Goblin from Arthur Rackham illustrations for Rosetti's Goblin Market

Spring 2004: Blog and Wiki Class

Tentative schedule

This class meets Tuesday March 30 and Thursday April 1 from 11am-12pm.

Friday, April 2, from 11am-12pm is optional for working with MovableType. You must request a MySQL database through Grove for this class day and they must give it to you first.

Introductory Material

CLAS computing does not have the resources to support Blogs or Wikis. Depending on their use, both of these are also questionable in terms of users writing entries because the University's AUP holds the webspace owner responsible for the content.

Luckily, UF also provides Grove space for us. On the Grove space, we can use CGIs, mySQL databases, and PHP. We'll have upcoming classes on those, but for now we'll focus on running CGIs to run blogs. Wiki's are just as easy to use, but we won't cover them in this class because of the potential AUP issues.

Blogs and Wikis both attempt to fuse ease and collaboration in writing practice. Ease can certainly be a trap that actually ends up creating confusion and lowering skills, but blogs and wikis are most often used for simple goals - like class collaboration which is often done with message boards and email lists. For this sort of collaboration and for sharing basic writing assignments like response papers, the ease inherent in blogs and wikis in terms of posting and collaboration proves a strong argument for their usefulness. Plus, their ease in itself has become an argument to use them in writing classes so that the classes can spend more time on writing and less on the fusion of technology and writing. This allows writing classes to reap many technological benefits without having to invest the same amount of time.

Setting up a Blog

1. Set up Grove Space

• To set up your Grove space, go to Gatorlink to modify your account: here.
• Log in to Gatorlink
• Click on the link on the left that says "grove unix services"
• Click on the "Add a new grove account" button (Please note that you will need to go to these pages and renew your existing account each semester)
• Once you've activated your Grove account, go to Grove here: http://grove.ufl.edu/creating.shtml
• Now, we'll set up our Blogs and Wiki's by telneting and FTPing over to Grove.

2. Set Up a Basic Blog

We'll be setting up a basic blog using Perl-based Blosxom:

1. Download blosxom from here.
2. Unzip the file. (in the shell: unzip blosxom.zip)
3. Configure the variables and set your datadir to be /home/username/public_html/blosxom
4. Open one shell to telnet to Grove. Make a cgi directory inside of your public_html directory
5. Then, open another shell and FTP blosxom.cgi to the Grove space cgi directory (ftp grove.ufl.edu)
6. Within the Grove telnet shell, chmod 755 blosxom.cgi and the cgi directory to make it work (telnet grove.ufl.edu)
7. In the telnet shell, create your blosxom entries directory using:
   mkdir /home/username/public_html/blosxom
8. Write your first entry and save it in the data_directory above. Entries should be .txt and the first line is the title, for now. Pretty dull, so configure the flavours. Ready-made flavours are available here.
9. Make head.html, foot.html, and story.html and save them in the same directory with your entry.
10. Fiddle with the flavours.
11. Make your plugins and state directories using:
    mkdir -p ~/home/username/blosxom/plugins/state
    chmod -R 755 ~/home/username/blosxom/plugins/state
12. Tell Blosxom where to find your plugins by altering the $plugin_dir configuration option in the blosxom.cgi script itself.
    /home/username/blosxom/plugins

3. Set your plugins

1. Calendar

Instructions are from the pages by John Todd Larason: Install the calendar plugin:

1. Download the plugin from here or here for no unzipping
2. Unzip the plugin.
3. Put calendar into your plugins directory. (Make sure it's world-readable.)
4. Modify the head or foot file to include $calendar::calendar, $calendar::month_calendar or $calendar::year_calendar

2. Collaborative Work Plugins

There are a number of collaborative plugins, and this is just one that's simple. For a list of plugins, see this page.

1. Get the submissions plugin instructions from here and the plugin itself from here.
2. Make a form that others can use to submit posts. Here's a sample form.
3. With that form, have the method be post and have it post to the blosxom.cgi file.
4. Test it - your pending entries will be in your entries file with a .txt- extension (the - keeps them from being read), and you can also see a list fo pending posts by putting in http://grove.ufl.edu/~username/cgi/blosxom.cgi?pending

Or, use Zach's submission CGI:

1. Get the write.cgi file from here.
2. Rename it to write.cgi, chmod it to 755, and save it in your CGI directory.
3. Change the variables on write.cgi
4. Create a form, with a password field, and have it post to write.cgi, like these forms: laurien_grove and academic-gamers

Wikis

Where blogs are generally restricted to the main user(s), Wikis predicate on being editable by anyone. MeatballWiki explains Wikis as:

Wikis work better because they rely on the community, rather than technology, to police itself. If someone comes along and deletes text or posts spam, someone else can just as easily fix the problem. Since an open environment encourages participation and a strong sense of community, the ratio of fixers to breakers tends to be very high, so the wiki stays stable.

There are technological protections, too -- they're just less obtrusive than having to "log in" or "rate" something. Most wikis store old versions of each page for at least a short period of time, allowing damage to be easily recovered. Many wikis provide a means to limit how quickly someone may edit a large number of pages. Most wikis also provide a means to lock out particularly abusive visitors without disturbing other visitors.

from http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WhyWikiWorks

To choose a Wiki, read over the notes here. For our mini-class, we'll be using UseModWiki.

1. Getting and Setting up UseModWiki

(These instructions are for after you've established Grove space.)

1. Download UseModWiki from here: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UseModWiki/Download
2. Email usemod@usemod.com to request to be on the list for updated versions.
3. Gunzip and untar the UseModWiki file. (gunzip filename and then tar -xvf filename)
4. Read the README and it's wise warnings.
5. Read and follow the installation instructions.
6. On the installation instructions, please note that on Grove, the wiki.pl file does need to be named wiki.cgi. Also, please note that you will probably want to set a .htaccess and .htpasswd to make sure that people don't just edit your pages - you are responsible for your pages.
7. Check the formatting notes for how to format the pages.

UseModWiki is written in Perl and available here

MoinMoin is written in Python and available here.

1. Setting up for Movable Type

• Request a MySQL account from Grove and make sure you get a confirmation email.
• Configure the account
  mysql --user=monty --password=guess db_name
  mysql help pages

Participants

• Rich Swilley
• Zach Whalen
• Clay Arnold

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