I am heartened to find that posting an entry visible to ‘everyone in the world’ actually works. Using the ‘permalink’ will bring up the blog entry even if you are not logged in. This is gratifying but I’m baffled as to how it worketh.
The Trackback feature — called ‘inform sites I have linked to that I have linked to them’ — also works.
However, there are still “issues” ….
Exceedingly annoying editing issue:
Another symptom of problems with categories is the following:
Posted by markp at April 26, 2005 04:28 PM | TrackBackIf I click on ‘View Site Entries’ I would expect my blog entries under the category ‘General’ to be displayed but I would not expect entries made with course categories especially after I had specified Publish to : all users of CS-182. What this behaviour means is that the “Publish to: ” course options don’t seem to work. Screenshot of problem. Note also that it’s impossible to know that you are viewing site entries from any of the headings on this page (see also problems with blog views
I am heartened to find that posting an entry visible to ‘everyone in the world’ actually works. Using the ‘permalink’ will bring up the blog entry even if you are not logged in. This is gratifying but I’m baffled as to how it worketh.
MoodleBlogs are given to users. One user on the system is allowed to create one blog. That blog, being user based, knows very little about moodle courses. Does that help at all?
The Trackback feature — called ‘inform sites I have linked to that I have linked to them’ — also works.
The intent here is to eliminate jargon - “trackback” and “pingback” are certainly jargon. Glad it worked for you - it took a while and Dan’s patience to get tb/pb working again.
Exceedingly annoying editing issue:
Create blog entry : apply a course category and publish to this course only […]
This is a bug, thanks for pointing it out. Since the blog doesn’t really know anything about courses it has to know to look for extra data associating entries with courses - in this case it fails to look for (or maybe to find) said data. I have added this to my TODO list :)
Another symptom of problems with categories is the following: If I click on ‘View Site Entries’ I would expect my blog entries under the category ‘General’ to be displayed but I would not expect entries made with course categories especially after I had specified Publish to : all users of CS-182. What this behaviour means is that the “Publish to: ” course options don’t seem to work.
On this item discussion is in order. In question is the definition of “Site”. Is course “A” part of the “Site?” Is course “B?” The assumption I make when showing all entries for the site is that I’m going to show you all of the blog entries that have been published in a way that allows you, the currently logged in user, to view those entries. Are you an guest user? If so you should see only public posts, nothing published to a course. Are you a teacher or student in a course? If so then you should see all public posts and all posts to any course you are associated with.
Might there perhaps be some better wording that would make this more clear? Or is the approach problematic for you?
Daryl
Posted by: Daryl at April 26, 2005 09:26 PMI guess what is puzzling me about ‘world availability’ is how access control is handled. In our Moveable Type system (v 2.6) the user has to set up a directory in his own web space for the blog and has to make it world:write access for Apache to write comments into. But Moodle’s data area is outside the Apache domain and folder heirarchies are allocated per course and not per user. So where are the user directories for the blog system located and how is access to them controlled? Would it be possible to upload files into these directories? Could a Unix based space quota system be used to enforce limits on file space?
The M.T system was great because users could create a group blog that had a group of co-authors and then they could upload files, make blog entries and generally use the blog as a group sharing space (eg http://www.earlham.edu/~markp/mgmt_2003/projects/). This would address the current achilles heel of the Moodle system - the lack of support for students to share material as groups.
I see your point about Site View. I guess I was looking at it from a different perspective. I think of a site as being all courses gathered in a Moodle instance , eg Earlham College, inside the site courses are not visible to each other. Then there is Guest access open to the world. (This paradigm may not scale well and so an additional heiracical level may be needed, eg department). My thought was that I could have a personal blog (or category within a single blog, as here) open to the world, a blog open to the members of Earlham College (the ‘site’) — General category — and then categories specific to each course. When I open Course View within CS-182 I only really want to see entries I have made in categories associated with this course. According to this philosophy the ‘Site’ view would only show entries made under the General category. But this would mean that if I wanted to find a specific post without knowing where it was located I would need to look in all the course blogs I had used. And now I come to think about it, this would be more of an issue for students. So, I think I’m coming around to your position. ‘Site View’ should include all the posts that you have made — and when viewing a different course blog you see only what a guest would see, that is, what has been published to the world.
I’m especially excited about this ‘world publish’ option because I’m hoping to have EC alumni post comments in student’s blogs and make trackbacks to them.
Daryl, I am flabbergasted at the functionality of this blog module of yours and the way that it is wonderfully integrated within the Moodle system. I see a very real synergy here and I do think that this system has a lot to commend it. I was seriously contemplating using Wordpress for student blogs and taking RSS feeds from them into a web page inside the Moodle system. Your blog system however has made me abandon that idea! Moreover, I do think that it will encourage profs who have not even considered the idea of blogs to make use of them.
Posted by: Markp at April 27, 2005 10:58 AMI guess what is puzzling me about ‘world availability’ is how access control is handled. In our Moveable Type system (v 2.6) the user has to set up a directory in his own web space for the blog and has to make it world:write access for Apache to write comments into
Now if you had only left comments on for your post “Blogging in the Wildreness - a How To” I would have answered this question before it was asked.
World Access) MoodleBlog currently only stores text. This text is stored in the database. Folder access is not a consideration yet.
“Local” posting) Check out MarsEdit on Mac OS X. You can manage a blog locally with this and when you are online you can then post your local settings to a server. Moodle Blog currently supports the RPC-XML calls needed for pretty much all text based functionality with this client (and others).
Media) Moodle Blog does not yet support media file attachments. This is a highly requested feature which will be a major priority after its first release I suspect. There are quite a few projects working on systems to allow user file management (DMS, etc) - I do not want to reinvent the wheel so I am waiting for something else to leverage for this feature.
The M.T system was great because users could create a group blog that had a group of co-authors and then they could upload files, make blog entries and generally use the blog as a group sharing space (eg http://www.earlham.edu/~markp/mgmt_2003/projects/). This would address the current achilles heel of the Moodle system - the lack of support for students to share material as groups.
You can find a way to replicate this. First remember that 1 user gets 1 blog. Any user can create any number of categories to post to. A teacher can create categories that become available for all course members to post to. So, it is possible to create a moodle course “Collaboration for CS101” and this course then becomes a post aggregator making it appear as if there were a blog with multiple authors….
My thought was that I could have a personal blog (or category within a single blog, as here) open to the world, a blog open to the members of Earlham College (the ‘site’) — General category — and then categories specific to each course.
Publish state is controlled per blog entry. It is not managed on per user/blog or per category.
When I open Course View within CS-182 I only really want to see entries I have made in categories associated with this course.
I have added, but not committed, a change to the blog menu block which should help I hope.
According to this philosophy the ‘Site’ view would only show entries made under the General category. But this would mean that if I wanted to find a specific post without knowing where it was located I would need to look in all the course blogs I had used.
I’m not sure I follow this line of thinking. You talk about posting an entry to a “site” category but then talk about looking for posts in courses. I’ll need a different or more in depth explanation here I think.
‘Site View’ should include all the posts that you have made — and when viewing a different course blog you see only what a guest would see, that is, what has been published to the world.
Again we seem to be mixing paradigms a bit here. Think of things as “Site view”, “User view” (a user’s personal blog), and “Course view”. Now that you have restricted yourself to one of these views now overlay the selection of a category (Is there a category specified? If so take the applicable entries and remove all other categories.). Then take the person making the request into account (Is the logged in user guest? If so only show items published to world, restrict everything else. Else is the person a teacher of a course one of these posts is published to?) etc, etc
This is achieved using a filter class which checks all these different combinations and returns all applicable entries depending upon the applicable items (thus the long URL you saw before)
I’m especially excited about this ‘world publish’ option because I’m hoping to have EC alumni post comments in student’s blogs and make trackbacks to them.
Trackback/pingback is a real reason for world publish, though students who are members of the same course could see each other’s posts and tb/pb to them as well I think.
Posted by: Daryl at April 27, 2005 12:39 PM