Thursday, December 9, 2004
Course-Specific Virtual Notice Boards
I've been thinking about the need for Course-Specific Virtual Notice Boards as discussed in the meeting I had with with Roger S. in July. I've had a quick play with the latest version of Blogger, which is quite a bit different from the version I was using when I started this blog (over a year ago).
It seems very easy to set up a blog - even for non-computing people I would think - but the result isn't great for our purposes, because:
- it seems impossible to remove the Blogger "navigation bar" at the top of the page, at least when hosted on blog*spot. Maybe this won't be a problem if I configure it to host on the LSBU server though; I should try it. The main problem with the navigation bar is that it shows a prominent "NEXT BLOG»" link, which could lead to something quite unsuitable for student viewing!
- blog entries get posted in chronological order, but reverse order would be better. I can't see how to change this, although I feel it must be doable.
An alternative would be simply to use Blackboard. This would probably be the simplest option. More and more of our units are moving to Blackboard now, so students and staff ought to be familiar with it. I've heard quite a lot of negative comments about it though - from a usability point of view - and I'm not that keen on it either, personally.
An alternative would be to use some kind of content management system, or to design a simple bespoke system using PHP4 and XML. Having worked with XML for the Expiry Checker I feel reasonably confident about doing this. I can imagine...
- showing posts (presented in reverse chronological order) within
<pre></pre>tags, for the simplest possible formatting
- setting up a separate XML file for each Virtual Notice Board (VNB), with simple password-protected access; anyone who knew the password for a VNB could post to it
- offering a facility for users to register for email alerts from individual VNBs.
cgi-bin containing a bunch of further subdirectories; one for each VNB. Each of those subdirectories could have .htaccess password protection (I'm assuming that this would work within cgi-bin, as elsewhere). Each would contain the VNB PHP script plus an XML file to store the VNB data.
Note (added 30/1/05)
After reading this, James emailed me to relay a message that he had received from John S. (CSD) on this very point...
.htaccess does not apply in the cgi-bin directory. By default if you have used wwwset to setup the file protections on your website, then all the files in the cgi-bin directory should only be readable by the account you are working with. The webserver and any other user on the system cannot read the files in the cgi-bin directory. The whole point of cgiwrap is that scripts run with the access rights of the account named in the cgiwrap path. Without cgiwrap you would have needed to make your script and any data files (not databases) accessible to the webserver. |
Note (added 20/4/05)
Today I came across the "glob()" function in PHP - this looks as though it would be useful for an XML-based system assuming that a separate file is used for each notice board as described above.