Solving technology problems, one at a time
If you need to browse source code repositories to get the latest build of some application (e.g. the JW Player), one of the easiest ways is to use the SC Plugin for OS X by Tigris.org.
The SCPlugin is a free system extension that allows you to use the Finder’s “Connect to Server” command to connect to the repository as if it were another drive.
After installing “Umbraco,” you may get the following error:
The virtual path ‘/install/steps/welcome.ascx’ maps to another application, which is not allowed.
This is because you have installed Umbraco in a virtual directory (not at the web root of the “Default Web Site” in IIS terminology). It is a path problem, easily corrected by fixing the paths in the web.config file.
Continue readingWhen using Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer to install Umbraco on a Windows 2003 server, everything seemed to be going right until I tried to view the site. I saw only this error message:
I started hearing complaints that a particular learning module completed a few weeks ago was freezing up at random. It took a while to isolate the problem down to the use of JQuery UI tabs
Continue readingThe pagetree plugin for Confluence is a commonly used navigation widget for the popular wiki. There are now 2 versions: the older “pagetree” and the newer “pagetree2” which has several improvements, including a less cluttered look. The older version displays the standard Confluence page icons next to each node of the tree, whereas these can be hidden (and usually are) in the newer version.
Old-style “pagetree” New-style “pagetree2”
If you get the error “Navigation to the webpage was cancelled” while browsing, chances are a security setting needs to be corrected. In a previous post, I suggested a “scorched earth” settings-reset procedure, but I’ve found that that isn’t always sufficient. Sometimes the settings need to be relaxed beyond factory defaults.
For instance, our Learning Management System (LMS) uses mixed https and http content, and Internet Explorer is often set to block mixed content entirely. Sometimes it will prompt the user but often it will simply give the error “Navigation to the webpage was cancelled.” In the case of our LMS, a large clue to what is going on is that the login page appears completely unstyled, because the style sheets and images are part of the blocked content.
Continue readingQualtrics is an online survey application with many capabilities that aren’t obvious at first glance. I’m currently using Qualtrics to create a feedback form that will be used in several hundred learning modules. This form needs to recognize from which learning module it’s being accessed, and it should determine the author of the module and email them a copy of the user’s feedback.
Qualtrics has a feature called “embedded data” which allows you to pass any arbitrary arguments in the link to the survey. We’ll use this to add metadata to the feedback.
There are three steps:
In trying to gain some understanding of collaboration patterns, I came across an interesting article that proposes a layered ontology or model of collaboration that reconciles the many ideas on collaboration patterns expressed elsewhere.
Towards an ontology of collaboration patterns proposes a “collaboration stack” which clarifies the relationship of collaboration patterns to collaborative services and to the underlying communication technologies.
Continue readingSometimes it’s helpful to have a quick reminder of how button events work within nested clips in ActionScript 2.
[ TRY DEMO ]
A button nested inside another button OR inside a MovieClip that has buttonEvents assigned to it will not work. (Button events include: onRollOver, onRollOut, onDragOver, onDragOut, onPress, onRelease and onReleaseOutside).
This is due to the way Flash captures events: the first parent instance with a button event handler assigned to it is the one that is listened to. None of its child objects will be listened for unless you use a workaround.
Continue readingOnce you’ve created a shared online space for your coworkers, you may discover with some frustration that it doesn’t receive the level of interest you are hoping for. One reason for this reluctance to contribute may be lack of structure. Wikis don’t make a lot of assumptions about how you want to structure or navigate through your data, and this lack of structure can be confusing and somewhat intimidating to users, particularly if they aren’t sure where to put their information. This confusion is not limited to non-technical people: I’ve seen IT community sites and wikis lose members largely because of poor planning and navigational cues.
Although theoretically, the ability to add labels or tags to wiki pages eliminates the need to put them in any particular location within the site structure, people still like to know “where they are” within a site because the relationships between documents carries a lot of information about the significance of the document itself. Users need clues as to what else might be there and what to expect when they click to other pages.
Continue reading