Today I took advantage of that extra hour when the clocks went back and everyone else was asleep and got stuck into some more of the #el30 materials. I started by reading this article/page on Linked Open Data and thought maybe I could contribute. Then I read more, opening this article by Tim Burners-Lee, and my brain was being squeezed a bit like when an octopus goes through a very tiny opening, but not so successfully in my case.
I moved on to watch the next video for Stephen Downes’ cmooc #el30. This one was about how to install gRSShopper. Now I do have a technical mind, but I haven’t moved with the times and got left behind in the second year of calculus in high school and never really got to grips with coding past basic. (yes, basic, but heck, that’s fun too.) Here’s the spoiler though – I DID IT!!!! and if I can, you can too!!
In the video, Stephen goes through the steps in real time. There are a few minor hiccoughs, but with a bit of careful attention and logical thought I was able to follow successfully. I had the video open in one tab and had my c-panel in another so I could toggle between the two. Now I haven’t gotten as far as actually making my subdomain look in any way presentable, but that wasn’t the challenge for today.
The video is all good, and I could do everything until… he stopped going through everything by hand and used some import tool. (see 27.30 in the vid) and there were acronyms flying – FTP win SCP. Oh my. I looked it up and thought that would definitely squeeze my brain without help, so I decided to add the directory by hand, which took about 5 minutes. I could cope with that.
There was a moment of truth when I was really pleased as Stephen said, ‘and now we’ll run the scripts’ and I got no errors! yay!
Then there was another one of those moments when you type something and run it, and there was a problem:
The good news here, was that I could put two and two together and look in the languages subdirectory/folder to check if the files were there. I had forgotten to put those in! They were in the video (at 24.10) – I think I was toggling and just missed those as the video ran.
Then I got to the end and IT WORKED!! but there was a little surprise when I went to see my first post. It said something odd:
(hint: look at the author)
I wrote to Stephen for help and he helped. Hopefully it made him chuckle. Maybe it was a little Easter Egg… everyone puts in a signature somewhere, don’t they? 😉
Here’s the solution: When you go to your gRSShopper home page, click on ‘write a new post’, then at the top of the page click ‘Make’ and then go down to the line where it says ‘View’ and select ‘List’ (it’s right at the bottom). Click on that.
It brings up a long list of 213 things. Scroll down, then go to page 2, and select some script, and you’re looking for the bit that is called ‘post_link_html’. Click the little edit icon and you can change the author when you find the bit of script that has the name in it.
(you’ll see I changed it in the screenshot below)
That’s all for now. My post worked. You can see it HERE. I have yet to figure out how to actually post to different places. For example if I push publish to Twitter/Mastodon it says the connection is off. You know what? The sun’s gone down and I think that’s pretty good progress for one day.
I’m off to play my cello now.
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Congratulations! Stephen was kind enough to set up an instance for me, but I haven’t spent as much time as I’d like playing with it.
Congratulations! Still working on my version.
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