Gearing up for another big week of webcasting, as we prepare to guide another group of visiting journalists through a week-long new media technology bootcamp. As always, we’ll have a bunch of great speakers during lunches and dinners, and those presentations are open to the public. Can’t make it to Berkeley? Check out the live webcasts. Especially Looking forward this week to Chad Dickerson of the Yahoo! Developer Network, and Richard Koci Hernandez, deputy director of photography for the San Jose Mercury News.

The new J-School server has arrived! Spent half the day developing a migration strategy to transition sites and services for the school off of OS X Server and onto a Linux/cPanel solution more tuned to the security ravages and configuration needs of pure web hosting (if cPanel ran on OS X Server we’d be sticking with it). The next month will be an interesting challenge as we get that project off the ground.

In the middle of putting the strategy together, the server itself arrived. Along with it, a separate box, very light. Inside that box, two more boxes. And inside those… ye gods! One power cable each. Power cables that don’t require damage protection at all, and that could have been stuffed into a single padded envelope. Better yet, they could have been thrown into the server’s own box - there was plenty of room.

This kind of thing makes my blood boil. Why do so many people/organizations behave as if their actions don’t matter? It’s not just one box. Multiply this kind of apathy by millions and you get… the world as it is. Talked to a Safeway employee last night who was foisting plastic bags on me unrequested. Asked her whether management was talking about banning plastic bags from the store any time soon. Her answer floored me: “No. In fact, we’re not even allowed to ask ‘Paper or plastic.’”

My boss warned me that if I blogged about this, certain perqs would be revoked. This is a test.

Another big week of podcasting coming up as we (the Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley) launch a week of training for working journalists in “new media / digital media” internet technologies. This week will be a variant of last month’s workshop - we’ll be working with reporters rather than editors this time around, and tuning the training to suit. As always, the workshop will be peppered with panels and conversations with fascinating experts, and those sessions are open to the public.

Can’t make it to the J-School? Tune in to the podcast series live, or catch archived versions the following week. I’m especially interested in “100 Megabits across the Digital Divide,” with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, but all of the sessions are bound to be worthwhile.

Knight Digital Media Center April 2008 Lecture Series

My WP-Mass-Upgrade script has saved me countless hours over the past year. Making sure all Birdhouse and J-School WordPress installations are managed via subversion has meant I’ve been able to wrap them all in a single shell script. When new releases emerge, I’m able to upgrade 50+ installs in a few minutes. The most time consuming part remaining was creating new installations when customers needed them. I had the process down to around five minutes, but knew the repetitive steps could be distilled into a script, so recently wrote WP-Create:

Super fast (~30 second) way to install WordPress for clients, via subversion. Yes, users can often self-install via Fantastico or similar programs, but what guarantee do you have that they’ll upgrade as soon as new releases become available? Letting users run old versions of web software is a great way to get hacked. Take control of users’ installations by checking them out via svn (with this script) and managing them with wp-mass-upgrade.

This script performs the following tasks:

• Gather installation info
• Create install dir and check out a copy of WordPress
• Create database, db user, set db privs via external .sql file
• Create WP config file
• Create upload dir and set filesystem permissions
• Generate array line for wp-mass-upgrade.sh

Final setup is done via browser.

Added these tools to the WordPress codex section on managing WordPress via subversion.

The Knight Digital Media Center has been running workshops providing multimedia skills training to journalists for a while now, but this week marks the start of a program expansion, as we offer our first Tech Training for Editors workshop. Rather than Photoshop, Sound Track Pro, and Flash, we’ll be teaching RSS, podcasting, map mashups, and other essential internet technologies to editors looking to expand the web savvy of struggling newspapers.

I’ve been busy setting up WPMU as a mock CMS for the editors to work on, relying heavily on the PodPress, Twitter Tools, and WP-Flickr plugins. I’ve also got the new Prologue theme installed, to demonstrate how publications can provide Twitter-like services of their own (I’ll be demonstrating it in a mini-session on microblogging).

The mid-day and evening sessions will be webcast as usual, but this time we’re adding a new element to the mix — rather than panning the camera to a screen displaying output from the presenter’s laptop, we’ll be using Vara Software’s Desktop Presenter to mix output from the speaker’s laptop with camera output, directly into our webcast software (knock wood). Tune in!

At the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, we use WordPress heavily as a content management system for student and organization publications, knowledge bases, student handbooks, podcast publishing systems, online magazines, etc. Over the past couple of years, I’ve found again and again that WP is not only up to the task of serving as far more than a blogging platform, it’s a great content management system for many types of sites, once you learn a few tricks.

Just wrapped up a marathon coding session, converting one of the J-School’s most popular sites, China Digital Times (CDT), from Movable Type to WordPress. We launched the new site (with a new design by Devigal) a few days ago. This was by far the most complex WordPress installation I’ve worked on, involving around 16,000 posts and 6,000 tags. As with every site launch, I learned a few things in the process. Thought I’d post some notes here for the sake of others going through a similar process.

Nutshell version: Though SixApart (who make Movable Type) claim that their static page generation approach is great for high-performance sites, we’ve reduced the time it takes to publish a new article from almost 15 minutes to a few seconds by moving from Movable Type to WordPress.
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Traditional news media is struggling to retain readership, and it’s all hands on deck to train working journalists in digital media technologies so they can reach the next generation of news consumers where they live (online). That means doing a lot more than shoveling newspapers onto the web, and the Berkeley J-School - in conjunction with the Knight Digital Media Center - has been at the forefront of multimedia training for journalists.

We’re expanding our popular multimedia training program to include training tracks on a broader ranger of internet technologies - map mash-ups, wikis, RSS, widgets, blogs, podcasting, FaceBook, etc. We’ve got two great new workshops in the queue for March and April - one for editors and one for reporters.

The workshops are free to qualified journalists (with stipulations). Click through for application details.

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Technically a few weeks late for a new year’s resolution, but better late than… whatever. Just stumbled across an incredible essay by Ryan Norbauer of 43 Folders: Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness in Work

Norbauer chips away at the notion that productivity and achievement are pathways to happiness, and in so doing opens up a Pandora’s box of existential questions for the workplace. For those of us driven like rats to sip from the sugar-water spouts sticking through our cage walls looking for one more rush, one more minor achievement to fool our impatient selves into thinking we’ve found a scrap of meaning in our lives, Norbauer says it’s time to step back and take a close look at ultimate motivations:

The essential point that we must confront here is that the achievements which seem so important and for the pursuit of which we perpetually torture ourselves are on the one hand futile and the other utterly insignificant. What is the ultimate summit we expect to reach? And if we can’t answer this question, why do we exert ourselves as if we’re heading towards one?

His observations are in part triggered by the release of The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great, which rests upon these core principles:

• Life’s too short.
• Control is an illustion.
• Expectations lead to misery.
• Great expectations lead to great misery.
• Achievement creates expectations.
• The law of diminishing returns applies everywhere.
• Perfect is the enemy of good.
• The tallest blade of grass is the surest to be cut.
• Accomplishment is in the eye of the beholder.

It’s a powerful piece, and one I needed badly to see. I’ve been feeling all of this for a while now, but blaming it on the wrong things: ennui, exhaustion, a fragmentated work environment, my own stupidity. But maybe the problem is that I’m looking for love satisfaction in all the wrong places.

My (fittingly late) New Year’s resolution is to chill more, back off the treadmill, and to remember to breathe.

via Weblogsky

Another week of interesting webcasts coming up at the J-School, mostly focused on questions surrounding the evolution of newsrooms - the integration and embrace of new and alien techniques and technology in the news gathering process.

The talks represent the public component of another digital media training workshop sponsored by the J-School and the Knight Foundation. We’ve greatly ramped up the number of workshops held each year - this topic is becoming critical to struggling newsrooms around the world.

Tune in live, or check back for archived versions.

A student happened across this blog today, and nailed me on it.

“Didn’t you tell us that light text on dark backgrounds was fatiguing to read?”

“Do as I say, not as I do” doesn’t work on 20-somethings.

I knew when I tried that Darkwater thing that it was naughty. But something about the water compelled me. And now a combination of fatigue and public humiliation has compelled me back to Cheap Thrills, with a few mods, including a wider content area. And a rare foray into the red spectrum for the bg.

Feel like my old self again.

Posted a while ago that I was going through some transitions at work, and that we were looking for a web developer. Here’s what’s going on, in a nutshell:

The J-School runs an aggressive program of multimedia training for journalists — both for students and for working journalists. We do semester-long classes in multimedia storytelling using Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro, Sound Track Pro, and a range of cameras and audio equipment. Students working in teams produce multimedia feature stories by the end of the semester — most of them excellent. We also do a compressed, one-week version of that class for working journalists who come from all over the country for training, as part of a program funded by the Knight Foundation. The program has been so successful that we’ve had trouble keeping up with its expansion.

On Monday, the Knight Foundation awarded a large grant to the J-School to build the program out into new directions and begin a new channel in internet technology training for editors and managers. And while they were at it, we also became responsible for training 600 NPR journalists in multimedia skills over the next couple of years.

On September 17, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation unveiled a $6.7 million initiative to assist news organizations facing the daunting transition to the digital world (press release). Two Knight grants - $2.8 million to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and $2.4 million to USC’s Annenberg School for Communications - were awarded to fund the expansion of the Knight Digital Media Center’s training program for mid-career journalists. National Public Radio was awarded a two-year grant for $1.5 million to work with the Knight Digital Media Center to fund the training of roughly 600 staff members, including executives, reporters, producers and editors.

The program is accompanied by a web site containing dozens of tutorials on multimedia production software and techniques (this is the Django-based site I mentioned a few months ago). That site is slated for a huge build-out, with tons more tutorials, social networking additions, and other goodies to come, as well as a redesign that’s just getting underway now.

The short version is that I was asked to transition from my current job as webmaster for the J-School and all of its satellite sites to working nearly full-time for the Knight multimedia site. Over the summer, my office was expanded and revamped, and I’m now sharing the space with a growing group of staffers and directors of the Knight program overall.

So that’s the summary version - all very exciting :) The rub now is in finding the right person to take my previous/current job as webmaster/manager of the J-School sites. It’s an interesting mix: PHP/HTML/CSS development of custom applications and utilities, building and maintaining content management systems for student publications (mostly with WordPress, but we use other systems as well), working closely with faculty, staff and students on special projects, training, helping out in classrooms, administering an OS X Server (which I hope to move to a cPanel system before long, but that’s another story), etc. etc. It’s a jack-of-all-things-web sort of position, and we’re still looking for the just-right person. UC benefits are great, the physical environment is great, there’s access to lots of intellectual stimulation (if you can find the time, which I never can), lots of good food nearby, and a ton of variety (but look out - all that variety may kill you).

The position is still open and we’d love to hear from qualified devs who also have strong communication skills and don’t mind spreading themselves thin. If you’re burned out on the private sector and feel ready to burn yourself out on the very different - but still amazing in its own way - academic life, give it some serious thought. If not you, please pass this on to anyone you think might be a good fit!

I can’t start my new job in earnest until the role is filled — help me out here :)

P.S.: We’re an all-Mac shop — servers too — so Mac/*nix geeks are especially encouraged.

Want to work with me? We have openings at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism for a technology training instructor and a pair of web developers. The technology training instructor runs workshops for mid-career journalists on new technologies reporters and editors should be using, as part of our growing Knight Digital Media Center (more on that another day). The two web developers work on the various web sites run by the school and its affiliated programs. Job links:

Technology Training Instructor

Web Developers

Posted a while ago about the Moral Compass produced by some of our recently graduated students as part of the News 21 Initiative on the Future of Journalism (News21 is a collaborative effort between four J-Schools). This year’s theme is “Faces of Faith in America,” and the Berkeley piece of that is called “God, Sex, and Family.” Most of the content from all four schools is in now, and the project has shaped up as an extremely well-rounded snapshot of the myriad ways religion plays out in American life.

So much at the site I’m not sure what to point to (and I haven’t begun to read it all). The tent city multi-religion conference inside Second Life was incredibly ambitious (catch a full video snapshot of the event here), and the Data Road Trip provides some fascinating perspectives into everything from Bronx abortions to Arkansas divorce rates. I appreciated this brief interview with atheist Sam Harris, who (to my surprise) says he prefers not to be called an atheist: “atheism is not a good term because it requires defining oneself in opposition to an arbitrary group.” I really appreciated that he made the point that atheism does not imply not having a spiritual life.

Anyway, there’s tons there - dig in. And leave comments if you got ‘em - the fellows would love to hear your feedback.

This is becoming (for me) the summer of pushing the envelope with WordPress - bending it to become a full content management system, rather than just a blogging tool. Between work and home, have been converting a couple of sites over the past few weeks - one from an old-school static site, and another from Movable Type to WordPress.

landwater.com represents the environmental and historic preservation law firm Rossmann and Moore - I’ve been working with them since forever. Their old static site (originally designed by baald, who comments here sometimes) has stood up to the years amazingly well, but it was time to move on. Now in WordPress, office assistants there can finally update the site without having to learn Dreamweaver or FTP. I love the way WP pages can become children of other pages. By nesting them, you get a hierarchal URL structure automatically, and can use the workhorse wp_list_pages() function to generate structured HTML lists, which in turn can be styled as CSS fly-out menus. Throw in the My Page Order plugin and non-tech editors can rearrange the hiearchy (and thus the menu system) via drag-and-drop. So elegant.

At work, have been on a mission to get all Movable Type sites converted to WordPress by the end of summer. The first of the two largest projects is pretty much done. North Gate News Online is the publishing arm of J-200, the journalism bootcamp all first-year students endure. The site has been a CPU-sucking Movable Type hog with a hideous design (my fault!) for years; as of today it’s majorly multimedia-enabled WordPress site with its own podcast feed (nothing there yet). This is a soft-launch; all the tech is ready and waiting for the next crop of J-200 students. OK, we’re showing too much roof, but the design is leaps and bounds beyond the old site. Using a ton of plugins to handle Flash, QuickTime movies, embedded audio, image pop-ups, etc. But most impressive is WP-Cache, which gives you the static page performance of MT combined with the dynamic page behavior of WordPress. Poetry.

The biggest WP challenge of the summer starts on Monday - total rebuild of China Digital Times, which has much more sophisticated needs. Looking forward to the challenge.

Very proud of our News21 (News Initiative for the Future of Journalism) team for the work they did on the Moral Compass, which asks the question “How do different religions view certain issues on sex and morality?” Spin the wheel and get answers on a host of questions covering masturbation, homosexuality, premarital sex, etc. from representatives of faiths including Catholicism, Judaism, Muslim, Buddhism, Methodist, Baptist, and more. Video interviews with clergy and others included. Nice work on the Flash interface!

The Moral Compass is part of Berkeley’s contribution to this year’s News21 project, Faces of Faith in America.

Ryan Sholin knocks one out of the park: “10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head“. Pretty much mirrors a lot of lunchtime conversation at the J-School over the past few years, with the discussion seeming somewhat more urgent lately (because the writing is on the wall for dead-tree distribution). I liked #7 especially:

Bloggers aren’t an uneducated lynch mob unconcerned by facts. They’re your readers and your neighbors and if you play your cards right, your sources and your community moderators. If you really play it right, bloggers are the leaders of your networked reporting projects. Get over the whole bloggers vs. journalists thing, which has been pretty much settled since long before you stopped calling it a “Web blog” in your stories.

… though all of his points are spot-on. John Battelle has some interesting commentary in a similar vein. On where newspapers are falling down (this was directed at the SF Chronicle, but could be applied to many/most municipal papers):

400 reporters and what is the paper DOING with them? Not much, I’m afraid. The paper should OWN the Valley Tech story. Does it? No. It should OWN the biotech story. Does it? No. It should OWN the real estate/development story. Does it? No. It should OWN the California political story. Does it? No! … I agree that Google and others should be more engaged in helping shore up and - GASP - evolve the fourth estate. But assuming the way to do it is to support more of the same - the approach that gave us a bloated newsroom that puts out a product fewer and fewer people want to read each year - is to ask for tenure over evolution.

Another big week of multimedia training for mid-career journalists coming up at the J-School, with a heaping handful of great speakers discussing the intersection of “new media” and journalism. These talks are open to the public, and will be webcast live (and archived).

Featured speakers are Tom Mallory, Chuck Scott, Alexa Capeloto, Nicole Vargas of the San Diego Tribune; Seth Gitner and Lindsey Nair of Roanoke.com; Brian Storm of MediaStorm.org; Richard Koci Hernandez of the San Jose Murcury News; Rob Curley of Washingtonpost, Newsweek Interactive, and Colin Crawford of IDG Communications.

Rob Curley’s talks are always dynamite. I’ve decided QuickTime 7 has been out long enough that it’s safe to switch to the h.264 codec. Upgrade your QuickTime if necessary, and look for a nice bump in quality this time around.

BeOS used to market itself as the “Buzzword Enabled Operating System.”

Got a call from someone recently who was going to be speaking at a public event, wanting to make sure I could set them up with a “Web 2.0-capable laptop.” And so I did. Wasn’t hard, neither.

Gearing up for another big week at the J-School, as we compress our semester-long multimedia training program into a single week for mid-career journalists from around the country. As always, lunches and evenings are filled with great speakers, which we’ll be webcasting live. If you’re in the Berkeley area, the conversations are open to the public - come on by!

Featured speakers are Joe Howry, Anthony Plascencia, Colleen Cason, Tom Kisken, Ventura County Star; Lisa Stone, Blog Her; Kevin Sites, Yahoo!; Sean Connelley and Katy Newton, Oakland Tribune; Rob Curley, Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive; Matt McAlister, Yahoo!

The Kevin Sites presentation last year was riveting, and Curley is a must-see for anyone interested in pushing old-school media properties in new directions.

J-School student David Gelles writes for the New York Times about green homeowners deploying mud, rather than wood, bamboo, or carpeting for their home flooring.

It is hardly a new or chic movement: millions of poor people around the globe use natural materials like dirt for their homes whether they want to or not. But with the growing environmental awareness in this country, Mr. Kahn said, there is greater interest in natural building materials like dirt.

Not without their problems, but can be made moisture resistant with beeswax and linseed oil, and more crack-resistant by adding paper pulp or fiber. They do sound gorgeous and comforting.

Why is Avid / Digidesign suddenly pushing Garage Band rather than Pro Tools? Is there an implicit acknowledgment here that PT is too complicated / expensive for a huge swath of users? Maybe this doesn’t seem weird to others — of course Avid can still sell you the hardware, even if you don’t go for their integrated M-Box/Pro Tools package. Maybe it strikes me as odd because of the endless battles we’ve gone through at work over the question of whether PT is overkill for our users (we’re now teaching Soundtrack Pro to multimedia journalism students rather than Pro Tools, so I guess we landed somewhere in between).

Apple profiles ukulele master Lyle Ritz, who recorded his latest album No Frills entirely in Garage Band (at age 75 no less). And it does sound gorgeous.

An unheard-of week at work - students gone, most staff gone, pushed aside half a dozen simmering commitments and immersed myself in a week of intensive Flash training. Flash is a skill I’ve wanted to pick up since forever, but have never cleared time for. It’s not the kind of thing you can pick up by dabbling - you have to throw yourself at it, give yourself over to its strange logic, swim in its strange waters for a while. Things that are trivially simple in HTML become nuttily difficult in Flash… but with juicy pay-offs.

Used two books as references, but spent most of my time at lynda.com - a site stocking more than 16,000 online training videos on piles of common software. Haven’t checked out their non-Flash coverage, but was blown away by the clarity and thoroughness of the Flash training. $25/month gets you access to all-you-can-eat, on any topic. Killer deal.

Anyway, great to finally have general comfort with the program after all these years. And before you ask, the answer is no — this doesn’t change my overall feelings about Flash. My caveats remain: Use it judiciously, use it only where standards-based development won’t get you where you’re going, be mindful of accessibility and search issues, etc.

Returned from vacation to a struggling XServe (at work, not Birdhouse) — the main boot drive had quietly filled to capacity, and for some reason the email alert system had not kicked in. Fortunately we had recently decided to upgrade the server to a RAID 1 configuration. I had ordered a pair of 500GB Apple Drive Modules before I left, and the delivery dude arrived right as we were in the middle of clearing up space. The universe smiles.

I had done some research on software RAID solutions for OS X Server, and was hearing great things about SoftRAID. Yes, OS X includes built-in RAID software, but this comparison between Apple’s RAID and SoftRAID had me sold.

There are a zillion ways to set things up, but the process turned out to be incredibly smooth. Disabled services to prevent data changing during the upgrade, installed the drives into bays #3 and #4 in the XServe, initialized and grouped them to RAID 1 with SoftRAID, used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the existing drive onto the new volume, set the new RAID volume as the startup disk in system preferences, shut down, ejected the original drive, and brought the system back up. The whole process took two hours, and everything was running like butter. Well worth $129.

Another big week of multimedia training and speakers/panels coming up at the J-School, starting this Sunday. Once again, we’ll be webcasting all speakers — tune in here (or, if you see this post in the future, visit that page for archived versions).

Featured speakers are Howard Rheingold, “Smart Mobs” author; Travis Fox, Washington Post; Robert Hood, msnbc.com; Al Bonner, Lawrence.com; Seth Gittner, Roanoke Times; Seth Familian, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business; Joe Howry, Bruce McLean, Colleen Casem and Tom Kiska, Ventura County Star.

Should be some fascinating conversations.

Yahoo! news correspondent and backpack journalist Kevin Sites will be speaking at the J-School Thursday night, and I’ll be webcasting the event. Watch it here, 7pm pacific time.

Sites has spent the past five years covering global war and disaster for several national networks. Sites helped pioneer solo journalism, working completely alone, traveling, and reporting without a crew. As a solo journalist (”SoJo”), Sites carries a backpack of portable digital technology to shoot, write, edit, and transmit multimedia reports.

Check out his reflections on his first year in the “hot zone,” covering every major global conflict. The talk should be fascinating.