[Server-devel] Edublog notes

Tue Jun 3 13:47:00 EDT 2008

Greg, Wad,

The people I'm working with apparently are familiar with Moodle rather 
than Drupal, so that might be the way to go for me&them in that sense 
(funny, Aymara has a different form for the "us" me-and-them, different 
from me-and-y'all, would be handy in this sentence), though I am very 
curious about the EduBlog as well.

 > My suggestion is to use Moodle, let teachers and sys admins set it up.

Uh, might need some hand-holding there, for those prospective teachers & 
admin.  I myself have never set up a successful Moodle server, will have 
to call that a priority so as to learn what a noob has to face.  Have 
already several offers of help, so no need you personally to worry about 
this.

 > BTW I need more people to test out the EduBlog GUI during Beta test,
 >  I need a teacher, a kid and an admin so let me know if you

sign me up if you want to let me give it a try.  No kids here, but I can 
virtualize the other two, and maybe borrow a kid or two at the crucial 
moments.  Y'all know I am obsessive about ease of use and vocal to the 
point of bad manners... :-)

Yama

Greg Smith (gregmsmi) wrote:
> Hi Yama and Wad,
> 
> Give us a blog hosting app. and an API. EduBlog adds a one click HTML
> front end with an option for teachers to approve posts. The blog can be
> hosted anywhere routable from XS (e.g. on XS itself), no internet
> needed.
> 
> That's the idea, we'll see how it turns out :-)
> 
> I'll leave it to others to comment on what blog hosting tools are
> planned for XS. I believe Moodle has or will have a blog tool and if
> Moodle is in default XS build that's an obvious choice. Drupal is
> another option. Ceibal jam people investigated this and client side
> ideas a little. See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ceibal_Jam/Blogs
> 
> My suggestion is to use Moodle, let teachers and sys admins set it up.
> Then use EduBlog to allow kids to post. If kids are comfortable posting
> right to Moodle Blog UI then you don't even need EduBlog.
> 
> HTHs.
> 
> BTW I need more people to test out the EduBlog GUI during Beta test,
> target late July. You're going to need internet and preferably an XO for
> the Beta. I need a teacher, a kid and an admin so let me know if you
> have any contacts who are interested.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Greg S 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Yama Ploskonka [mailto:yama at netoso.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 10:23 AM
> To: John Watlington
> Cc: Greg Smith (gregmsmi); server-devel at lists.laptop.org
> Subject: Re: [Server-devel] Edublog notes
> 
> I second this request for off-internet solutions.
> 
> I am currently cooperating with a Bolivian Ministry of Education project
> for community/school centers which depends largely on blogging and such
> tools, so I am following this thread closely for concepts / ideas /
> solutions that would be obsessively user friendly.
> It would be just the best of both worlds if the same tool were used for
> XOs when we do get a deployment there!
> 
> Yama
> 
> John Watlington wrote:
>> What do we provide for the schools which don't have internet access 
>> right now ?
>>
>> Should the XS contain some blog hosting software which can actually
>> host the pages created by this tool ?    (Pardon my ignorance of
> whether
>> Moodle already contains such.)
>>
>> wad
>>
>> On Jun 3, 2008, at 9:27 AM, Greg Smith (gregmsmi) wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Martin,
>>>
>>> On the sanity check, that's not it :-(
>>>
>>> It my fault for not explaining it better! I really hope Tarun, Marcel
> 
>>> and Pablo are more in synch... It will be more clear once we get some
> 
>>> draft/static HTML pages in place.
>>>
>>> I'll take some HTML editing help if anyone thinks they can mock up 3 
>>> static HTML Pages based on the text here:
>>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Blog_Educativo_Plan_del_Proyecto
>>>
>>> Here's another earlier write up which includes a network diagram 
>>> which may help explain the parts.
>>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_Blogger_Project
>>>
>>> We do not plan to code, host, share or serve any blogs! All we will 
>>> build is a simple front end that let's users create a blog post and 
>>> click once to have it appear on a Moodle Blog, Blogger.com, Drupal 
>>> etc.
>>>
>>> Kids enter content, clicks post and that's it. The back end SW 
>>> running on the XS takes that post and puts it on the blog e.g.
>>> http://centenarioescuela38sg.blogspot.com/
>>>
>>> The SW we will build on the XS may include Apache + PHP + DB for HTML
> 
>>> towards client and probably XML + RPC or SOAP towards blog API. There
> 
>>> will be three main web pages and we will build no client code on the 
>>> XO at all, just support Browse! I need it to be simple so we can 
>>> build in 7 weeks.
>>>
>>> Three web pages towards the client then APIs towards supported blog 
>>> systems on XS. That's everything. Let me know if that explains it 
>>> better or its still not clear.
>>>
>>> I'll think about the database comments too. Let me see what fields 
>>> and tables Tarun thinks he needs and I'd like to get his input.
>>>
>>> Tarun and Marcel, let me know ASAP if the description above is not 
>>> clear. I think we are in synch but it never hurts to re-ack (there's 
>>> a reason why TCP is a triple handshake :-).
>>>
>>> BTW better book mark those two links. The main Uruguay page just got 
>>> a major re-edit and those links are now very hard to find.
>>>
>>> Other than that the new page is packed with info and links thanks to 
>>> Pablo! http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Uruguay
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Greg S
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Martin Langhoff [mailto:martin.langhoff at gmail.com]
>>> Sent: Monday, June 02, 2008 5:38 PM
>>> To: Greg Smith (gregmsmi)
>>> Cc: server-devel at lists.laptop.org
>>> Subject: Re: Edublog notes (was: Re: The road towards xs-0.3 - 
>>> update)
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 7:09 AM, Greg Smith (gregmsmi) 
>>> <gregmsmi at cisco.com> wrote:
>>>> Sanity check on our high level concept.
>>>>
>>>> The core idea of this software is to present an easy to use 
>>>> interface so kids can post to blogs. Enter text, click post you are
> done.
>>> Yes, and that's fantastic. But if I understand it right, we are 
>>> talking about 3 stages:
>>>
>>> 1 - Blogging tool on the XO -
>>>
>>> Something like Drivel, lets the user blog on the XO even while 
>>> disconnected. New articles and edits get placed in a queue and pushed
> 
>>> out when we see the XS. This needs Sugar integration work so it's a 
>>> candidate for a write-from-scratch effort or, more likely, a wrapping
> 
>>> around the abiword-based Write.xo .
>>>
>>> 2 - Blog on the XS
>>>
>>> This should
>>>  - display blog entries like a normal blog does
>>>  - receive blog entries and edits from the xo-based tool
>>>  - allow new blog entries and edits from a web UI
>>>  - allow "approval" stages
>>>  - "forward" blog entries & edits that are tagged 'public' to an 
>>> internet-hosted blog
>>>
>>> Some of this aspects are _complex_, even if they sound trivial. So I 
>>> heavily recommend a pre-existing blog tool. Grab something that is 
>>> good, offers good APIs, is well maintained and known to be scalable.
>>> And then patch it here and there to do what we want :-)
>>>
>>> 3 - Blog on the Internet.
>>>
>>> This bit is not under our control ;-)
>>>
>>>> Let me know if you have any comments or questions and I hope its 
>>>> clear now we are not building another blog hosting system.
>>> Ok, so my understanding (and hope) is that you are building #1 above,
> 
>>> and patching an existing blog tool for #2.
>>>
>>>> Back to the DB. The EduBlog web app needs a table to store its own 
>>>> info (e.g. configured blog URLs, blog user name/pass, posts 
>>>> submitted but not approved by teacher, options set for each student,
> etc.).
>>>> Should we store that in the same DB that moodle is already using and
> 
>>>> just create some new tables or should we create a new DB for our own
>>> use?
>>>
>>> If you are talking about the queue of blog entries on the XO-based 
>>> tool, you will probably want to use sqllite. For the XS-based local 
>>> blog-and-foward tool, you _really_ need to get your head around how 
>>> the core tool works, and you'll find that you want to add a few 
>>> columns here or there. Most blog tools will already have a "Config"
>>> table to hold configuration, so that's easy.
>>>
>>>> In the future we may want to run a query on the moodle DB and web 
>>>> app DB. E.g. get user name, class and school from Moodle DB then 
>>>> look up configured blogs in web app DB.
>>> IME the blog tool will expect to have a copy of the user profile to 
>>> be able to run joins across the data, and grab the relevant bits. So 
>>> you'll want to copy the "user profile" data into it, and lock down 
>>> the "user profile" editing in the blog tool itself.
>>>
>>> It's a bit of work - I know - but it's very important that we avoid 
>>> reinventing the wheel. Building a blog is a huge job - easy to get 
>>> started, but pretty near impossible to get to the level of polish you
> 
>>> expect, and to keep it maintained long term.
>>>
>>> If we reuse an existing blog, what we get is
>>>
>>>  - a solid base to build upon
>>>  - a pre-existing community that can help you, and that will keep 
>>> improving and fixing the blog for years to come
>>>  - if you hit a bug, and fix it, it can be merged upstream
>>>  - if you develop a useful enhancement - the review stage you mention
> 
>>> and the "forward to another blog" are good examples - it can be 
>>> merged upstream
>>>  - a few customisations that are local to us - hopefully minimal
>>>
>>>> BTW last time I wrote an SQL query it ran against Oracle 8 (AKA 
>>>> years
>>>> ago) so let me know if my use of "DB" and "Table" is unclear or not 
>>>> relevant for PostGres.
>>> Database and table are more than relevant - they are crucial :-)
>>>
>>> The most important thing is to pick the best upstream, understand it 
>>> thoroughly (warts and all), and develop a good relationship with the 
>>> existing upstream core dev team. If you guys get that right, the rest
> 
>>> is a SMOP :-)
>>>
>>> cheers,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> m
>>> --
>>>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>>>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>>>  - ask interesting questions
>>>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
>>>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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