Web Development
Coding Open – The Benefits of Free and Open-Source Software in Academia
The term “open-source software” means many things to many people. To some, it’s a method of collaboration; an easy way for your work to benefit your peers. Others see it as a confusing business paradigm. After all, how can you make money by giving away your work? Still others see it as an affordable way to launch a business; or teach yourself a new skill. Clearly open-source software has many uses. But like anything, it’s important to understand both the benefits and the drawbacks to going open-source. Specifically in an academic setting.
INTERACTIVE DESIGN: EMU Marketing Exhibit
Artists’ Reception | Fri, Oct 16th | 4-7pm | Adell McMillan Gallery
UPDATE – Show Website: id.uoregon.edu
Darrel Kau, Director of the UO Cultural Forum, offered us an opportunity to exhibit our work in the Adell McMillan Art Gallery. Needless to say, we jumped on it.
This was an ambitious project for us. While the designers had experience creating small exhibits through their classes, none of us had executed an art installation that included a 34′x9′ wall, six 8′x8′ display cases, and a 17′x11′ display case. The challenge was to create an exhibit that reflected our collaborative work style, gave props to the designers and programmers, showcased how we advance student learning, and gave those viewing the installation an engaging, interactive experience.
We like this kind of challenge, and we made it work. Big time. Read more…
Javascript Text Wrapping Function
This is an old function I wrote a while back and drafted up but never got around to posting. I hacked it together to fix the behavior of some BBCode buttons on one of our older sites.
Quick and easy AJAX with JSON-RPC
The web has come a long way since the days of intrepid coders hacking asynchronous content into pages with hidden iframes and dynamically loaded javascript files. Today we take the ease of use that standardized support for XMLHttpRequests (XHR) affords for granted. Libraries like Prototype and jQuery help to clean up code by handling generating requests and processing return values but we can do better. Here’s where RPC comes in.
Wordpress for Student Groups :: Part 1-What is Wordpress?
What is Wordpress?
Wordpress is a free blogging software that is used by hundreds of thousands of blogs around the world. CNN, The New York Times, Ebay and even the British Prime Minister all use it to help them connect and communicate. It prides itself on being easy to use and maintain and being very flexible.
Learning Outcomes: Interacting with the Flickr API using PHP
Many of the sites we build feature a small photo gallery as part of their design. Rather than roll our own photo management solution, we opted to integrate Flickr into our custom site framework.
Reactive tree caching
APC is an amazing tool for increasing the performance of PHP scripts. The framework we’re developing makes extensive use of caching to store complex data structures that would be too resource intensive to rebuild often. A lot of template engines produce static files to cache the output of resource intensive database driven systems. This works great but we wanted more flexibility.
Getting Wordpress Working on Shell
UPDATE: Jeremy Blanchard has written an awesome shell script that will compile and install wordpress for you on your shell account. Check it out here: http://wiki.auzigog.com/Wordpress_on_shell.uoregon.edu
Getting Wordpress working on Shell is slightly more complicated than normal, but still fairly straightforward. The two important hurdles are getting PHP and MySQL working.
Learning Outcomes: jQuery and AJAX
So this term I took CIT 381 Database Systems (part of the CIT minor). For our final project we had to design and implement a database that would store information for a fake K-12 tech conference. So that means information on speakers, topics and volunteers. We were then required to develop a web form that could be used to get information out of that database.
Extending your web apps with peripherals
You may not know it, but it’s relatively simple to extend the value of your web applications with peripherals like barcode scanners and magnetic stripe readers. These devices can both be purchased inexpensively (sub $50 in most cases) and will hookup to any computer via USB. When you’re shopping for these peripherals make sure they have “Keyboard Emulation.” This means that when you hook them up to a computer they will act like a regular input device and simply dump their output as raw text.
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