Edition of Moodle as well as plugins specifically focused on the needs of Liberal Arts Colleges.  So how does this get cloudy?  Well they use Google Code to distribute their developments.  This allows everyone involved in the project to access or share code that has been developed for the community.

If you’re doing something similar let me know about it.  I’m very interested in how different academic institutions are using the cloud to develop systems and applications.