International Women’s Day: Kalia Vandever - "Temper The Wound"

 INDIVIDUAL

|

 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC   

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP

Temper the Wound	Wound
	Wound

Kalia Vandever

BBC Radio 3: J to Z International Women’s Day Special

My Moon Mission? "The Stack"

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group

I choose  ... [still] to try . 4.6 . . . 8.7.5 and c o u n t i n g . WAMP Windows Apache MySQL PHP Command Line Interface [VirtualBox, Vagrant ...] PHPMyAdmin  JQuery git HTML5 CSS Drupal APIs Themes & Modules*^ Create Custom T&Ms #? . to journey ... to explore ... to learn ...	Saturn V Reference Dimensions: http://heroicrelics.org
The Drupal slogan is: "Come for the software, stay for the community."	The Stack

*What are the requirements of your project?
^What themes and modules are available 'out of the box'?

^#If the themes and modules you require are not available you can create your own.

The idea of using Drupal (or other CMS) is to use the software to do the 'heavy lifting'.


Image source:
http://heroicrelics.org/info/saturn-v/saturn-v-general.html

Stamping about the world and Hodges' model

I don't know if they say things about stamp collectors but there's one over here. In mitigation I'm of the dormant type, it's more about buying gifts for junior family members. Things to keep if the recipients are minded to. Over the years stamps have taught me a great deal: the rise plateau and fall of an empire; the changing face of Africa and the 'Rest of the World', the politics of the world and the truth and lies behind geographic projections. Like painting, drawing and other possibilities the stamps are there, imprinted on my brain as a possible thing to do.

As a mental health nurse I've come across many people (demographically predictably usually males) who have planned for retirement for quite a while and then when it happens the impact is a psychological sledgehammer. While it's also surprising to learn of the people who do not have any interests, you can also see how trite, inappropriate, insensitive ... the question of "Do you have any hobbies?" can seem.

That's because when you listen and hear:

the harried, hesitant, hopeless bound accounts of not knowing who is looking back in the mirror in a morning. Why am I standing there at all? Walking the dog, whatever the month, you see the crucial umbilicus is failing. The one that connects me simultaneously to myself, others, the world at large and joie de vivre:

then you know.

Then you listen and watch for the positive change working with colleagues. You look for the chinks of light that might show the darkness is perforating and the light shows through. Maybe then there is promise in hobbies and interests of all kinds. Keeping mind, spirit and body active, alive. 

Maybe though - it is just being able to be once again.

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic --------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL
|

group

Dr. Arieti, Italy, pinterest.ca	Einstein, stamp, ebay.com
Australia, Community, Stampgallery	UN Stamp: End Violence Against Children unstamps.org

Drupal tinkering - Salamander's in the sand

I keep thinking of drawing a line in the sand as to when the new Drupal site will go live, but then a curious clucking sound takes over and my arms flap uselessly at my sides. The image below is a screenshot using the Salamander theme for Drupal 6.2. As you can see I have not altered the themes default logo, or the colour scheme; but I'm starting to find my way around the menus at last.

I've started to add other users and as you can see have created a forum with topics and posts. The rail ticket image is neither transparent, nor exactly territorial in disposition. It should be possible to set a default vertical and horizontal spacing for images in the archived content. There is another choice to be made in which drop capitals format to adopt. Having read through jQuery in Action, it is time to revisit the book and really experiment.


Assuming there is a community out there - a series of forums on Hodges' model must be at the heart of the new site, but this begs the question of what tools would a community of Hodges' model users need? Drupal's content types can be extended, but how much effort (if any) should go into such resources? Should they be ready-rolled, or should the community identify the need, specify the requirements and produce the goods? Can an MSWord.doc h2cm template provide a start, or is a more adventurous seed required?

So far several people have used the model for their studies or in specific clinical areas. It makes sense then to try to produce a content type that can be configured by the user for these purposes. It makes even better sense to invite registered users to post their contributions. While I continue to piece the new site together, I must investigate the available Drupal modules and Open-EHR. I had heard of 'Open-air' before in passing and last week at Harrogate learned of it in more detail. I wonder what form and scope the archetypes take? Open-EHR may be far too sophisticated for our purposes, but now is a good time to check.

Drupal 6 themes and tools

Of the themes I have downloaded that work with Drupal 6 Four Seasons and Bluebreeze look worth pursuing. Transferring over the style sheet used in Drupal 5 with Denver caused quite a few problems as expected. Commenting out some of the global styles one-by-one and noting the effects can't avoid the sense of work to be done. Here is D-6 Bluebreeze:


In the above image, the panel on the left is one of the modules downloaded and enabled. There are no more than two users at present, so I'll disable this for future use. The fixed-width version of Bluebreeze may be needed as off to the right there's yet another tab - 'Book'. I'm going to bring over the draft glossary page, it might prompt me to add some terms.

One of the tools that should prove itself has placed a tick box 'Themer info' in the lower left corner of the screen as illustrated below.

When activated you:

Click on any element to see information about the Drupal theme function or template that created it.

There's a problem though when I try to access 'modules' -

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 347727 bytes) in C:\....module on line 1291.

Mmmm.

Drupal Themes - eeny meeny minny mo.....

I've been going through the Drupal themes again, this time with a fresh pair of eyes - having tinkered and read a little. The themes that stand out for the h2cm archive project include:

• Aurora
• Brushed Steel
• Denver
• Flexible
• Foundation
• Itheme
• Meta
• Multiflex37
• Salamander
• Stylized Beauty
• supriya
• Wall

With the admin theme fixed, I've been enabling and making the themes default in turn. Some of them stand out straight away in terms of fitting the content and the styling. Unsurprisingly, others mess up positioning the title and the menus - although I have been messing about and I'm not using the theme engines. The other two requirements I have - page printing and accessibility are also varied. As the names above suggest some are bare bones that you can adapt yourself, including Zen which is were I am up to. I'm going to need to decide soon! In Mercer's book though, he advises taking some time to check through the themes - so....

It shows you Drupal's reach as there are UN templates, yes, that 'UN'. This shows how open source projects often 'give-back' the community as a whole.

There are four of us so far for Wednesday's Drupal night. Hope there's a few more.

Drupal + Being and Time

I'm continuing to explore Drupal amid some reading, blocks, menus, content.... Searching for content to practice upon, I checked one of the old (1997-8) introductory pages - Brian's course notes - and found my closing sentences were utter drivel! [Well it was a surprise to me.]

Although the prospect of a winter through spring clean is daunting, it will also prove an exciting completely about-time refresh.

Drupal is forcing me to do things I should have done ages ago:

• Separate the content from styling;
• Separate the static (historic) content from dynamic;
• Review the graphics;
• Thinking about audience(s);
• - and related content and solutions (archive, computer aided learning, prototyping).

Don't panic about the colour scheme in the screen shot below, this one allows authorised users to alter the colour, font size and width (see the very top line). Accessibility is a must this time, plus printer friendly content. The flexibility is quite amazing. There are errors on the page illustrated, the theme is not compatible with the latest Drupal version; but it works. I've gone through my own introductory page and stripped out the FONTS, TABLES and other superfluous HTML tags. What is a real conundrum is the front page.... The A,B,C I mentioned before may come to the rescue as 'this site' will just feature static content at first. So all I need is a menu in the sidebar. Users won't need to register, which may require a multi site config to develop the open source collaborative book.

It's cool to find there is a version of jQuery in Drupal. With a bit of PHP code I can fade text onto the screen - like many other sites and one of many effects to learn (and use sensibly!). Keith's DOM scripting will also finally come in handy through the dark months. I can't wait for the next NW England Drupal meet, it seems ages since the Cornerhouse get together. I'd put the modules and themes in the default directory, oops - that's sorted now. Need to explore content creation, the theme files and templates (CSS!) and the CCK (content construction kit) and views modules. Aarrrgh! Must also dream and think, dream and think, dream:think ....



Have a great week!