Web Log

Media galleries

Media galleries are slide shows. There is a summary page with a listing of all galleries and preview of their slides. Clicking on the preview opens a full size view of the slide as pop up. The summary page cannot be configured. Clicking a media gallery shows a larger, configurable grid of slides. Clicking on a slide either shows a strangely small pop-up view of the slide or large view of the slide in a new page (configurable).

Images can be uploaded one by one. There is no bulk upload option. It is quite time consuming to upload a slide show. Powerpoints or odps cannot be uploaded...

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Data files

Data can be uploaded in variety of ways. It looks like anywhere you can add and edit text there is also an option to attach multiple files. They need to be smaller than 128 MB. For example, this blog entry has a file attached. Simple pages can have attached files as well. Another option is to use the class app and attach files as class materials. Files there need be smaller than 256 MB. Software uploads could also be used to distribute files. This option has the advantage of having a way of versioning data sets. Files size is up to 256 MB there as well.

a footer

It is useful to have a consistent footer for each openscholar page. It can contain for example links to higher level departmental web sites, fas or harvard.edu. That can be easily accomplished by creating a custom html widget in the layout view perhaps called "footer" with the desired content and then adding it simply to the footer layout section for All Pages and the Front Page.

Openscholar URLs for isites

URL forwarding is now available under Settings. This resolves the issue we had with isites URLs. Excellent !

We also have an isite web presence which unfortunately has pretty ugly URLs. Until isite also gets custom URLs it may be useful to have simple links from an openscholar site with a nice URL to the isite. That is possible by simply creating a page for each isite page. The page then contains the link. Unfortunately, there is no way to have redirection at these pages because that requires javascript or changes at the server level both of  which are not allowed, for good...

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Some openscholar limitations

Openscholar is very nice and its restrictions are both limiting and helpful. They are helpful because they keep the system manageable. For example, it is not possible to duplicate posts directly. I came across this limitations when I was editing a static page and tried to create a backup copy. The only way to do that is to copy and paste which is ok. Duplications often leads to confusion. Another limitation is that there can only be one blog. One could imagine to have one blog on one topic say earthquakes, and another one on teaching. The idea with openscholar seems to be that tagging is a...

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Presentations

Presentations in openscholar are a way to keep track of and publicize your presentation. There is a description, date and location of a presentation and files. The app does not allow you to actually present slides.

Where does this entry go ?

This entry was created by Add a blog entry under an already existing blog entry. The expectation is that is goes as an entry to the blog. The other, unlikely option is that the existing blog entry is treated as the "home page" for a new blog with this as the first and only entry, and a hierarchy of blogs is established.

The answer is that the first expectation was met.

About the software module (app)

The software module is really tailored towards distributing software, rather than documentation of software. It does not have hierarchical organization capability but it has a guided path to provide multiple releases of software with individual descriptions.

About static pages

Static pages do indeed offer the same formatting tools as blog entries, and have no time stamp or commenting. There can be sub-pages and perhaps sub-sub-pages for hierarchical organisation. For example there could be a main "Documentation" page with sub pages. Let's see how sub pages are connected to the main page. It turns out there can be multiple levels of hierarchy. Sub pages are connected to their parents with nice links and even to their grandparents with hierarchical, collapsible menus. There does not seem to be a way to make the columns with the sub page links wider. This may turn... Read more about About static pages