Adlernest Portal Development

Well a couple of interesting things have happened in the last week.

'Carmen' registered on the site after giving tirelessly of hours of her time via email to advise and revise various pages - Medienberichte, Ministerien and Fernschule.

Some of which meant deleting text, adding structure and predominantly improving the grammar and spelling. Sigh - I was always aware that my German wasn't that great but I was a bit gutted to have to change so much.

Anyway now there is an outline albeit in English of what the Medienberichte is there for. I still have to decide what to do about there being one area for images and one area for files. It doesn't make sense for the 2 to be split, and there are fewer images, but the image gallery supposedly is a better layout. Mmmm?



The other interesting thing, at least to me, was that I have had some replies to my questions in the BW.o forum, and even one complete solution that worked - even though I thought what I had done was functioning intuitively.

I am slowly being swayed back from my recent "I hate bitweaver" stint to focus on why this site exists and its potential. Ok, so it is not much yet, but if it lives up to what it could be then I will be satisfied.

I am still too scared to do an update to the software and I don't know that this will change until sufficient releases have come out without event, and bugs are down to a minimum at Sourceforge, to restore the trust that any good software needs to expand its catchment.

Well, after having taken a break of several months I am again applying myself to continue developing the structure of this website.

I have not gone back on IRC for help and have no intention of doing so. I have just started to use the BW.o forums again, but tentatively at best. Time will tell if I get any answers there.

At present I am frustrated that BW does not handle thumbnailing of data files like pdfs, etc. It does images okay, but having used Linux and seeing how effortlessly it thumbnails anything and everything it feels like a step backwards to only have a single icon with the words 'pdf' on it in BW.

Recently I have worked on the University wiki pages structure and it now awaits the contact detail data for each one.

The wiki pages for laws are also now linked to from the front page.

And I have also started the beginnings of a media repository, where articles can be stored and presented for access.

Just wish I could get on top of the html purifier script that I have to write for the exceptions on Adlernest.

Being new to a programme is an adventure for anyone, but most of the time with good documentation and forum support you get where you want to go in a timely mutually satisfying manner.

With learning Bitweaver, I have never felt so DEMORALISED in all my life. There have been some developers that have helped here and there but in the main I get the feeling and have been told that I am wasting their time, purely because I do not know what I do not know.

Where do developers get off with thinking that they have arrived. When did they suddenly go from a newbie to a know-it-all? From the conversations that have seen, they don't know it all anyway. They still ask of each other simple questions about html encoding for example, but thats acceptable so it seems.

Today I had an issue re-occurring that I had launched a bug report about and decided to hop on IRC to find out if anyone knew of anything else I could try to solve the problem. One of the lead dev's started to help me and we went around the block several times before he told me that I was wasting his time, and asked had I read his documentation on the site first etc.

Unfortunately much of the documentation is not for newbies. Not much of what is on the site is. (Thats why I started some). In this instance the pages I was referred to only had one little piece of information about forcing a top_bar site-wide - which is part of what the issue I am having is - its conflicting with the default top_bar somewhere.



This is not the first time I have thought of changing programmes, but man, what a huge task. I feel committed to something that I can't get out of easily. Something that has taken me months and months of my precious time, energy, thought and tears to birth.

One thing that is keeping me holding on by the skin of my teeth is the encouragement I have had from pppspoonman. If it weren't for him I would have taken the site offline and given up totally.

Otherwise really, who needs to be made to feel inferior? Isn't staying in a place where this happens to you, akin to 'Battered Woman Syndrome"?

It wasn't perhaps the most logical thing to do, but we took a weeks holiday the day the site was launched.

As someone said...nothing will change ...the bugs will still be there when you come back! Which is true.

Something though that is different is that there is another dev that is working on the project - pppspoonman, and he seems to be very competent and compassionate. He encouraged us to use SourceForge to report bugs, despite the reticence to register at yet another site; and is doing his best to help solve some.

While we were away there were also a couple of updates to the software that seem to have solved our constant ADODB issues, but new ones exist - this time with Smarty and various BW structures.

Marketing the site is next on the agenda but things need to be 'right' first so that visitors are not put off seeing the potential of the portal for its appearance of fragility and error.

Well, today I threw the switch to open Adlernest, but it is not the Adlernest that I'd hoped to show to the world.

I sat here last night and striped the site of some of its pages, and functionality, because it simply did not function, or I was scared would cause a problem. Even as I went I had errors popping up left, right and centre for me.

I had hoped that I could have structured the site more fully using the wiki book structure but it doesn't work if you have as many pages and we do here - only 700 at present but potentially it will be over 45,000.

There was the thought that perhaps I should not have opened the door at all, until everything is worked out, but I am afraid that may never happen fully - software, servers and databases are all fickle.

My heart broke thinking about having to take what I had create here and transfer it to another programme - 4+ months of learning this software.

On top of that the host server has been blamed a lot - a scape goat if you will, but I am not so sure that it is responsible for any other problem than the UTF8 encoding issue (trying to get the umlauts, eszetts etc showing properly).

Despite all these misgivings, I remain hopeful that this idea will take off (and the technology will cope!).

I still strongly believe that Adlernest could be transformational for German homeschoolers, that it is a practical way to distribute information and combine the resources of a global community.

I as one person can not do much, but we as 100's and 1000's of 1's can really make a difference - one lesson, one book review, one translation at a time.