edna.edu.au

Open ID now supported in me.edu.au

Just a short note that you can now use your me.edu.au profile url as an OpenID login. For example, my profile is http://me.edu.au/p/nlothian, so anywhere I see the Open ID login option I can use that.

I'm sure someone else will do a nice walkthough of the process.

Tags: openid
Posted at 02:54PM Aug 21, 2009 by Nick Lothian  |  Comments[2]

Me.edu.au progress

I wish I was a more frequent blogger here.

Anyway -  last Friday I rolled out a new code release to me.edu.au. This is the third release so far this year which means we are making slow, but steady progress on improving a number of things on the site, as well as adding features.

One of the major features we have been working on is best seen though the "share" interface.

This is designed to let you share useful resources with your colleagues. While there are plenty of other sites that let you share resouces like that (del.icio.us and diigo are two obvious ones) this has a few unique features.

Firstly, we work quite hard to extract as much metadata as possible from a linked resource. While this metadata isn't all exposed yet you can see the beginnings of what we can do with it in the screenshot above. In that, I shared a link to a FlickR photo page which was marked up using the geotag standard (we support both the ICBM and geo.position methods). Using that metadata we were able to extract the location of the photo and display a map. We also save that, so in the future we could potentially do a position-based search which shows other resources in same area (See, for example the search we built for our colleagues at the Learning Federation). 

Secondly, we consolidate metadata from multiple sources. For example, Slideshare and FlickR rss feeds both support the Media RSS format, which lets us extract and use thumbnail images. Here, for example Julian Ridden has posted his excellent moodle themeing slidedeck on slideshare, which shows up in me.edu.au via RSS:

 When someone bookmarks the same item later in diigo or delicious the RSS will not contain the thumbnail. Fortunatly we can look up the thumbnail for the resource and enhance the display of that item with it. Here, Kerry Johnson has bookmarked the same slideshow on diigo, and me.edu.au has displayed her caption with the orginal thumbnail.

In the future we intend to expose all the metadata we are collecting for each item, as well as giving users ways to edit and organise the items they have shared with me.edu.au.

Tags: me-edu-au development
Posted at 10:46AM Apr 27, 2009 by Nick Lothian  | 

New me.edu.au release

We have just rolled out a new me.edu.au release, with a few bug fixes, including fixing the bug in comment approval. That means it's probably worthwhile checking if you have any new comments waiting for you on your blog:

 We have also improved the navigation on the blog somewhat, so you can add a colleague and navigate directly to a blog user's profile page.

Tags: me-edu-a
Posted at 03:29PM Jun 16, 2008 by Nick Lothian  | 

Bug in blog comments

So it appears there is a bug in comment approval - if you approve a new comment it will un-approve any other comments shown on tthat page.

We'll fix that ASAP, but until we do a work around is to use the "filter" facility over the right hand side of the page to filter so you can only see the comment you want to approve, and then approve just that comment. That seems to avoid whatever triggers the bug.
 

Tags: me-edu-au
Posted at 08:43PM Jun 01, 2008 by Nick Lothian  | 

About the me.edu.au blogging system

So I'm a technical architect at education.au, with responsibilities which include the me.edu.au service. Over the past few months we've been working hard to integrate a blogging service into the professional networking site which we had previously delivered.

The core me.edu.au website is a custom Java web application, built using a fairly standard technology stack (Spring, Tomcat, ROME, Postgresql ,Solr, CAS).

In this latest release we have integrated the open source Java Roller weblogging system using SiteMesh. This has allowed us to almost completely avoid modifying the core Roller code (although we did have to alter the user interface layer in the JSPs). This will hopefully let us take future upgrades to Roller without needing to do too much customization. Most of the customisation we've done to the core Roller code base we've sent back to the project as a set of patches, which will hopefully be integrated over time.

One nice customization we did was to integrate tag suggestions from communities of interests. This means that this particular post will show up in the me-edu-au community, because I tagged it me-edu-au.

Because Roller is a separate web application, we have been able to deploy it in a separate Java Virtual Machine. This allows us to increase the reliability of the site as a whole, because we can partition upgrades and do downtime for each application separately.

We have also integrated the blogs into the me.edu.au search using Solr. For example, a search for "blog" now will return everyone who has created a blog within the system, and can be facted by blogs, blog posts and comments, as well as all the standard facets which previously worked (communities, people, etc).

Thanks to the entire team who worked to build this. I'm sure I'll miss more than one person, but Ben (who did most of the coding), Kate, Jo, Jane, Kerry, Mark D, Mark TF, Michael J, and Graham have all made significant contributions at various times.

Tags: technology me-edu-au programming
Posted at 09:25AM May 29, 2008 by Nick Lothian  |  Comments[2]

First Post

Welcome to the me.edu.au blogging system!
[Read More]

Tags: me.edu.au
Posted at 04:59PM May 28, 2008 by Nick Lothian  |  Comments[1]