EduGlu Sandbox

9:30 -- Re-read Brian Lamb's blog post.

9:33 -- Poked around Stephen Downes' site, reading over some of the documentation on Edu_Rss. Really, I'm hoping to find an OPML file. Bingo.

9:40 -- Create a database on educon20.org.

9:42 -- Go to Drupal.org -- grap a copy of the 5.7 codebase, and the following modules: FeedAPI, FeedElement Mapper, Views, Views Bonus, Tagadelic, and CCK. At a later point, if nothing blows up, I'll probably add in Similar Content.

9:50 -- untar code. Realize I'm curious how long this will actually take, and resign myself to getting less sleep than I originally hoped. So it goes.

9:59 -- upload code to the server. Crack a beer. A good one.

10:04 -- bring site live.

10:08 -- in the process of installing the modules, realize I have forgotten to download the SimplePie parser. Oy.

10:16 -- create settings for the imported feeds, and create taxonomy categories the individual posts.

10:23 -- test import with a test feed. It looks good.

10:30 -- import opml file

10:35 -- first attempt at opml import bombs. Time to increase the memory allotted to php scripts in the settings.php file. Bumping it up to 40M ought to do it. If that doesn't work, I'll break up the opml file into multiple parts. At this point, I congratulate myself on the wise choice made at 9:59. A lesser beer would offer less solace during these times of peril.

10:42 -- second attempt bombs again. Time to try a third attempt, and see if it bombs in the same place. Don't know if I'm running into a php timeout, or a malformed xml file.

10:45 -- third attempt. Fingers crossed.

10:46 -- bombs out at close to the same place. In all likelihood, a php timeout issue. Small curses.

10:57 -- finished editing the original opml file into 4 smaller opml files. The first one imports with no issues -- 100 feeds down. Now trying the second opml file, which is larger than the first.

Note: I'm doing all this via a wireless connection, which is rather silly. When I am uploading files, I prefer to use a wired connection, as there is less chance of a transfer getting munged.

11:06 -- the second opml file bombed -- edited it into two smaller opml files. Trying again now.

11:13 -- the first two opml files have imported cleanly. The third is importing now. After this, two more to go.

11:22 -- opml import complete. Now, to begin the process of importing the feeds.

11:23 -- first cron run begun. In Drupal, there are many wonderful things that occur during a cron run. It is a sign of my general disintegration that I now have an active interest in things that occur during a cron run. During the first cron run, nearly 1000 posts were imported from the various feeds.

11:26 -- second cron run begun. An additional 2000 posts imported

11:30 -- third cron run begun.

11:37 -- fourth cron run begun.

11:45 -- create default views for imported feeds, and keyword directory.

12:06 -- install Similar Terms module -- this is a lightweight content recommendation engine.

12:25 -- for the last 20 minutes or so, I've been lost reading content.

12:40 -- set up a cron job to run automatically. This will serve two main purposes: import new posts, and index the site so that the search actually works. It will probably take about half a day for the site to get fully indexed; after that point, the full text search will work pretty well.

1:00 -- clean up this post. Wonder why I didn't go to bed earlier.

As of this writing, a little over 3.5 hours from when I started, there are nearly 7500 posts imported from around 500 different feeds.

Well, it sounds as if everything went well last night with the arrival of our 15 participants in this year’s Pakistani Educational Leadership Institute, or PELI for short. Although their departure wasn’t all that smooth as it appears that they were caught up in the chaos surrounding a siege on a mosque. Apparently the shooting started while they were leaving for the airport and they just made the airport before the curfew went into effect! Our ITA colleague in Pakistan, Beena Raza, is still sorting through some things back there.

Their transit took them through Heathrow and even with all the recent trouble over there, it appears that it didn’t slow them down as they made it into Logan Airport around 8:30 p.m. EST last evening. As I type, they are probably still making up for lost sleep and aren’t due to make an appearance until our brunch around 11 a.m. local.

The focus of this year’s Institute is on assessment. As this is the fourth year that the Institute has run, it was felt that it was time to bring over some of the senior educational leadership and close the loop on our prior work. I’ll keep folks apprised of our progress as the next three weeks unfold.

[tags]peli, peli2007, pakistan, education, leadership[/tags]

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