Mobile JWiki

On the side as of late I’ve been working with Tim Jore at Distant Shores Media to help them create ajaxy goodness for their MediaWiki-based site at http://door43.org that features free and open licensed contributed discipleship resources for everyone in every language, including an open Bible, open Bible School, open worship music, etc. Anyway, I’ve just released a new application for them that dynamically has the ability to turn their entire wiki into a mobile online/offline application.

So if you are using MediaWiki, or would like to mobilize someone else’s Web site or wiki, you can find the simple 1-2 pages of code here: https://github.com/rwadholm/Mobile-JWiki. The code can be put on any server anywhere (that supports PHP 5.3), and will create a mobile offline/online version of whatever site you point it  at (out of the box it works with MediaWiki) via PHP,  JQuery, JQuery Mobile, and HTML5 (and it works as well without javascript enabled, so for non-smartphones it’ll still serve up your mobile site just fine). Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but you could even use it to make your own mobile offline/online version of Wikipedia that’s hosted on your own server.

The real purpose, however, is to allow users of wikis in areas with spotty internet connectivity or expensive data plans to be able to learn on the go, using their phones, without a continually active internet connection.

The Little Library Beta 1 Release

The Beta 1 version of the Little Library application was release earlier today (to mild applause by my family). You can check it out here:

https://github.com/rwadholm/The-Little-Library-Beta

Follow the instructions on that page, and you too can be the proud owner of a test library! You’ll be doing the world a service by breaking things now so they don’t have to later. Please send any comments and feedback my way.

Some new features include syncing with other libraries (actually works now!), automatic creation of an online library, a three page End User License Agreement that quotes Patrick Henry, file validation (to avoid loading those pesky malware files onto your computer and in the cloud), optimized iOS page sizes, automatic thumbnails for any items that have images in them, and the ability to upload and view multiple files for every item in your library. This last feature allows you to use your library as a private Web server. You could host every file of a website you’ve made in one item, and when users click on the item–BING!! (not really “BING”, I actually prefer non-microsoft products), they’re at your hosted Web site. So you could share your library with them, they could make changes, share with you, and you can have a dynamic Website between friends. How lovely.

Beyond Web sites, you could include all of the Word documents, books, videos, audio and images you wanted to all in the same library item, so that you can serve up a college course, a series of videos, a compilation of songs, etc. all packaged together nicely. You’ve just got to make sure the content is owned by you (as in, you created it, or you found it with a Creative Commons license that allows you to share it). That’s because the End User License Agreement requires you to only upload and share Creative Commons or Public Domain or other similarly licensed content.

So you can think of the Little Library not as a file repository, but as a multi-device, peer-to-peer, distributed online/offline open content bazaar based on bleeding-edge technologies like JQuery Mobile, HTML5 WebStorage, and CouchDB. Although that is a bit wordy…

More to come.

JQuery Tools

I have begun to use JQuery Tools for tabs and other minimally animated content. You get six JQuery related plugins in one package, all of which are hosted on a CDN so scripts don’t take up server space or bandwidth. Pretty clean coding and easy to expand. I’ve reworked their tabs and pop-up descriptions on a new site that I’m developing for the IU Theatre and Drama Department here: http://www.indiana.edu/~coas2/thtr/facilities/layout.shtml. This tool has allowed me to focus on specialized scripting rather than patching together many different JQuery plugins to do what I want them to. Also exciting is the release of JQuery 1.4 in January. I’m loving their new API documentation on their redesigned site, and some of the new features that come standard now.

The beauty of frameworks and tools like these are that they are easy to use and learn, and they allow us to focus on content and specialized tasks, and leave the rest to the framework. They are also open and heavily documented all over the internet. And extending them is very simple. This allows us to save time and money and hopefully allows our pages to be more accessible and interactive at the same time. If you haven’t already, try them out. There’s nothing like the feeling you get making stuff move around on a screen in a useful way.

Learning to Blog, Blogging to Learn

Last summer I finished an E-learning solution for highschool and college teachers who would like to learn how to use blogs as a part of their instruction. Videos, links to online resources, and walk-throughs are provided in this extensive (2-3 hour) self-directed tutorial website. Feel free to use these materials in any way you want (think of the content as open source, as well as the code).

The Open World

This week after work I was hanging out on the curb by my building waiting for my wife to pick me up in our car. The sun was shining, and I was standing in the shade of a nearby tree. I was thinking through the events of the day. A coworker and I had been working through a difficult Web programming issue, and had been working at it for week or two. While I was imagining a solution, I had a bit of a “Zen” moment.

I have been reading Dr. Bonk’s newest book on factors that come together that are making our world open. In an open world, almost anyone can learn almost anything at almost any time of the day or night and from almost anywhere. In his book, Bonk discusses why this is so and the great opportunities it presents. The book is very personally motivating and is energetically written. It is hard not to absorb his positive outlook on the world. I find it hard to read more than 50 pages without going out and checking out the things that he discusses. He’s so excited about these new opportunities that his enthusiasm convinces me to see them and try them for myself. Anyway, back to my Zen moment.

There I was under the tree thinking about computer programming problems. I thought about how much of programming these days is done publicly (open source, or freely available on the Web). The Web programmers in our world, by and large, are open to sharing their knowledge and expertise online. Asynchronously I can just Google a problem I’m having and check out many different solutions and work my way to solving my own problem with help from other experts.

Now, my dream in life is to be a missionary and help people in other parts of the world. I’m getting this degree only because I think it might help me to do this. One skill I have to offer and share with the world is designing and developing for the Web. I could help others learn this skill and pass on this knowledge so that they can become self-sufficient knowledge creators and sharers. If I helped impoverished people to develop these kinds of skills and helped them to see opportunities in their world for growth, I could help them in a small way. This knowledge could really open their world. And that’s when it hit me: all this time I had been reading and rereading Bonk’s book on an open world, I had not really grasped at a visceral level what he meant by an open world.

Until that moment.

I now realized that the world is opened to those with whom knowledge and skills are shared. And that is what is happening in our world today. Learning resources are being shared on a grande scale. And this helps people in the third world by opening up their minds to a whole world of possibilities. If knowledge is power, then we give power by sharing our knowledge. We give the world to others. What an enterprise!