VuFind UConnect SSO
VuFind is the library catalogue system and UConnect is USQ’s custom SSO system that was developed. I’ve gone through and built an integration between the two which looks like the following:

I talk a bit more about VuFind, SSO and authentication in an earlier blog post.

Book Finder
This is primarily the work of Ken MacAlpine who is working on mobile technologies at USQ. Ken developed an SVG powered map of the top floor of the library to aide in the location of books. He put together a database of roughly where the catalogue numbers stop and start for each shelf on each side. It has been integrated into the catalogue and shows up as a “Show on Map” link for Toowoomba Main Collection items.

At some point in the future we will work to expand it to all campuses and collections. When it is clicked it appears in a new window like this:

It is aimed to be the same size as an iPhone display so that it fits neatly there. It also works in all browsers that support SVG. Fallback support is provided for IE since it doesn’t support SVG yet.

ePrints, RPCS and data conversion!
As an interesting exercise I also spent some time converting data from an internal reporting system, RPCS, into our open access repository – ePrints. This was a fun project which required connecting to RPCS’ MSSQL database and outputting an XML file for ePrints to eat. To do this I figured I’d pull out Web Matrix, Microsoft’s cut down editor for web developers. It feels on par with Geany though it has a built in web server, request tracking and a database explorer. It also integrates with the Web Platform Installer product which means I can easily install other applications. I used Web Matrix to kick start the Joomla! install for the Access All Databases research project as well.

The RPCS data is loaded into our ePrints system along side the Author ID project that existed there. We’re also pulling across the data from their system which is going to result in duplicate authors until we merge them down to uniques however doing so in an automated manner isn’t easily possible. There is a whole heap of work to get things together but all in all we’re doing well.

EQUELLA Moodle module
Last but not least I’ve been playing with the EQUELLA Moodle module. It adds an extra option to the Moodle resource drop down and enables access to select items from the EQUELLA repository software.

I’ve used Web Matrix here to deploy out a quick Moodle site utilising the same Web Platform Installer technology and managed to get up and running quickly with everything. The deployment of the module to our main Moodle environment would enable lecturers to directly select course readings to embed in relevant modules on their Moodle course pages – exciting!

Until recently my mum who lives in a rural area didn’t have a unique rural property number for her new house. As such she used the one for the old house and the post man knew which one to deliver too. At one point she got a new number and I was trying to send her something. Curiously all of the systems attempted to autocorrect me to the wrong address – a now vacant house. In some cases (Queensland Motorways) I had to fight the system to let me have the address I knew to be correct.

My present situation is more interesting. I have two problems: I live in a new suburb and I live in a new unit complex. Some systems will complain that the suburb I’m in doesn’t exist and will flat out refuse to let me have it as a valid address. I find this a joke, I mean you’re saying that because you don’t know where I live you won’t let me set that as the address and would rather I set the “wrong” suburb just to suffice validation? In other situations they will let me have the suburb (yay!) but then refuse to acknowledge I live in a unit. In these cases the unit qualifier is dropped or suggested to be wrong.

The depressing thing is that my experiences ranges from three different levels:

• They suggest I have the wrong address but let me keep it as one of their suggestions.
• They suggest I have the wrong address and make me go through multiple levels of confirmation before they let me keep it.
• They don’t let me enter my correct address and refuse it.

What worries me is that this happens all together. The user entered their address and while having an AJAX powered suggestion box would be good as insulting your users by suggesting they don’t know their own address doesn’t help very much. I could see value in suggesting a better suburb match however in my case when universally the application is broken until it next gets an update from whoever it is that hands out addresses – straight out suggesting I can’t enter my address is your failure not mine.

This time they’ve changed tactic. Instead of guessing where you are they ask you what your post code is straight up. I punched in “4350″ knowing there isn’t a Bunnings within a good 50km or more. It then asks me which one of 44 matches I’m actually in. Your next nearest store is more than an hours drive and 80km away. The one after that is an hour and a half with 100km! IT DOESN’T MATTER WHERE IN 4350 I LIVE BECAUSE ITS ALL THE SAME! STOP WASTING MY TIME!

Harvey “it’s hard to get people to work in my stables” Norman doesn’t fare that much better with its location finder. Though after interrogating you about which suburb you live in it has the gall to show you just how far you are away from its stores. I couldn’t pick a location in 4350 that put any of the other stores closer than 60km, that included Athol which was 12km away from the store. I mean seriously, IF NONE OF THE OPTIONS GO ANYWHERE ELSE WHY WASTE MY TIME? I live in Toowoomba, it’s a small town. You’ve got one near by store for 4350 how about you just get along with displaying me the information that I need? Otherwise you’re just making your service more irrelevant. I could have just as easily found “Toowoomba” on the list of “Queensland” stores instead of this arduous affair about selecting which one of 40 suburbs I live in after I told you my postcode.

Location services are supposed to make my life easier and quicker not make it so I have to jump through just as many hoops of pointlessness.

The long and the short is if you want to test out the latest Joomla! 1.6 beta release (beta 9 at the moment), all you have to do is add our own custom feed to the Web Platform Installer!

The first step is to get the Web Platform Installer. The easiest way of doing this is going to Microsoft’s Web Platform download page and then download and install the Web Platform Installer. From here it’ll load and have a list of tabs on the left and some content on the right. At the very bottom left of the screen will be an option button that you can select. This will open up a window which has a text box around the middle with a button that says “Add Feed”. This box allows you to add custom feeds to WebPI to enable my custom Joomla! 1.6 feed to work. In the box put in the following URL: “http://update.joomla.org/webpi/webpi.xml” and click “Add Feed”. Hit ok and the screen should refresh and a new “Joomla!” tab should appear. Under the tab there should be a few options, I’ve tagged Joomla! a few different times (in future I might add nightly builds for both 1.5 and 1.6 to aide testing) but there is only on 1.6 Beta package. From here you should be able to install Joomla! and in theory it should download and configure any dependencies (e.g. IIS, PHP on IIS and MySQL).

As a word of warning, if you’re already set up using XAMPP or similar this might interfere with those environments however if you’re new and wanting to get into testing Joomla! 1.6 Beta on Windows and IIS (we always need more IIS testers), this should make your life much easier!

From here I set apart removing extra components until I got down to what I felt was the absolute minimum. I’ve actually been a bit lenient and included a few extra components I wasn’t quite willing to part with. In the administrator area I’ve killed almost all of the components except for content, frontpage and media. The admin modules are gone as a lot of the front end modules. The search plugins are mostly removed except for content and the XMLRPC layer is dead. A few of the templates are dead and I’m asking a friend to make a simple one as a replacement for rhuk_milkyway. I’ve also cleaned out some images and I nuked a lot of legacy junk that isn’t required any more.

I’m calling it Pine Tree as a difference though since I don’t really take apart the framework it isn’t that much lighter than a normal Joomla! instance. A copy is available on my JoomlaCode project, check out at http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/pasamioprojects/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=5353. It is slightly branded though not a lot. There is one minor bug fix but on the whole it is a copy of 1.5.20 with a whole heap of stuff removed. Oh and don’t bother with the sample data or migration, either option will likely fail (will probably remove these later). There is also no administrator so don’t bother clicking on that either. Pine Tree template design and quick logo done by Making Digital Design. Let me know what you think.

Firstly I’ll do a quick overview of the two main systems being promoted: Git and SVN. SVN, or Subversion, was developed as a newer version of CVS. Subversion has been referred as a “code wiki” which I feel is a great explanation. It keeps versions of files around for you and ensures you’ve got everything in hand. Subversion is a centralised source control system, so you need a central server to run it on for different people (you can also run it on your own machine as well but there is only one point of truth). Git is a distributed version control system where basically every working copy has a full copy of the tree. This is great for pure source projects and a few other sorts where having everything on disk isn’t too bad but doesn’t work well when you have larger repositories and files that you might want to share. Git doesn’t permit partial checkouts as well so you get the entire repository or nothing. This can work in your favour (you can do stuff like commits locally and do history checking locally) or against you (it might be a chunky repository). Git repositories typically are more compressed and smaller than SVN however Git’s Windows tools leave a lot to be desired. If you’re working with people who aren’t technical, Git can be painful and I’d suggest Subversion. Both are a learning curve but Subverion’s is easier and the centralised control is useful for most projects.

Provider A: GitHub
GitHub are one of the most popular Git hosting sites out there for open source projects as well as being a commercial hosting provider with “private” repositories. For people who are doing open source projects and interested in using Git, GitHub with its 300MB disk space (expandable for open source projects) and unlimited public repositories and collaborators is perhaps the most powerful option in the Git sphere. It is also all backed up as well, like most of the options, so you’ve got some peace of mind there. GitHub have personal and business branches offering different “private” hosting options starting at five private repositories consuming 600MB with one additional collaborator for $7 per month. The plans go somewhat incrementally up from there adding disk space, private repositories and private collaborators. GitHub has a wiki as an option as some point as well as a private/public pastebin service.

Check out GitHub’s pricing at http://github.com/plans

Provider B: Unfuddle
Unfuddle is something I’ve just come across after my presentation on a recommendation from someone at the conference. Unfuddle offers both Git and SVN support as well as a form of a wiki in what appears to be “Notebook pages”. It limits you to one active project but features RSS and iCal support as well as bug tracking, milestones and in the free version support for two people to collaborate. The free version offers 200MB and more expensive versions have file attachments, SSL and time tracking as well as more disk space, active and archived projects, people and unlimited “notebook pages”.

Check out Unfuddle’s pricing at http://unfuddle.com/about/tour/plans

Provider C: CVSDude
CVSDude are a much older group who offered initially CVS hosting but recently handle Subversion. They support Trac which a popular development support tool that integrates with Subversion providing milestone support, issue tracking and integration (e.g. you can close tickets from SVN) and a wiki. CVSDude appears to be slightly below par with GitHub with their cheapest plan offering 500MB of storage, one project and two users (as opposed to five projects and 600MB from GitHub). They also appear to offer Bugzilla, a popular bug tracking software (perhaps they didn’t like Trac’s version or have disabled it?) as well as DAV storage whatever that means. CVSDude does emphasise that they have better backup facilities than others offer plus the Trac/Bugzilla instance provides more functionality than GitHub does. CVSDude annoyingly hides a lot of information behind marketing so you need to do a lot of reading to work out what they’re really selling for each option.

Their overview page serves as an entry point for finding more information, check it out at http://cvsdude.com/hosting-products.html

Provider D: GForge Group (and JoomlaCode)
GForge Group appear to offer free one project per person hosting on their stack with a 75MB space offering. You can add up to five people to the project and it is a private project. GForge offers a wiki, mailing lists, forum, file release system, tracker and a few other tools as well. It has the interesting caveat that if you don’t log in for 30 days your project will be permanently deleted. GForge are selling a stand-alone product more than anything so they’re encouraging you to head that way with that however as an item it is an interesting. It looks like you can add to it however their store link didn’t appear to be working properly. JoomlaCode is powered by GForge AS and offers many of the same features (version control currently limited to SVN though GForge AS supports CVS and GIT amongst other things). JoomlaCode’s hosting is free for GPL non-commercial Joomla! related projects and is offered as a service to the community.

Check out http://gforge.com/gf/register/?action=ProjectAdd for more details.

Provider E: PixelNovel
PixelNovel is another host I’ve just seen today that offer a tool for Adobe Photoshop that integrates Subversion straight into the tool. This means that you don’t need to jump out of the system to handle it and it also does previews of the Photoshop files for you for when you’re going back in time. The standalone Photoshop plugin will work with seemingly any Subversion repository and costs around $60 per licence though it would appear you can pick up a free copy with a PixelNovel account which offers 100MB for nothing and goes up from there.

Check out their pricing and plans at http://pixelnovel.com/pricing

As with everything before you hand over cash, code or templates read the fine print. Though it doesn’t say it outright, PixelNovel for example will delete your account after two months of inactivity or lack of bill payment and GForge have similar albeit much more upfront text. Some services offer SLA’s on performance and uptime guarantees where as others don’t whilst some mention backups in a very definite time frame (I think CVSDude offers 10 minute backups) and others mention that they do it without many details. Some also offer more tools than the others and PixelNovel has some specialised tools targeted at designers particularly. As with everything the devil is in the detail so good luck checking things out and make a decision based on your own personal needs.

Currently ePrints lists authors by using the creator field of an ePrint. This is usually entered as the cited name of the author. If you have a small number of authors with different names this works reasonably well as the system can differentiate between people without much issues. The problem comes in when people are cited differently or have very similar names but are distinct people. Then it becomes bad.

One way of solving the problem is really quite ugly: you go through and change the cited author to make it look “neater”. In fact one of our library staff decided that they would do that greatly damaging the value of the data stored with in the system, tainting it horribly and creating more work for themselves. The cynic in me wonders that they’re just creating more work for themselves later to go back through and fix it all up. So there is a solution, non technical and pretty ordinary.

So our solution was to turn authors into a first class data set within ePrints. They’re not some unidentifiable free text field with no great purpose (there was a creator ID field but email address was suggested to be used for it) but in fact they are now their own entity which is cool.

We’ve done some different stuff with the author ID project at USQ that I’d like to share:

So an author has a name, they can be linked back to a user ID, they have an email address (both primary email address which should be used for contact and alternate addresses for aiding search), a biography and external identifiers. A cool feature of the primary email address is that when it is updated it automatically gets copied to the alternate email address list,  so you can easily update an email address and still retain the old one (you can still remove them from the alternate email address easily). The external identifiers section provides the ability to list useful identifiers for the author that mean something outside of ePrints. This could be stuff like a staff or student number that you record against the author to help with recognising your users. This is also a new field type developed called ‘Name-Value’ to represent name value pairs of data and provide an editing interface.

But the problem with authors is that they don’t stay the same: they’re dynamic. So they might move around an organisation, shift faculties, join a research centre or even leave the organisation. Recording this in the author record is more than possible but it starts to get messy – we start talking about ‘versions’ of the author but versions imply the wrong concept. A researcher might be working on papers in two different faculties, each paying for his time and each deserving of recognition. In our case we also need to use that information for reporting so that we can properly allocate funds based on research outcomes as well – for us it is important to know who paid for the research.

So to solve this problem I created a system called “author instances”. Author instances provide a subrecord of the authors that permits instances of specific data to be created and associated with the author. Then when an author creates a paper a link is created to this instance and not directly to the author. This allows the author record to contain information that is relatively static and data that might periodically change (such as department or even which institution someone is at) is then located in the author instance. As this isn’t ‘versioning’ per se it also works well for when a researcher is concurrently producing papers for different parts of the institution (or even for bodies external to the institution).

This screen depicts the edit view for an author instance.

The author instance is very light by default, it only contains the author that it is linked to, its display name and a preferred flag. The preferred flag is mutually exclusive within author instances – if one instance for an author sets the flag then it is cleared for all other authors. In the screen shot you will notice an untranslated field called “deptid”. This is another new metafield that has been developed called “Externalitemref” which is similar to the built in ItemRef field however it works on tables managed outside of ePrints. ExternalItemRef takes the params of a table name, a key field and a name field to operate in a similar manner to the ItemRef and link data back in.

The observant will notice that both the ExternalItemRef and the built-in ItemRef field also have a find entry button. This button has also been added to the ePrint item editing screen as well and triggers a popup window which allows easy searching for the particular item (user, author, author instance) that you are interested in.

The standard ePrints creator fields have a "Find Entry" button as well.

So as we can see there is now a “Find Entry” button that pops up with a new window allowing us to select an author instance for this author easily and not have to worry that we’re going to mistype their email address or similar.

This is just a quick introduction into some of the changes that the Author ID system which USQ has developed provides. Ideally we’d love to feed this back to the ePrints core so that everyone can use this, or a similar system, in a great way. If you want to read more you can check out the “Author ID Notes” document on my knowledge base download site.

I’ll start with Safari because that’s where the discussion began with. Many years ago there were two major browsers for the Mac: Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Netscape on a Mac at primary school was my first exposure to the internet which dialed into the local University and used their connection. This was back when browsers still costed money to acquire, we’ve come a long way. At one stage Netscape was shipped by default but as we progressed with Mac’s, Internet Explorer became the default browser that shipped on Mac OS (along side Netscape). Microsoft really had no interest in continuing to develop for the platform that they started their life on (yes, Word was originally a Mac application, which is why it has quirks like Mac’s) and their browser stagnated on the platform. In 2003, Apple announced that they were effectively forking KHTML and building their own browser which ended up being included as the default browser in Mac OS X 10.3 (that same year) with Internet Explorer an alternative and then as the only browser in Mac OS X 10.4 (which was where I started my Mac journey).

It was a bumpy road for Safari but they came out the other end with the open source project “WebKit”. This is significant because today WebKit is used more places than Mozilla’s Gecko engine. WebKit forms the basis of Safari on Mac, Windows and iPhone/iPod Touch for Apple developed products but is now a part of Google’s Chrome browser and their Android mobile phone platform and Nokia are using it with their Symbian S60 phones. Apple, Google and Nokia. There are other browsers that are picking it up, like Epiphany on Linux (moved from Gecko to Gecko and WebKit to just WebKit), iCab and Omniweb. There were also those browsers who were built around it,  like Shiira and Google Chrome. Just recently Palm has joined the mix with their new “Pre” handled being heavily powered by WebKit (you know, the iPhone killer). Really quite scary when I think how out of nowhere really this rendering engine has appeared and taken market dominance away from Gecko.

And Gecko, the engine that powers Firefox that came from the Netscape line. Gecko at one stage was the engine of choice for GUI based browsers for Linux. Sure there were other browsers out there that did their own thing but nothing really compared to Gecko. Gecko powered Mozilla’s Navigator line as well as Firefox but it also held a lot of sway amongst the GNOME guys as well. Gecko was the engine that powered Galeon. Galeon was perhaps for the longest time my most favourite web browser for Linux. It was lighter than Firefox and in some respects has some features that Firefox is only just getting. Unfortunately the Galeon people had a falling out and some moved to Epiphany. Epiphany has never been the browser that Galeon was which is disappointing to see.

Next on the list is Opera. Opera has never really been my favourite browser though it does have some nice features, I just never picked up on it. I continue to have a copy of Opera laying around my Mac but the last time I seriously used it was for testing websites when I wandered complete cookie isolation when both Safari and Firefox were busy being useful. The time prior to that was before Firefox 3 was in beta (Minefield!) and I wanted to test some CSS that Safari 3 rendered fine but Firefox 2 refused to display properly. Firefox 3 didn’t render the page perfectly (still) but it did go a long way to getting it right and Opera got a bit further but not quite there. Opera has some really cool features such as tab previews and their ‘quick dial’ page as well as the ability to embed ‘widgets’ into the application as well which seem to be able to work at a higher level than the Firefox extensions appear to work within normally.

Last on my list is Internet Explorer. IE is these days predominantly a Windows only web browser though in its history there were ports to both Mac OS (8, 9, X) and UNIX. IE also makes an appearance for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating systems as well. It is most revered perhaps for its lack of ability to follow standards and interesting flaws such as the PNG transparency issue. Interestingly since the Mac version 5 diverged using the Tasman layout engine not the Trident engine (Trident being the engine behind the Windows versions which is still used to this day). Tasman aimed to follow the standards and did so quite well and as such it didn’t feature IE’s Box Model bug and had better XHTML, CSS and PNG support (with full transparency and colour correction). The Tasman layout engine lives on today within Microsoft TV Mediaroom Edition with rumours it’d be used in IE7 which turned out not to happen. IE has been known to introduce a few features that have lived on however. The favourite icon support was first seen in IE an the AJAX revolution was started by Microsoft’s XMLHTTPRequest object. IE is also well known for the things it has introduced that have caused issues, such as ActiveX controls, insecurity with various security flaws and inappropriate designed trust models in addition to the fact that each version introduces new quirks and bugs for rendering inventing the need for browser specific hacks to get a page to render the same. Yes, I’m sure every web designer in the world loathes this browser but with Microsoft’s monopoly it is unfortunately not going to disappear overnight. Shame really.

At the end of the day I use Firefox the most on Windows (gaming PC, others PC if possible), Mac (main desktop) and Linux (work desktop). When I was using Windows for my work machine I had IE, Safari, Firefox and Chrome. Most of my browsing lived in Firefox but I used Chrome for my GMail accounts to keep them in their own little play pen away from where I was working. My gaming machine has a similar set up but since I usually only search to work out why games aren’t working (you’d be surprised by how much old games stop working when you change their preferred DirectX version), that usually just means Firefox. My Mac at the moment is a battle ground between Firefox and Safari. Safari at one stage in the last week was the only browser I had open after I got annoyed with Firefox eating CPU and memory. Safari is a might lighter browser and I do enjoy it over Firefox at times. It has features like the ability to save all of the tabs in a window into a bookmark folder and then to open bookmark folders as new tabs. It allows me to save a window full of ‘research’ easily and close that browser window off until I need to work on it again and then immediately everything is back. Until Firefox 3.5, Safari also had a “reopen  last closed window” option which was unique and similar to the “reopen last closed tab” that has been around in Firefox for a while. Safari doesn’t have the last closed tab yet (annoyingly) however Firefox 3.5 nicely introduces the window option along side the tab option (I’ve already used it once since I switched to the beta). Firefox 3.5 also adds the ability to drag tabs out of a window into another window or their own fully fledged window, something that Safari has had for a while and that Google implemented within Chrome. It isn’t as smooth or slick as the WebKit browser’s implementation but it is a start and is useful for those times when you want to break a window out into its own, or join it to another window, but since it has a form in it that you’ve entered details in or something that you can’t easily get to (YouTube video, shopping cart submission, etc) with a direct link. Safari’s version is very smooth and neat whilst Firefox still has a lot of rough edges to sort out but it is a start that it is at least there. The Safari 4 beta had some interesting features that they took out, the fact that the tab bar was merged into the window title was one I liked personally as it gave me even more screen real estate for my web pages, so I’m sad to see it gone in the final. Firefox has the nicer developer tools and I feel at home with Firebug however Safari also has some quite capable tools available. The latest release of Firebug annoys me that they make it more complicated to enable a panel, instead of landing on a panel and having the option to enable it, it tells you to click on a few places to enable it. Frustrating that I can’t click a big button that just says “make it so” to enable it but that is life – since I have the old Firebug at work I still prefer it over the newer one my home FF3.5 instance has. Opera has a small place on my Mac and is really an incidental browser and comes fourth to Shiira, a WebKit powered browser. Shiira has some interesting concepts such as the ability to put a page into a sidebar (with tabs) that you can then use to power the main page. It turns out especially useful for those long link list pages where you click on them to go down into a content page but they provide no easy option to navigating to the related links unless you hit the back button. Shiira also has some other interesting UI changes which makes it my third place browser on the Mac (especially when I am navigating a complex web page with a link structure as noted before).

All in all it is interesting to sit down and look around to see what the world still looks like with HTML5 around the corner it will be interesting to see how the browsers adapt to the future.

Now the original design of Experts Exchange wasn’t too bad. You could ask questions if you had enough points. You could also assign points to different questions increasing in value for importance I guess. You acquired points by either paying or by successfully answering questions. The thing that annoyed me was that if you weren’t the person that was nominated as the one who answered it you got no tangible credit for your contribution even if it helps or even if the correct answer was actually wrong or perhaps not the best response.

But obviously at this point they feel that they have enough knowledge to justify not only spamming their pages with tonnes of ads but also starting to force people to pay for even more. And be aide they’ve been around for a while and have had a good reputation they’re using this plus close keyword matches on the question to continue to drive traffic.

So now with Google’s Search Wiki, we can fight back against Experts Exchange and it’s pointless entries in Google’s index. All you need to do is be logged in and when you see an Experts Exchange result in your Google search make sure you delete it from your results. My belief is that if we get enough people to blacklist and delete those entries, Google will take note and eventually lower the rank of the entries and we’ll stop seeing their results.

The Highfields Cultural Centre and Me

The first experience I had with the cultural centre was through a high school team building exercise. The Highfields Cultural Centre was probably chosen for the simple fact it was cheap and not attached to the school directly. In the past we did stuff at the St. Mary’s Hall but that never really got you away from the school. So we ended up trooping off in buses to the Highfields Cultural Centre multiple times to “get away from it all” making use of the full area with the auditorium. We had special speakers come in and teach us all sorts of useful stuff that I thought never got through to the people who should be listening most. But such is life.

Disco Inferno

Disco Inferno was St. Mary’s musical in my final year which was predictably held at the Highfields Cultural Centre. The Centre staff at times could be decidedly crabby but were usually right when they were doing it. As the Cultural Centre had most of the features that we required it worked well and the staff typically didn’t have an issue with the Stage Manager “Steve Loxley” who I note now works at the Centre. He must have made a decent impression on Rod after all.

Amalgamation

I finished high school and continued my studies at USQ whilst still working at Council. In 2008, Toowoomba merged with seven other local government authorities to form Toowoomba Regional Council. One of the authorities that was amalgamated together was Crows Nest Shire Council which contained the township of “Highfields” and thus the “Highfields Cultural Centre”. At this point in time I ran into a fine chap called “Brent Moore” who informed me of the crazy stuff the Centre had running out of it from time to time and the esoteric promises made by Councillors relating to IT around the Highfields Cultural Centre. Suffice to say, I’m amazed that the place wasn’t mobbed by angry people more often – perhaps that is why the staff weren’t the happiest.

And whilst lately I haven’t travelled out there I’m reliably informed that the Highfields Cultural Centre has been transformed with demountable buildings housing extra staff that have been dumped in there. The mezzanine level is now someone’s office which I must admit is quite crazy. To be blunt: the place has been transformed.

Leaving Council

So last week I left Council, but as I was leaving Mr. Loxley emails me from my personal website asking if I want to do some work on the Highfields Cultural Centre website. He’s emailed me through some information on it with the name of the centre all in lower case (seems to be the present style) and some links to what are decidedly ugly websites (including one with a flash splash page and iframes that seem to serve no purpose, really that bad). Their existing site looks a bit timid but beyond not being regularly updated (probably because its just a HTML page) it seems to be alright. It gets a page rank of three which whilst not spectacular (it should be doing much better than that) means it at least has been looked at by Google. The new design lacks content dramatically so I think they’ll some issues.

Why write about the Highfields Cultural Centre

Well I was thinking about the history and what the place has meant for me. Its interesting to be potentially given the task to redesign the site and I must admit I think it’ll be an interesting challenge. They’ve got a good start on the site style wise but they’re going to need to a lot of work to get it up to scratch for what they need. I was also interested in seeing how hard it would be to get a blog post ranked by Google on their list. I’m not sure how I’ll go but I’m hoping to use it as an example of how easy it is to write some good content and get Google to index it. Hopefully I both get the job and get this blog post to rank to demonstrate my point, I’ll be disappointed otherwise.

Happy coding!

I’m also looking at doing some work on the JAuthTools for 1.5 to improve support. There appears to be some issues so I want to get it back up and running as well as porting/merging some of the features from the LDAP SSI into 1.5 and the LDAP Authentication plugin. I’ll probably also do some update to docs on the wiki as well to reflect the new features.

Things on my todo list after I clean up my released JAuthTools plugins:

• Backlink Manager
• JAuthTools Manager
• JDiagnostics for 1.5

So the solution from the above as to add a redirect to another virtual host on the server:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/error http://pasamio.com/error

Another solution is to rewrite the ErrorDocument to make it return strings instead of page: 

ErrorDocument 400 "400 HTTP BAD REQUEST"
ErrorDocument 401 "401 HTTP UNAUTHORIZED"
ErrorDocument 403 "403 HTTP FORBIDDEN"
ErrorDocument 404 "404 HTTP NOT FOUND"
ErrorDocument 405 "405 HTTP METHOD NOT ALLOWED"
ErrorDocument 408 "408 HTTP REQUEST TIME OUT"
ErrorDocument 410 "410 HTTP GONE"
ErrorDocument 411 "411 HTTP LENGTH REQUIRED"
ErrorDocument 412 "412 HTTP PRECONDITION FAILED"
ErrorDocument 413 "413 HTTP REQUEST ENTITY TOO LARGE"
ErrorDocument 414 "414 HTTP REQUEST URI TOO LARGE"
ErrorDocument 415 "415 HTTP SERVICE UNAVAILABLE"
ErrorDocument 500 "500 HTTP INTERNAL SERVER ERROR"
ErrorDocument 501 "501 HTTP NOT IMPLEMENTED"
ErrorDocument 502 "502 HTTP BAD GATEWAY"
ErrorDocument 503 "503 HTTP SERVICE UNAVAILABLE"
ErrorDocument 506 "506 HTTP VARIANT ALSO VARIES" 

This also fixes the problems, though in a few more lines. This is perhaps the better solution as it wipes out the old ErrorDocument directives that were giving us some troubles and returns a straight string. The next simplest solution is of course to move the Subversion “SVNParentPath” from the root to its own path underneath the root, which is the solution that most people seem to go in for doing.