Troubleshooting for the Contribute Admin
Contribute is an application that is so easy to use most people probably never take the time to look through the ‘how do I’ section or read up on its features. Rarely will you will run into problems but when you do sometimes it’s just a simple fix and you are done, other times it’s a bit trickier. This post is a collection of common problems and solutions I have had over the past few years as well as a couple picked up from the forum.
General Problem: I can’t connect to my server or Contribute is connecting very slowly or I can’t load my changes onto the server
Solution: Use network I/O logging to log operations and identify problems.
Why? The I/O logging is the first place to look to identify where your problem is occurring. You can quickly find server permissions issues or server speed issues.
Problem: I can’t edit files on the server even though I have it checked out.
Solution: Check to ensure group write permissions exist on the file you are editing. Certain Linux and Unix user set-ups can cause Contribute (and Dreamweaver) to not pick up the users umask settings and the files end up not being group readable.
Problem: I need to edit my source code.
Solution: Many people do not know about the ‘edit in external application’ feature in Contribute. This allows you to edit in your HTML editor of choice and smoothly go back into Contribute to edit the content or just put it back on the server.
Problem: Contribute is not rendering my page properly in edit mode or I want to highlight the places people can edit but I don’t want to use Dreamweaver Templates.
Solution: Design Time Stylesheets – you need to make sure you load the CSS to the server and the Dreamweaver Template itself has it included.
Problem: I need a section of text to have a certain div id or class name.
Solution: Contribute’s application of class or id names to items is stuck with adding them to the tags. So if you highlight a set of text and apply a style it will add that class name to the ‘p’ tags. Try using the library feature to insert a code snip that has the class or id name you want.
Tip: have a design time style sheet that adds a background at edit time so people know if they accidentally remove the region by deleting too much text. They can just insert it again.
Problem: I want to upload different file types to different directories.
Solution: Administer web site, user role settings, file placement.
Problem: I want to modify some style elements on the page
Solution: Page properties allow you to change some basic style elements.
Introducing UW Chatter
Let me introduce to you UW’s very own Twitter clone called UW Chatter. It’s purpose, to act as notification resource for students, staff, faculty, departments, groups, etc. Features it has now:
- post to your groups and stream
- list friends, add groups, create groups, remove groups, etc
- jabber client (uwchatter@gmail.com)
- email to SMS notifications
- email notifications
What it still needs:
- SMS gateway
- other IM clients
- stable jabber
- a production server
- UI love
- twitter API hook in
- mobile version
- a way to post to groups from jabber, right now you can just post to your own stream
About the app…. We built this with Ruby on Rails. It lives on a development box with a Mongrel cluster and mySQL in the back end. The code itself will go to Rubyforge the end of June (as will the rest of our Ruby apps).
Please give it a go, create some groups, post some notes. Try it out! If you join the bug and notes group you can post your thoughts on the app and what you would like to see. We still haven’t written a help file yet so you really need to just try it out!
I was supposed to present this today at Design Camp Waterloo but I ended up running around campus chasing my tail…
Community: TODCON, CANHEIT, DemoCampGuelph, and a Design Camp Waterloo
Just sorting out my travel plans and really looking forward to TODCON 2007 in what I assume will be a much hotter Las Vegas than during the Adobe MAX conference. There is a great line up of presentations this year, Greg Rewis from Adobe will be opening things with a keynote that looks at the integration of things at Adobe, Stephanie Sullivan will be sharing some her CSS magic and show off those cool templates in Dreamweaver CS3, and Robert Hoekman jr will be talking about good design. I will be presenting on mobile web development. If you are going send me an email and maybe we can meet up for a pop or something!
There are a few events happening locally though. Sadly I will be missing two of them:
- CANHEIT which is hosted at Waterloo. For higher ed folks in Canada this is a great conference covering all sorts of issues related to technology and education.
- DemoCampGuelph – this should be a lot of fun
- Design Camp Waterloo – I sorta wish they followed the BarCamp model instead of the one they have but I am sure it will be a good time… maybe next time they can be a DesignCampWaterloo
If you are in the Waterloo area be sure to get out to local events. They are a great way to build a community and meet some really talented people.
Social networks as a tool for campus security
Since the tragedy at Virginia Tech just about every higher education campus is dusting off their emergency plan. Why the Montreal shooting in September didn’t have the same effect is beyond me. I suppose people related it more to high school, although a CGEP is more like a Univeristy campus than a high school… anyway people are looking at security and communication with students, staff, and faculty. For some reason they are fixating on mobile phones and SMS as theanswer to all this. That is wrong, it is only a part of the puzzle.
The problem
The problem is defined as how can we get a blast message out to people on campus immediately. I don’t think anyone is expecting to reach everyone at once but reach enough people that the word will get out quickly. SMS is really good for that. A recent poll of students on the Waterloo campus (1300 respondents) has just over 70% of students with mobile phones. If you have all their numbers and an application to blast it out and you assume most have their phone on, just hope they aren’t desensitized to SMS enough that they will check it within a few minutes of it being received. There you go, problem solved.
There are some problems with this theory though. Like the bouncing IM client on their desktop, how many students ignore the instant message part of SMS? How many have their phones on? How many have the same number they entered (likely more now thanks to number portability)? If students are following the rules, their phones are off or silent in class as well.
I think you will reach a lot students with SMS but I don’t think you would reach enough to rely solely on a SMS alert system. I think an alert needs to go out over SMS, email, IM, post on web pages, and ideally even send an alert over the Facebook Waterloo network (23 500 people in that now).
The solution: social networks.
If you look at a system like twitter, you have IM and phone settings but you also have an active user base. If you sent an alert over a social network that has an active user base I think you are far more likely to reach people. It is just amazing how quickly word gets out on twitter. Back to the Virginia Tech tragedy, students and the media turned to social networks for information. That certainly validates their utility.
With the social network theory as my motivation, I have been working with a great group of people under the banner MMNP to create a twitter like application for the UW community that will have an alert feature. It will send out an alert to all the communication venues the user has in their profile.
I will talk about this topic and demo our application this weekend at BarCampWaterloo. Then I will demo it again at Design Camp Waterloo (they really need to plug that into the BarCamp wiki) on the 17th of May. After that the app will go into public use mode but the server likely won’t be stable for a while. We are just finding our way with Mongrel clusters
BarCampWaterloo this weekend (May 12)
This weekend will be the fourth BarCampWaterloo and the third at the Accelerator Centre. This time we have even more sponsors, I have received a lot more emails asking about it, and more people are signed up! There should be a lot of interesting presentations. If you can just make it for a few hours come out anyway. Waterloo has a lot of innovators with great ideas, we just need a build a better community!
If you want more camping in the area, on June 6th there will be a DemoCampGuelph. As with GuelphCamp I decided to follow TorCamp create a WatCamp page. That page can act as a place to collect information about activities in the region.
