Up until last week I hadn’t been sure that my capstone proposal would be approved.  Now that it has been, I find myself far behind the 8-ball and trying furiously to catch up on all the work that I should have been doing up to now.

I also drastically underestimated the ammount of time it would take to edit and post video clips from the footage professor Kuznick provided.

The site is live, but still under development. I created categories for each type of post and plan to incorporate guest blog posts this way so that the site is easily navigable. I have begun reaching out to potential guest bloggers and will hopefully be able to generate more interest in the project now that it is officially university-sanctioned.

I decided to use disqus for the comments in order to allow users to sign in and share comments using Facebook, Twitter and email. One bonus of this approach is that I can allow comments to be forwarded directly to the professor allowing him to follow the discussion without having to visit the site.

I had originally planned to use wordpress’s “buddypress” plugin to give the site more of a “social network” feel, but I have decided that my time will be better served by focusing on the content and providing interactivity through provocative posts and the incentive of guest participation.

I’ve been toying with the idea of a new website for the past few weeks.  The concept is a multimedia view of history based on the works of Oliver Stone.

Why Oliver Stone? The simple answer is because that’s the focus of the course I’m taking this semester. The more complicated answer is that although Stone’s movies are controversial to say the least, they provide a visceral experience of history that seems to serve well as a starting point for intellectual enquiry.

While no one will argue that Stone takes more than a few liberties with what his defenders refer to as the “literal truth,” it seems that his films have the power to stimulate both our imagination and our curiosity. His unique blend of fact, speculation and fabrication urge us to reexamine traditional narratives of the Vietnam War, counterculture in the 60s, foreign military intervention in the 80s, and the role American media in the 90s.

Stone is most successful when he creates enigmas for the more skeptical among us to unravel, and the unraveling seems worthy of the collective effort of an online community.

6 months worth of homicide victims meticulously catalogued.  Wish I’d figured out a way to automate this, but you know what they say: wish in one hand, shit in the other — see which hand fills up first.

Still working on a way to incorporate images.  As it stands users can click a link to upload them, but putting them in the page requires reading some find print.  On the plus side, once you get the syntax right, tiki-wiki includes a nice little light box module.  Worst case scenario — all images end up in a gallery and I take it upon myself to put the thumbnails where they need to be.

Twitter is still a no-go too.  I tried the juitter module but can’t get it working… I guess I’ll have to keep tinkering with that too.

In other news, someone actually tried to register… unfortunately I didn’t have the mail server set up, but hopefully she’ll respond to my email and then I’ll have at least one beta tester.  Good to know the word is getting out though.

I had a rudimentary drupal site all set up through bluehost, but then for some inexplicable reason I decided to move all to a less public directory (note, DO NOT try to do this just by ftp).  Anyway, something went to hell, and now index.php says it can find my bootstrap.inc.  I looked into the php and tried to modify it so it could find the bootstrap file, but to no avail.

So I’m trashing it all (not like I have anything on it) and starting from scratch (again).

This time, screw security.  I’m making it public and hoping that hackers of the world have more lucrative things to do than to hack my little website dedicated to a bunch of people who got shot in the District. (For the love of god, think of the children!)

The good news is that the friendly fellow at bluehost showed me how to set permissions on folders (which was keeping me from ftping stuff up before), so that’s one less hurdle to jump.

Also, I have to say, watching filezilla destroy a drupal site is kind of satisfying — like watching a building collapse in slow motion.

Okay, now let’s try that again…

If you haven’t watched it yet, I have one major recommendation:

Start at 20 minutes — not much happens before that, and if you have extra time you’re probably going to want to rewatch the text edit, file rename and copy/paste segments.

Also, interesting to see how the drupal file structure works with regard to theme (didn’t realize html and php were so closely related), but not sure how helpful it is if you’re not using an html/css template.

Advanced forums are up.  Would like to figure out how to make fontface bigger on headlines.  Might tinker with that today.  Also, would love to get some kind of rating module up and running.

4 Containers-3 forums per container.  Topics range from policy to media coverage and individual action — I did my best to try to make them interesting. (feel free to make suggestions)

Still think activity might be best for the homepage, so users can see what’s happening on the site when they log in.

A Twitterfall would be cool for the video section — if the moderator invites users to tweet questions and comments, then it might be useful to display those underneath the video.

@davidnorton- Juitter looks super cool.  It doesn’t seem like it’s updating in real-time though, which might be a drag (I hope I’m wrong).  I love that it has tabs to track multiple feeds though.

@devteam, I checked out the other twitter modules — tweetmeme looked especially cool (allows a retweet button to be added to comments).  Also check out addtoany.

Is there a way to extract info from people’s Facebook profiles, i.e. basic info like age, sex and location?

Thanks Ladanne for posting the American Forum’s Facebook page (thanks, Evan for reminding me how hot and sexy embedded links can be).

Description is still pretty vague, missing word aside:

“Policy action on climate change remains politically gridlocked in the United States and throughout the world, while polls show that Americans remain divided about the causes of climate change and the urgency of the problem. Are you worked about climate change, and what can your generation do about it? Bring your questions to the American Forum!”

But least now we know who the panelists are:

Matthew Nesbit, AU (we knew that)

Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post

Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones