Today's Topic: Course Overview, Weblogs, and CMS Systems

We’ll review the course web site, including the syllabus and the course outline. We’ll also do introductions, and talk about what makes a web site “good.”

We’ll spend some time discussing weblogs. What are they? How are they different from “regular” web sites? What opportunities and challenges do they present for web developers? Weblogs are a specialized type of CMS, or content management system, so we’ll talk about CMS more generally, as well.

Weblogs will be an integral part of the course this quarter. This site, for example is a special-purpose weblog. Each of you will be creating your own weblogs for posting in-class exercises and links to assignments, as well as your thoughts on lectures and readings.

Because the Movable Type weblog software we’ll be using is a set of programs that run on the web server, we’ll review some basic server concepts so that you can install the programs in your Grace account.

At the end of class, I’ll do a brief review of basic CSS formatting concepts for students who did not have CSS in 320 or 741 class.

Readings on Weblogs and CMS

• Wikipedia entries on Content Management Systems and Weblogs
• Meg Hourihan’s Powerpoint presentation on weblogs
• Rebecca Blood’s Weblogs: A History and Perspective
• Blogs open doors for developers (ZDNet)
• Use the blog, Luke (from Salon.com)
• Blogs vs Web Pages, part 1, and part 2 (comic strip explanations by grumpygirl)

Discussion Question: Introductions

Post a brief introduction of yourself in the comments section below, focused on your RIT and web development background. When did you start the graduate program? What are your concentration areas? When did you take 320 or 741, and with whom (or did you have that requirement waived)? What outside-of-class web development experience do you have? Why are you taking this course? What are you hoping to learn?

Feel free to add anything else about yourself that you’d like the class to know.

In-Class Exercise: Installing Movable Type

1) Telnet (or secure shell) to grace, and use pwd to find the full path to your home directory (you’ll need this later, so write it down). Mine is /users/rit0/g1/ellics, but yours will be slightly different.

2) If one doesn’t already exist, create an .suexec file in www directory. (The presence of this file allows the web server to run CGI programs as “you,” so that you don’t have to give write permissions to the whole world.)

3) You’re going to need three directories—one in your home directory to hold the database files, and two in your www directory for the movable type program files and the blog itself. In the examples below, the database directory is called db, the movable type program directory is called mt, and the blog directory is called blog. You can call these whatever you want. The permissions on all three directories must be set to 755.

(If you use the example directory names, the path to log into your blog for editing and configuration would be http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/mt/ , and the path to read your blog would be http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/blog/)

When done, log out from grace.

4) Download the full version (with libraries) of Movable Type, and decompress it locally with unstuffit or winzip.

5) Edit the mt.cfg file using a good text editor (e.g. BBEdit or UltraEdit). Make sure the program is set to save the files with UNIX line breaks, to avoid problems when uploading. (More detailed information on the configuration file can be found in the Movable Type installation documentation, on their web site. This is an abbreviated, RIT web server version of the instructions).

• change the CGIPath variable to be http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/mt/ (if you chose a different name for the movable type file directory, use it here)
• change the DataSource line to show the full directory path to your db directory (e.g. /users/rit0/g1/yourid/db), substituting your path from step 1, and the name you gave your db directory
• Uncomment the following lines in the file by removing the # from in front of them.

DBUmask 0022
HTMLUmask 0022
UploadUmask 0022
DirUmask 0022

6) Edit all files ending with .cgi to include the proper path to perl (/usr/local/bin/perl). (The only exception is the mt-db-pass.cgi file, which does not need to be edited.)

7) Use an FTP program to upload all files and directories in the distribution directory to the movable type directory you created. Most FTP programs will properly set the directories to 755 and the files to 644, but you probably want to check to make sure that’s the case for the mt directories.

8) Using your FTP program, or a telnet/secure shell connection, change the permissions on the .cgi files to make them executable (chmod 755 *.cgi)

9) Open a browser and run the mt-check program to test the installation:
http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/mt/mt-check.cgi

If mt-check.cgi is successful, run the mt-load program to initialize the software
http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/mt/mt-load.cgi

(Substitute the name of your movable type directory if you didn’t use mt)

If mt-load runs properly, delete the file so it can’t be re-run.

10) Use a browser to go to http://www.rit.edu/~yourid/mt/mt.cgi and log in with the default values—user Melody, password Nelson. Immediately edit your profile to change the user name and password to what you want. (The user name will be what shows up on your posts, so choose something you’d like to be “public”.)

Image Files for Pre-test

For those of you having trouble accessing myCourses, here are the image files for the pretest (it’s a 1.6MB zip file with four images in it). Remember, you need to use these—or something similar—to create a composite image mockup of a web page—not an actual web page.

Configuring Your Weblog

On the “Manage Weblog” screen, select “Weblog Config” from the menu on the left.

You need to enter the UNIX path to your blog directory, and the URL to the directory; then add “archives” to the end of each for the next two fields. It should look much like the example below, but with your user ID and path substituted for mine.