benlog

I’m writing this up in the hopes that it will someday help someone avoid going through what I have for the last several days. I will attempt to describe how to use Visual Studio 2005 to create a Windows Installer msi file that will install asp.net files, create a virtual directory in IIS, make sure that ASP.NET is installed and enabled for IIS, and also make sure that the script mappings for ASP.NET are installed. I’m using C# for coding where needed.

Just to cut to the chase, the real challenge is figuring out and correcting the state of ASP.NET and IIS. Depending on the order of installing IIS and .NET, and probably with some other unknown factors thrown in, IIS may be all set up with ASP.NET and ready to go or it may not have anything from ASP.NET installed at all. ASP.NET may be installed but the script mappings might not be in place, or maybe the script mappings are there. IIS 6.0 adds a twist in that you can have everything installed but the ASP.NET extensions might not be enabled - because, you know, usually when you install something you don’t want to actually be able to use it. Read the rest of this entry »

The first two or three times I set out to start what became this nlog, I started working on my own design from scratch. I picked WordPress mainly based on one positive mention on a website for my favorite RSS reader. Then I set about doing all the templates and all that, until I just stopped working on it. This last time when I came back to it, I just did a clean install, picked the default theme, and that was it.

The default WordPress theme is nice and neutral, and although it wasn’t my own creation, it seemed to fit nicely. In the nlogosphere, though, you have to worry about sticking out as someone who pretends to be all web-savvy but just has an off-the-shelf look to his or her site, just like everyone else who installed WordPress that day. So, of course, the drive to search for themes grows until something must be done.

The thing is, when it’s your personal site, themes are sort of like someone else’s vacation pictures. Some of them look real snappy, but rarely do they express any real meaning or relevance to your own life and self. This one suits me okay, having this great old tyme feel to it, but the urge to find something better or try to make a whole new theme that’s just the right thing is still there.

Answers.com says that doodad is a synonym for widget. It also lists gimmick and contrivance, but I don’t want to complain as much as my last post.

Last Friday I took the time to update my computer to OS X 10.4, which brings with it Dashboard. I don’t have much to say about how new or not new putting JavaScriptlets on your desktop is or is not, but the installation and moving over of my files went smoothly enough that I decided to make my own Widget. I started trying to make a widget that displays a Flickr badge by generating the request that you get from their nice badge creation page, but the problem with that is it comes in as javascript code that you embed in a page, which is not easy to dynamically update. After only having something partly working I decided to rethink the whole thing. Now I use our friend the XMLHttpRequest to pull the RSS 2.0 feed and pull the title, image, and link out of that. Easy. Well, mostly easy.

Whatever part of OS X that does the HTML/CSS/JavaScript, I think it’s WebKit, is a little quirky to my understanding of xhtml. It seems that <div/> is not the same as <div></div> which is also treated differently than a div followed by a new line followed by the closing div.

Hmm, how about some of this drag and drop magic in a Dashboard Widget?

I’ve been more or less involved with people who think, talk, and research about education for a pretty long time now. Since I’ve been slightly on the outside of that, or at least placed my own thinking as somewhat removed from the actual education process, it’s been interesting to observe the changing key words and phrases that are required to be used in such discussions. Some good examples are authentic learning, student artifacts, and there are many more.

I started writing this in order to complain about ajax. When I first discovered that making interactive and dynamic web pages using JavaScript, CSS, and DOM had a new name, I thought it was pretty silly. I remember the DHTML (or do I mean dhtml?) craze, although I never did much with it at the time. That only slightly preceded the tipping point of Flash, and was only slightly less annoying when trying to find Content on a website. I’ve come around quite a bit to accept the ability of a new title for something to have an important effect, although I do still question if the effect in this case is necessarily positive. What I’ve come to realize, though, is that I just don’t like the name. It’s not that it’s a household cleaner, it just sounds bad to me. It’s abrasive or something.

I also planned to complain about blog, which is short for weblog. If I remember correctly, weblog became the new name of web journals sometime around 1999. Just about all of my computer-enthused friends where updating their homepages nearly daily - as a sort of online journal - starting around 1995. I don’t mean to say that in a, “in my day, we walked to school up-hill, both ways,” kind of a thing, just as an example of a thing people did under a different name, that got a new name for no good reason. At least blog sounds better than ajax.

Next up… blogging about ajaxing on my nlog.

I spent some time recently investigating drag and drop with JavaScript. First I found a script for making anything drag-able, which is called DOM-Drag. Then, putting that to work with modifying the sibling nodes of an ordered list is Simon Cozens. Following on his success is Tim Taylor with several examples.

My own adaptation of that is to allow you to move items from one list to another. This could also be expanded from lists to just about any container. The lists are nice because you get good snap-to positioning when you drop your drag, but this combined with those fake floating windows and you could make a File Explorer or Finder simulation and be pretty happy. I haven’t done that yet, but the simple version is over here.