Cormac’s blog

I’ve just spent the last few days trying to set up the wiki and this blog, and to iron out the problems I’ve encountered along the way. Firstly the wiki, well, it was pretty farcical, since I had only used FTP transfer once before, briefly - and installing MediaWiki is probably not the best thing to start off with (!). After pestering the tech support people at siteground (my webserver) to reupload the first mediawiki folder that I had attempted to upload, and to get the wiki working, I promptly went and demoted my default (”bureaucrat”) access rights on the wiki - meaning a whole fresh installation had to be done - hmm. Then, MediaWiki customisation - the daunting task of editing a PHP file in order to allow image uploads. I’ll spare the details - suffice to say it was horrendous - and utterly baffling. I had a broken wiki for a day or so, got the siteground techies to upload a new “localsettings” file (pretty fundamental), and at least I had a wiki again - albeit pointing to the wrong database (!). Then, between attempting to turn on image uploads again, redirecting the wiki to the right place, and uploading a logo (Jenni’s Wikiversity logo contest entry), the whole thing went arse-up again. It finally took me giving Sebmol access to my website via FTP, and him cleaning up all the mess himself - including some of the mess left by the siteground techies. (Sebmol has earned a place in my eternal Légion d’Honneur - or, at least, a night of free beer when I next visit Berlin.) I suppose I didn’t think it was going to be easy to set up a wiki - and it certainly wasn’t. Hey, I just edit the things…

As for this blog, well, it’s been around since I set up the webspace, but there was still stuff to be done (and still remains). I was looking around for “themes” that I could use - but everything was either so pastel-wishy-washy, slightly off or, just, plain ugly that I knew I was going to have to make my own or, realistically, customise another one. I did find one that was usable - ZaZen - though, which needed customisation for me to be happy with it. It took me a while to figure out how to deal with the plugins necessary for the theme to work - but at last I’ve got something that at least functions in a basic sense. I still need to test that it all works, and make a few tweaks to the design once I figure out to carry them out, but this is all part of the learning curve of taking up a new technology. I’m not 100% competent with all these things yet, but at least I feel competent enough to work on them - that’s important. And, anyway, a central theme of my research is learning from experience, so how much more appropriately could I start off this PhD anyway?

On that note, as a final closing thought, I’ll leave with a quote from an email I got from a “baffled” potential contributor to Wikiversity who was (along with many others) unsure about what it was, and where to go to look for definitive and clear information on the project - which we still need to do, and which we have a fabulous newcomer working on. She said:

“I think that if you’re on the planet you’re wearing L plates. Irrespective of age, intellect, expertise, education, qualifications or life experience we are all Learners.”

In case you missed it - and I did the first time round - that’s learners with a capital “L”…