http://www.ronbravo.com/mytoolbox/source

IMPORTANT NOTE: I developed this software using the Mozilla Firefox Internet Browser because it complies with webstandards more than Internet Explorer and it has better development tools. This means some of the myToolBox features may not work in Internet Explorer. I am assuming that the tools should work fine in the Safari or Opera browsers as well, but since I have not tested this I cannot confirm it. I just know that Internet Explorer will probably not work. This does not mean Internet Explorer will never be supported it just means that it is currently a pain in the ass to work with and so I’m holding off doing anything with it.

Once you’re on the myToolbox site just click on one of the tool names and the tool should run. Below I give a little bit of a description about them.

Tabula Terra

This is a simple journal entry system to allow people to enter in different conditions for the day while they were in their garden. This is Jill’s idea so I will be working with her to try and flesh this out more. At the moment it is pretty much a clone of the functionality provided by the Seeds of Change Garden Planner. Ours is a little more sterile than theirs but I imagine as development moves on Tabula Terra will start to look a lot nicer.

Currently anyone can enter in a journal and mess around with it. Once user accounts get up and running we will be able to allow the journals to be organized more by an individual’s account. I also plan on allowing for charts to be generated so that we can get a visual representation of a lot of the data users will be putting in. I know that Jen has begun tracking her harvest at the end of the month and those are the kinds of things I’m hoping can get entered into the database(See Jen that’s the surprise I was talking to you about).

Some of the ideas Jill has thrown around are things like getting a nice database going of information on what people are planting, what their weather is like, and anything else related to growing food in our region. Hopefully in a year or so we will have enough data to compile and print for people to use. So there is a lot we can do with this.

Wiki Reader

This is a wiki application. Even though there is a ton of wiki software out there, many of them are pretty complicated. Most do not have the techno junk stripped out so that normal people can just jump right in and start creating documents. The few that I did like for easy of use required a subscription. No way. We need a free solution, and since I could not find what I think would be best for the group I’m hoping to create something that will. Now I will admit I have no idea how hard or easy creating wiki software is, but I figure we have some time before having a wiki up for AZHS is essential. In the meantime I will try and throw something together and see what comes out. Mostly though I’m using this as an excuse to practice my software development skills and gain a little more experience. So that in the future if AZHS does need some specific tool that does not exists I may be able to provide an option.

So that’s the myToolBox package in a nutshell. It’s all been license under the free, as in freedom not beer, license known as the GNU AGPL version 3. I’m also using several 3rd party souce code libraries to help take care of some of the heavy lifting in the development of this software. The big idea being that the source code stays open for any community to update, maintain, and modify how they see fit. Providing them with the freedom to do what they want with the software hence the phrase, free as freedom not beer. Of course the development community at the moment is only made up of one person, me, but I hope that will change in the future. So give it a spin and post back any feedback or suggestions you might have. As I said these tools are in very early stage so don’t expect much yet. Give it time and they will grow.

1. Check with mulching services at dump. Sometimes city dumps set aside organic materials like yard clipings and tree leaves.
2. See if any municipal leaders can help. Two names came up Maria Baier and Phil Gordan.
3. Look into the New York City, Washingon DC area community gardens and see what they did to get up and running. Maybe contact them?
4. Locate and start tracking potential plots of land. Then find out things like who owns them, water source on plot, places to compost, what residents live in the area who would be interested, and so on…
5. Can community gardens be had at the Phoenix parks?
6. What more is needed to get schools involved?
7. Get schools to start growing their own food for kids’ lunches.
8. Opening schools up in the evenings for things like community pot lucks, free urgent care facilities.
9. Getting schools, especially middle and elementary, to teach more culinary classes and agriculture classes.
10. Contact churches to see if they would be interested in starting compost piles or even community gardens.

Phew. Yeah we had fun thinking of a lot of things. Again, this is based on a bunch of assumptions. We have no clue what is involved to get a lot of this done, but decided it was still important to think about. It’s energizing meeting people who have this authentic desire to help. Makes me want to leap tall buildings in a single bound. LOL!. Anyway, met some cool people and hope to keep this up. Now for the hard part, which is trying to get some of the stuff on this list done.

My Hole in the Ground
After a few days I’ve managed to remove about 90% of the dirt in a plot from my backyard, as the photo below shows.

My Backyard Photo

The size is roughly 4ft wide by 37ft long by 2ft deep. I broke a few PVC pipes which was frustrating but I think I should be able to fix them tomorrow. I talked with Jen and we should be setting a site analysis for my home in the next couple of weeks or so. I know what you’re thinking, “But Ron, shouldn’t youhave done the site analysis before you decided to dig a grand canyon in your backyard?” To which I can only reply that you are correct. Oh well. In any case should be a good chance to get some PPG Design Course students out here to see what they think and to provide some advice. In the meantime I need to work on fixing the PVC, getting woodchips, getting a little more compost, getting some coffee grounds, and a few cardboard boxes. Then I can begin filling the hole and start planting. The good news is I a close friend named Debbi who is interested in starting her own garden as well. So the digging doesn’t stop here.

Software Development
So after the decision to stick with Ning for a while, I decide to turn my attention to a few other things:

1. Installing a wiki
2. Looking into making some widgets for the site.

One of the things that came out of the AZHS’s class at Partners in Participation, was that we agreed to install a wiki or some kind of software to document stuff. This way member have a resource they can use to help them with gardening that is specific to our region. As with most software there is sooooo many to choose from. So I’m still looking.

In the mean time I’ve also been toying with some widget stuff. Check it out here:

My test widget!

So nothing to impressive, but it is a start. From there I hope to do some more stuff. I’m using a widget/user interface library I came across called ExtJS. It uses javascript and was orginally made for the Yahoo widget library. The best part is that ExtJS is open source and very mature.

Now some people wonder why I’m a huge advocate of free open source software. One of the biggest reasons is freedom. You are not tied down to the decicions and policies of the developer, as I found out in this Ning Developer post about widget laboratory. Essentially the story goes that due to issues Ning was having with a 3rd party over repeated violations of user information, Ning had to let the developer go. Some people were a bit angry as the decision was made without their concent. This was a set back for some as they had invested a lot of time and money in both Ning and the third party Widget Laboratory. In the end Ning recovered and now offers a bunch of cool little apps and a development platform through the OpenSocial API. However, I hope my point is clear that sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes opensource can give you that freedome to branch off and move on if the developer does something you don’t agree with.

Anyway, we’ll see how ExtJS holds up.

That’s all for today. Time for bed.

Currently we are using the Ning social networking platform. It has been extremely useful in getting people organized. It’s biggest benefit has been it’s ease of use and simplicity. After some of my inquiries into other social networking platforms during the past two days, I have come to appreciate what Ning is doing and how they offload much of the site setup and maintenance difficulties. They make it so that the average computer user can start up a social network simply and easily. However, even with all that there are a few things still left desired from Ning. We called out a few of those things at the meeting and so I began looking around to see if there were an alternative technology that could do what Ning could and more.

So I started with a quick google search of “opensource social networking frameworks”. So after that I picked three sites to work off:

Online Resource 1
Online Resource 2
Wikipedia Comparison

After some browsing I came down to three options I wanted to try:

Elgg
PHPizabi
Drupal
GROU.PS

So quickly I jotted down my opinions and quick experiences with these packages.

Elgg
So I started by trying to install Elgg on my local. I ran into some problems due to me installing Elgg in a sub directory of the main site. I should have it installed it directly to a location like “http://domainname.com” but instead I chose “http://domainname.com/elgg/”. At the time I thought this was not a bad thing since it is a pretty common practice. After about an hour or two of trying to fix this issue and the reading of several posts on the problem, I was still getting errors. So I decided to stop for the night and try again the next evening.  Tonight I tried to install Elgg again but this time on my main webhost server online. I got further than I was able to get last night but still more problems. I think I managed to install Elgg but everytime I tried to login I was getting 404 errors about pages not being found. Again, this probably has something to do with the fact that I installed Elgg in a sub directory. I could have easily install it in the main root of my site but I figured, “Why should I do that? What I’m doing isn’t that crazy”. I’m surprised that I was not able to fix the problem. I read through a few blog posts on the net of how to solve this issue but after I tried some of their suggestions nothing worked. I never got a chance to use the site of my own installation. So after about 3 hours I moved on. Maybe I missed a step or missed a configuration file but I do not care. One of my requirements is that installation should be simple. I think Elgg will eventually solve this problem but until then I’m won’t be using it or recommending it.

PHPizabi
So I moved on and began the installation process for PHPizabi. I stopped immediately as I began reading through the user license. It was a custom PHPizabi. I went back to the webpage and located some of their comments on the license and it seems like the PHPizabi custom license is open source, however they added some comments regarding the addons that I’m not too sure about. In either case when I look for projects that are open source I look for them to be license under the more common GPL, LGPL, MIT, or BSD license(look them up here). The reason why is those license have been around a lot longer, are more widely used, and has been scrutinized and tested a lot longer than a custom license for some specific software. Newer or less commonly use custom licenses I’m a bit weary about. It may work for others though, so I encourage anyone who’s not to picky with software licenses to give it a go. However, for me and projects I work on, I usually recommended to stick with software released under GPL or similar types of licenses.  So it’s a no go for PHPizabi.

Drupal
I just needed to set a few file permissions to the folder where Drupal is kept. Other than that installation was about as easy as installing WordPress, so pretty easy. Now the jury is still out on Drupal. This is because out of the box it is not setup to be a social networking platform. Drupal is a content management system so this means in order to get it to do what I want, I will need to add several of the third party modules to Drupal. So based on this article here, you would need about 17 to 20 different modules to get Drupal social networking ready. Even though the article is from 2007, I don’t think the situation of the amount of modules has changed much. So I still need to get that part done. The other thing I’ve been wondering about is how well is Drupal going to scale up and performance? Base on a few articles I’ve read:

http://twtitw.firebus.com/node/10
http://20bits.com/articles/4-problems-with-drupal/

Drupal comes with it’s own issues with speed and scalability but you’ll be mostly fine as long as you are not using too many modules. That is not a good sign for a Drupal based social networking site. As I said I may need anywher from 17 – 20 modules. Modules can be problematic because are usually written by third parties, might not be optimized, properly maintained, or might not be compatible with the current version of Drupal. Even with all that Drupal should still be capable of social networking as there are a lot of sites using Drupal to do just that, but I will admit those sites probably have dedicated programmer and designers working to keep things going smoothly. At this point I am a bit tired and it’s getting late so I think I will save the modulating of Drupal for another day or week. I want to give it a chance though, just because I’ve heard several good things about it and it does have a lot of nice modules that would be very useful to AZHS. So my final conclusion for Drupal will have to wait.

GROU.PS
I actually came across this site this afternoon from a blog post that can be found here. Essentially, the guy had been using Ning and likes it but was browsing for alternatives as well. He stumbled upon GROU.PS and said it had some potiential, so I signed up for an account today and I am liking what I see so far. It’s almost like Ning++, meaning that it can do many of the things Ning does while giving you a bit more control over the network. They also have a pretty simple and intuitive interface for both admins and users. On the front page they talk about the hosting service and how they provide free hosting with unlimited traffic, unlimited space restrictions, no ads, free domain pointing, works with mobile devices like an iPhone and a bunch of other stuff. I was just like “Wow. Awesome. Seems too good to be true” and we shall soon find out. The jury is still out on this package as well as it’s in beta, but for being in beta it seems to be working pretty well. One other thing is that GROU.PS is not open source yet, but they are working towards releasing the whole platform as open source. Parts of it have already been released as open source so that is a good sign. I plan on playing with it a bit more before I say yea or nea, but I am optimistic.

Phew…man I’m tired. I need to get to bed. I hope this was as informative for you as it was for me. I like Ning a lot and appreciate how it has allowed many more people the access and ability to create their own specific networks. Ning is a technology that has been out for a while and as with most popular technology, you eventually get people imitating it and improving upon that initial idea. So I will continue to search to see what’s out there.

Goodnight and C ya.