Tag Archives: CHNM

Yes! We have no THATCamp

I work extensively with universities, but I don’t really think of myself as of universities anymore. One of the things that has most stubbornly kept me connected to the academic world has been the yearly pilgrimage to RRCHNM for THATCamp. Since leaving grad school, it’s been one of my last remaining interfaces with academia where I don’t feel like a service provider, but like an equal participant (kinda the point of THATCamp).

This year, there’ll be no THATCamp at CHNM. Until today, it hadn’t dawned on me that not only am I missing my usual summer kick-off, but I’m also missing my annual reminder that I used to be a geek-leaning academic rather than an academic-leaning geek.

On that note, an only slightly irrelevant clip:

New WP plugin: WP DPLA

Last week, I attended THATCamp CHNM, and I entered (and somehow managed to win) the Maker Challenge with a WP plugin that pulls related items from the DPLA API and displays them on your posts. I’ve just added the plugin to the wordpress.org repository: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-dpla.

Read more about the plugin at my THATCamp post: http://chnm2013.thatcamp.org/06/08/maker-challenge-wordpress-plugin-for-displaying-related-items-from-the-dpla/

Introducing Participad: Realtime collaboration for WordPress

Today I’m releasing the first public beta of a new WordPress plugin: Participad. Participad integrates an Etherpad Lite install into your WordPress installation, enabling realtime collaboration on the WordPress Dashboard or the front end of your WP site. If you’d like to download Participad, learn more about its features, or play with a demo site, check out participad.org. In the rest of this post, I’ll give some of the technical background about Participad, and some explanation of why it was built.

Participad was developed as part of some work I’m doing for thatcamp.org. If you’ve even been to a THATCamp unconference, you know that the first thing that generally happens in a session is that someone starts a Google Doc for collaborative notes, and tweets the link to the #thatcamp Twitter stream. In one sense, this is great – it’s very much in the spirit of THATCamp to have shared, crowdsourced, online notes for each session. But Google Docs, for all its coolness, is not the ideal tool for the job. For one thing, Google Docs are tied to a user’s account, making it very difficult to assemble a persistent, searchable archive of all THATCamp notes. There’s also the concern of storing user-generated THATCamp content on Google, which is alternatively benificent and malevolent, depending on the swings of the market.

Etherpad provides an ideal solution to the Google Docs conundrum. It’s a free software project that can be locally hosted, giving organizations and admins full control over the software and the data within. Etherpad has recently been rewritten as Etherpad Lite, an implementation in Node.js that is far more lightweight and easy to install than the original Etherpad, and, notably, has a rich REST API for integration with external software. This is what makes Participad possible: Participad uses iframes to display the Etherpad interface inside of WordPress, and then uses the EPL API to sync content between Etherpad Lite pads and the associated WordPress posts.

Participad is shipping today with three “modules”, each of which is a separate implementation of Etherpad Lite in your WP installation:

  • Notepads are the solution to the THATCamp/Google Docs problem described above. Notepads are a WordPress custom post type that can be created and edited from the front end of the blog by any logged-in user. Participad comes with a widget and a shortcode for displaying the Create A Notepad interface. And Participad redirects the Edit link seen on the front end of WP blog posts, so that it leads to a front-end editing interface. Content is synced back to the WP database every two minutes, or whenever a user clicks away from the Edit interface. In the spirit of THATCamp, Notepads can be “linked” to WordPress posts and pages, and a Participad widget can be placed in a sidebar that will display a list of a post’s Notepads. And because Notepads are just a species of WordPress posts, you can access lists of Notepads via an archive page.
  • Frontend is the Participad module that allows you to enable front-end, Etherpad editing for *any* WordPress content type. Turn it on, and the Edit link for any post will lead to an Etherpad interface, embedded in your theme where your static content would normally appear. Participad has a permissions schema that works with your WordPress installation, ensuring that only the users with the proper rights to edit a given piece of content through WP are able to edit that content through Participad as well.
  • Dashboard enables Etherpad editing throughout the Dashboard of your WP installation. All Edit screens – posts, pages, and other posts types – will have their WP editors (the Visual and HTML tabs) swapped out with a Participad tab. Autosave works just like it does in WP, and content is synced back to the WordPress database when you click Publish or Update.

I have a feeling that these three modules will cover most of the potential uses of Etherpad in WP, but if you have an unusual need, Participad is designed to be extensible. Build your own module by extending the Participad_Module class, in your own WordPress plugin.

Full instructions on setting up Participad can be found at http://participad.org/faqs/. Please note that Participad requires a separate Etherpad Lite installation, and for the moment, that installation must be accesible on the same domain as your WP install.

If you’d like to follow development, contribute fixes or improvements, or suggest future features, please visit Participad’s development home at github.com/boonebgorges/participad.

Antholocheers

Totals

Antholocheers

I’m happy (and, frankly, a little surprised) to announce that my campaign to fund a round of Anthologize development, which ended last night, successfully met its funding goal of $2,500. Donations came from friends and strangers; individuals and organizations; and from the WordPress, ed tech, digital humanities, and other miscellaneous communities of awesomeness. Close to $1,000 (or more, depending on how you count – more on this in a moment) came in within the last 24 hours.

First off: Whoo! And thanks!

Second, here’s an exact breakdown of the funds:

  • The final tally from the Indiegogo campaign was $2,665.
  • I got an email late yesterday from the team in charge of the OpenLab project at CUNY City Tech. They pledged an extremely generous $1,000 for the Anthologize campaign. For bureaucratic reasons, their donation couldn’t come through Indiegogo, so we’ll be working out a different way to deliver the funds.
  • The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media agreed (amazingly) to match, dollar for dollar, all donations to the campaign. Their contribution comes to $3,665.

This gives us a grand total of $7,330, which translates to about 98 hours of development time. It’s worth saying again: Whoo! And thanks!

Next steps: In the upcoming week or so, I’ll be reaching out to donors to collect any information necessary for their awards: mailing addresses, links to their websites, etc. Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be talking to other members of the Anthologize dev team about a roadmap for using these dev resources. And I’ll be starting to work down those 98 hours around the middle of November, when my work schedule eases up a bit. That’s also when I’ll start blogging in earnest about progress on the plugin, as well as some more general thoughts about crowdfunding for this sort of project, about the viability of free software projects not owned by any specific institution, about the role of Anthologize in publishing, and other such philosophical delights. These posts will “sponsored by” the contributors who pitched in $75 or more, which means that I need to write at least 15 of them 🙂

I’m looking forward to the next stage of Anthologize. I hope you are too – you made it happen.

Anthologize campaign update, and a sneak peek

My Anthologize development fundraiser is going great so far – as of this writing, $870 has been pledged. Put that together with the generous match from CHNM, and you’ve got $1,740. This translates to over 23 hours of dev time. A huge thanks to those who have already made pledges – you’ll be hearing from me individually once the campaign is over on October 10.

Aside from some miscellaneous cleanup and compatibility issues, my first goal during the development period will be to get the plugin running better in more server environments. Our most reported bug is that Anthologize Exports time out due to memory limits. This is an especially vexing problem on inexpensive, shared hosting, which is what much of the Anthologize target audience uses for hosting their WordPress sites. I’ve started to sketch out a plan in this Github ticket for making Anthologize exports less memory-hungry.

It’s always hard to estimate these things, but I’m guessing that 23 hours will be enough to do the initial plugin cleanup, and to get most of the way toward the rewrite of the export process described above. That’s progress!

Remember, more pledges mean more development. If you want to see more fixes and enhancements to Anthologize, you’ve got until October 10 to donate.