Author Archives: Euan

Waiter, there’s a Baboon in my Drupal! Or how to use Drush in Windows with Babun to manage your Drupal site

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I was struggling to find a robust solution to install and run Drupal’s Drush in Windows with MySQL and rsync all playing along nicely.

I run virtual machines to get around this for the larger, more sophisticated sites, but it’s nice to be able to fire up Uniform Server (my preferred wamp stack) now and again and just run things locally. I have tried a  lot of solutions, but the cleanest so far has been to make use of Babun, a rather cool package developed by Tom Bujok and Lukasz Pielak.

Drush command being run on the Babun shell

Babun (pronounced Baboon) is a pre-configured Cygwin with a lot of addons and lot’s of other bells and whistles including a zsh/bash shell and Git. You can download and install the software via:

Installation

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Annotations on the web – a brief list

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Annotation software or add-ons are valuable tools for academic websites and teaching applications, allowing collaborative discussion and editing of course texts. Here’s a quick round-up of some of the more notable options:

  1. WordPress plugins
  2. Google docs or similiar cloud interactive services (I think we can rule this out simply on ownership/copyright issues)
  3. Code plugins
  4. PDF page-flipper type add-ons that have annotation capability (these are generally expensive and not necessarily up to the job.)
  5. Browser add-ons (e.g. Zotero for Firefox, or Wired Marker) – not practical for ‘public’ use.
  6. Other services
    •  A.nnotate   (http://a.nnotate.com/)  –  An Edinburgh-based annotation service, with free and paid options.

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) Shuttered

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[Original story at: http://paritynews.com/web-news/item/737-the-web-standards-project-wasp-shuttered]

“Aaron Gustafson and two of his fellow contributors, Bruce Lawson and Steph Troeth, have announced the closure of The Web Standards Project (WaSP). It was formed back in 1998 by Glenn Davis, George Olsen, and Jeffrey Zeldman to get browser makers support the open standards established by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The project described itself as a ‘coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.’ Founded at a time when Microsoft and Netscape were battling it out for browser dominance, WaSP aimed to mitigate the risks arising out of this war – an imminent fragmentation that could lead to browser incompatibilities. Noting that ‘..Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality’ Aaron noted that it was time to ‘close down The Web Standards Project.'”