Rocket Science

This post details some of the things I’ve learned while examining how to run WordPress 3 multisite (Network) for OEIT.

Peter and I decided not to migrate the individual sites now, pending a further investigation of how to handle the hostnames and Shibboleth integration.

Read more…

I’ve had a case where I need to run WordPress and Drupal side-by-side.

My preferred method is to run WordPress in a sub-directory of the Drupal installation.

So the server’s document root is set to: /var/www/html/oeit/. The Drupal instance is in: /var/www/html/oeit/drupal/. And the WordPress install is in /var/www/html/oeit/haiti-oer-symposium/.

Aside: We already have a rewrite rule in place because our Drupal installation was coded to require the subdirectory <server document root>/drupal. Yes, that’s not ideal. But the rewrite rule has been a heck of a lot easier than going through and changing the custom theme and testing it out. I’m not a Drupal developer, nor do I see a particular need to become one right now.

With the rewrite rule, I needed to be able to let the WordPress rewrite rules take precedence in the /var/www/html/oeit/haiti-oer-symposium/ directory. That actually gives part of a clue as to how the problem is solved.

I originally looked for stuff like “integrate wordpress and drupal” or “run wordpress in subdirectory of drupal”. Ultimately I ran across the suggestion to have Apache ignore anything going to the haiti-oer-symposium sub-directory.

I added the following code to our .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/haiti-oer-symposium/


Here’s an explanation from rick_deckard about how this is doing it’s thing…

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^blog

…

In that case it says
If the request URI does NOT (!) BEGIN (^) with “blog” and the requested URI does not map to a file or directory, then rewrite to invoke drupal.

Put another way
If the request URI is for my blog or a file or a directory, serve that straight up, without handing me off to drupal. So in the case of your blog, it passes you through to WP

…

[And this proved to be key...]

As for the leading slash – run the HTTP Live Headers plugin in Firefox to see what the server thinks your actual REQUEST_URI is (or use phpinfo() on your /blog directory). In my case at least, it does not want the leading slash.

[Our server did require the leading and trailing slashes.]

Source: rick_deckard

So, is it better to know what you’re doing, or just get lucky with copy and paste?

Do you use Firebug in Firefox when doing web development?

Guess what, Safari has a built in debugger that works in a very similar fashion.

In the terminal, with Safari closed, type:

% defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

(Thanks to MacOSX Hints, Enable the Safari debug menu for the how-to.)

I just posted a screencast of a remote presentation I gave on the SpokenMedia project.

I gave this presentation from my apartment in Lexington, MA to the conference in Mumbai, India. (My butt was very happy it didn’t sit in a seat forever to fly there.)

Here’s how I did it.

I was connected to the conference via a Skype call–I would be speaking while someone at the conference manually advanced my slides for the audience. I displayed my slides on my local screen and talked about each slide, asking the person controlling the slides remotely to advance my slides when needed.

To record the presentation, I used Screenflow to capture the presentation on-screen. With Screenflow I was able to record both the slides on the screen as well as my laptop’s camera. This would be the end of the story if the screencast recording worked perfectly. Of course it didn’t.

As I was starting I was asked if I could switch on my camera in Skype. I tried doing that, but the output from the camera was already “captured” by Screenflow and Skype wasn’t able to use the camera. When I switched back into the presentation, it seems Screenflow didn’t like the fighting over the camera and it messed up the display of the slides. Though, thankfully, it kept recording the camera’s video and audio.

Screenflow records the desktop and the video camera as separate tracks–ok, great, I’ll just create another “good” recording of the slides and then replace the one track with the other After some simple trim edits to each track to line things up and I’d be done. Not so fast. It seems that Screenflow doesn’t include support for doing what I wanted to do–the edit tools really are designed for much simpler tasks and not splitting video+audio tracks into 23 segments and moving them around. Great.

Ok, time to bring in the big guns–so I switched to Final Cut Express HD. (I could have done this all in iMovie–I just didn’t want to use all of the space on my hard drive to save the bloated iMovie import files.) After some futzing (I’ve done video editing in the past, but I’ve never used Final Cut) I was able to produce the video you see above. I tried using the screen capture of the slides, but in the end I found it easier to just import the slides as separate images. Also, I probably should have included some more transitions and probably done a bit more with the audio leveling. But, I figured I had spent enough time to get the output that you see above. Mostly because it took 2-5 hours to render the video on my laptop–and I was tired of losing all the processing performance on the laptop during the day or setting it up to render overnight.

Guess, what?

Apple has a built in way of taking a screenshot on your iPhone. (Which explains how I’ve inadvertently gotten a screenshot in the past.)

Hold down the Home button and the sleep/power button on the top of the phone for 1 second. (Keep in mind that holding down this button combination for 10 seconds can cause the phone to reset. Also this requires a 3G or newer iPhone running iPhone OS 2.x+.)