Eyefood

So this site, as I might have said a few (?!) times, is a closed space. You can;t get in to see things unless you’re a student/member of staff … which is done for specific reasons (that I might also have said). Anyway. Whatever.

The thing is, for it to be a success, there has to be some benefit in participating in the enclosed social network. I mean, what’s the point of whacking your work onto a website, if you can’t (a) do anything with it afterwards, or (b) if nobody is going to look at it.

Obviously, with a site geared around student work, the obvious reason for uploading is as a portfolio, and for peer/staff feedback. But it occurs to me that there are other benefits from sharing - or at least, there should be.

One of the things that I haven’t yet properly implemented, is little easy cut-n-paste code sections, that let you place the work on an external site (you know, like Flickr and YouTube let you). THe old version used to have that feature, and for the life of me the only reason I haven’t written such a simple thing so far (I think) is because I can’t think where to put them on the page, without destroying the so-far-lovely aesthetic.

(Style over content, as I’m perpetually accused of)

But the other thing that I really must get around to writing, is the ability to link your profile on the site to profiles on other sites. For example, images uploaded need to have the ability (even if not taken advantage of) to go to Flickr as well. Videos should be possibly squirted onto YouTube at the same time. Links should plop themselves onto del.icio.us.

And, of course, the other way around. If I upload something to Flickr, then it should find its way into my portfolio. (If I want it to)

It’s not a hard thing — all of those sites have perfectly-well documented APIs that I can take advantage of. All I have to do is write a section that will link with their individual authentication APIs and let me say “Oh hi, this person has an account on your site. Let’s share”

The privacy concerns of the site are about creating a ’safe’ environment for experimentation, but we should (I feel) give students the opportunity to share their work with an outside audience, if they want to.

And the lovely thing is, I’ve done similar code before. I just have to remember how…

Perhaps a misleading title. Oh well.

One of the features that everyone kept asking me for in our ePortfolio tool, was the ability to have private groups. Being able to link together different people and pieces of work, and form discussions around them is fun … but it’s useful sometimes to be able to do that without the glare of the outside world looking in.

(Interestingly, sorry, it’s like a mini-version of the site itself - which is visible only from the inside. Privacy within privacy, he said, digressing)

It wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be, when I actually got down to it today (which is usually the case. As long as I can remember how I wrote something in the first place, I can usually change it slightly to add new features). In this case, it was just a question of having a ‘privacy flag’ in the database (which was already there, what with me being a bit more fore-planning this time), and the right checks on group-membership and overall-authentication-levels (and stuff). Wrap it all in an if(), and make sure that all the places where they would normally show up are covered.

Bingo.

Cute huh? The red dots are the private groups, and the orange ones are the ones that are invite-only (to join), but visible to everyone else.

What struck me as a useful thing to do next though, was to be able to specify privacy levels on pieces of work themselves. Things like “public, private, tutors-only, friends-only”. I did wonder a while back about how relevant this sort of thing would be, and erred towards a “Open and Free For All” approach … but I’m starting to think that there are very obvious reasons why thing might want to be private (not least, using the site as a handy place to stick images to reuse on blogs - like I did with the one at the top there)

Anyway, we’ll see how this pans out. Something that did strike me earlier though, was a large sense of ‘community‘ when I was using it a moment ago. I think there’s a significant sense of being part of something because of the Site.

I should write more about that some time.

2. Substructure

(Part one)

I’ve been meaning to write more about my little e-Portfolio tool for some time now, but it’s almost an unnecessary endevour. There are that many similar systems and sites across the whole of the Web 2.0 spectrum these days, that it almost makes no sense to outline what this one does — seeing as its functions are replicated in several other places.

Many people, for example, liken it (alarmingly so) to Flickr … and it’s very true that I’ve been very-much ‘inspred’ by Flickr in the way that a lot of the features of the site work. In a way, Flickr is almost the perfect model for an Art-School-Portfolio site like ours, and I’ve been very aware of the similarities all the way through coding it.

(Having said that, there are some features that are replicated in Flickr, like being able to make Group sets for example)

I have a very pressing need at some point to make an “Introduction to the Site” presentation — not for public consumption, but for the students who will be arriving in September. But in the meantime, I wanted to explain a little about what drives the site, and then follow it up with some screenshots.

…

I’m lucky, in a sense, that I have a very small and carefully-defined target audience for what I’ve made. In essence, it’s never going to extend beyond an active set of users of about five hundred or so. True, ex-students are an increasing part of what goes on on it, but even the most active ones tend to die down a bit in their engagement, and it’s mainly the Undergraduates and Postgraduates that are the focus of activity.

Because of that — and the lesser emphasis of scalability that seem to plague a lot of larger sites these days (*coughtwittercough*) — I’m able to use a very simple file-system for processing the work that gets posted.

Essentially, the main uploading part of the site places whatever was sent to it by a user into a common ‘queue’, to be processed by a series of little scripts — scripts that take advantage of some open source software: ImageMagick and ffmpeg (mainly, but there are others)

It’s like a system of ‘Watch Folders’ if you like — every minute or so, cron scripts check to see what’s in certain places on the server, and fire up if they find things. They move the files to other places, process them into web-ready versions of the original upload, and then move them all over the place (and update the database) when done.

It’s quite an elegant little system, if I do say so myself. There’s even a nod towards being able to expand the file storage if needs be in the future — with the site choosing a specific external server to store the files on.

It also means that it’s relatively simple to add different media-types to the site, just by finding appropriate open source (or, perhaps, not) tools that will squish formats from one to another, and process whatever the students might have on their hard drives into something more web-friendly. I have (for example) an experimental installation of wv — a Word-to-HTML convertor (which isn;t working actually, and I think I need to install AbiWord instead) — that used to take word files and automagically present them as web pages (after being run through tidy to get rid of Word’s hideous formatting)

…

One of the original features that I haven’t yet perfected (and so is still disabled) is the post-processing of moving-image work into Quicktime 7’s h.264 format. What used to happen (when the whole thing ran on my home servers) was that after upload, a quick-and-dirty MPEG4 would be spat out (after about 5-10 minutes), just to acknowledge that something had been uploaded. In the background though, the original file was moved to a second queue, and later that night (always at 3am — when I in theory wouldn’t be working on the machine that did the encoding) it was recompressed into a much better copy.

As I said a few weeks ago though, playing around with Compressor has given me the idea that it might be much easier to set up a render-farm using that, rather than relying on the (rather kludgy) QuickTime scripts that I had before … and it would also give me the options to easily convert the files into many more formats (iPhone anyone?)

…

Anyway, bleh. Rather than talking about each and every feature over the next few weeks, I’m just going to upload some screenshots and describe some of the functions…

A thought occurred to me earlier on, regarding the way we have created accounts for the students in the pilot on The Site. To make things simple, I rehashed a version of my ‘click to join the site’ box (which is the glowing orange doughnut in some of the snapshots that have been appearing), so that all they had to do was click and they’d automagically have a new account and be put into the right groups.

Which is all very well, but I’ve started wondering how this will work in relation to their existing accounts - will having two identities on the site be confusing? Will they flip backwards and forwards between the two? Will they spend more time devoted to one than the other?

I know that personally, having several identities online is something that I’ve struggled somewhat with for the past six years. Juggling which particular ‘persona’ I felt like on a particular day hasn’t always been easy - even though I’ve taken steps like having multiple browser installations (with their own separate cookies) to be able to do things like keeping three Flickr accounts and three Twitter accounts going at the same time.

Even then though, I’ve always noted that I seemed to shift emphasis from one persona to another depending on a host of different things.

…

Originally, when I was first playing around with the idea of having specific Second Life sections of the site, I introduced a category in the user database to store Second Life names. One thing that I think this pilot will show, is whether I should have pursued that idea, rather than relying on separate accounts.

We’ll see I guess

Introduction

I’ve been meaning to write this for ages. Mostly, whenever I make something I’m proud of online, I just link to it. But for reasons that I’ll elaborate on later in this series, I’ve deliberately made this piece of software a closed-community, and as a result, I haven’t been able to simply point some links at it.

I’ve been responsible for the web activities of the course that I teach on - BA (Hons) Contemporary Art Practices - for quite some time now. Longer than I’ve been a member of staff on the course in fact. Originally, the course website was a gallery-esque tool, there to show some of the student work generated in the course of the years, and to give information out about the course. But in recent years, there has been a desire for the site to actually do something.

Originally, most of the experiments I tried into student-driven site content were just that - experiments. I figured that it would give the students a sense of ‘partcipation’ if they were to actively upload their work to the site, and (frankly, sorry) would make my job of collating “Stuff” for it a lot easier.

We tried two specific things - first of all a simple account-bsaed gallery affair, which I tried to tack a few useful functions onto (like calendars and such). It had promise (and ironically, is almost exactly what we have today, just four years too early), but the time and resources weren’t there to develop it to an operational position.

The second approach I took was to try and set up individual blogs for every single student on the course. With limited resources (again), this involved a hasty decision about which software to choose (this was before the monolithic Wordpress and Typepad-like options were starting to be established as ’standards’), and a rapid installation of some open-source blogging tool on my own home server.

For all its faults, that version actually worked, and got picked up by one or two students. But “one or two” out of a cohort of one hundred and eighty isn’t really a decent adoption-rate.

During all that time though, I had obviously been looking into various web-based social networks as part of my own work - things like Flickr, and YouTube (and its precursors), so in 2005 when I was asked specifically to produce a tool for our students to catalogue their research, and for us to provide feedback to them, I had some influence that enabled me to think differently about how I might approach it.

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The site that emerged did so partly by accident. The two specific ‘briefs’ - of a research database and student-specific feedback - meant that I had to develop ways in which (a) students could upload pieces of work and/or research to a web site, and (b) we as staff could send private messages to students. So in doing those two things, I developed pieces of code that would enable the areas that the site has excelled in - uploading various different pieces of work, and acting as a means of communication across the School.

…

Anyway. That’s all probably very boring. I could probably expand on this boringness by going into great detail about what version 1.0 of the site looked like.

But I won’t.