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?

As a followup to a comment I made to Chris on my Visualizing 2010-2011 post, here’s a pie chart visualization of my time spent, by project for OEIT for 2009-2010.

(I’d like finer grain detail, but as it stands I sometimes forget to track even this level of data in a timely manner.)

In 2008, OEIT, where I work, completed a strategic planning process based on Jim Collins’ “Good to Great and the Social Sectors.” In September 2010, we’re undertaking a new strategic planning process. We thought that revisiting the 2008 process and OEIT’s Hedgehog document might be a good place to start.

I started with OEIT in February 2009, so I missed the original process that lead to the hedgehog document. However, I think that I’ve tried to accept that document as the basis for our activities at OEIT.

As I prepare to help the strategic planning process, I just completed reading Jim Collins’ monograph. This post will include what I think are the important aspects. Hopefully I’ll write a followup post with my observations on working with OEIT for the last year and a half in light of the monograph, hedgehog document and realities of how we do our work.

Good to Great and the Social Sectors

The Good-to-Great Framework is essentially a logic model framework. What are our inputs, how do we affect them, to produce what outputs.

Issue One: Defining “Great”

“How effectively do we deliver on our mission relative to our impact, relative to our resources?” p. 5.

What is our Big Hairy Audacious Goal?

“What do we mean by great results?” p.7

“What matters is that you rigorously assemble evidence — quantitative or qualitative — to track your progress?” p. 7

“Any journey from good to great requires relentlessly adhering to these input variables, rigorously tracking your trajectory on the output variables, and then driving yourself to even higher levels of performance and impact.” p. 9

Issue Two: Level 5 Leadership

Is there/should there be a goal to move everyone in the organization toward the top of the Level 5 leadership pyramid? p. 12

Issue Three: First Who — Getting the Right People on the Bus, Within Social Sector Constraints

“The great companies, in contrast, focused on getting and hanging on to the right people in the first place — those who are productively neurotic, those who are self-motivated and self-disciplined, those who wake up every day, compulsively drive to do the best they can because it is simply part of their DNA.” p. 15

Issue Four: The Hedgehog Concept

“The Hedgehog Concept of the good-to-great companies…reflected understanding of three intersecting circles: 1) what you are deeply passionate about, 2) what you can be the best in the world at, 3) what drives your economic [resource] engine.” p. 17

What is OEIT’s Hedgehog Concept? What is our 30 second elevator speech?

Issue Five: Turning the Flywheel — Building Momentum by Building the Brand

“Remaining true to your core values and focused on your Hedgehog Concept means, above all, rigorous clarity not just about what you do, but equally, what not to do.” p. 26

“To do the most good requires saying ‘no’ to pressure to stay, and the discipline to stop doing what does not fit.” p.27

Summary

“Preserve the Core and Simulate Progress. Enduring organizations are characterized by a fundamental duality. On the one hand, they have a set of timeless core values and a core reason for being that remain constant over long periods of time. On the other hand, they have a relentless drive for change and progress — a creative compulsion that often manifests in BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals). Great organizations keep clear the difference between their core values (which never change) and operating strategies and cultural practices (which endlessly adapt to a changing world).” p. 35

Reference

Collins, J. (2005). Good to Great and the Social Sectors. Jim Collins.

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.