search
Today a student e-mailed me that she was confused by the university's new student portal, so she used Google to search for my senior-level writing course. Instead of locating the advanced technical writing course site, she stumbled into my personal pages and my business pages.
This is not much of a problem, since my personal pages deal with my freelance writing. Having a student read my CV isn't exactly an issue. It's not exciting reading.
So….so so so so so so, it’s time for a little walk down WPMu history lane. Last year at this time I was desparately scrambling for a way to have sitewide tags for UMW Blogs. I found the solution in Dr. Mike’s hack shared on the WordPress forums here, but it was a kind of a mess even then. Yet, the concept was brilliant, a separate site that allows you to archive, search, and create a tag cloud for categories through a good ol’ spamming plugin. —DIY ingenuity at work given the limitations of WPMu at the time. The set up ran on a separate single install of WordPress that was pulling in the sitwewide feed from WPMu (thanks to It Damager –who has disappeared along with his Sitwewide feed plugin) and running it through the outdated Wp-Autoblog plugin, as well as a plugin for re-directing the permalink to the original blog it was fed in from (a process I detailed here). Moreover, once I got this hacked concept straight in my head and installed it, the WP-Autoblog plugin and the Sitewide feed plugin had to be further modified to work. Add to that the fact that when I updated UMW Blogs from 1.2.x to 1.3.3 the category were no longer pulled into the separate WP site properly, effectively breaking the tag cloud. Making the whole thing at least a partial bust right around February. In short, it was an extremely smart hack on Dr. Mike’s part, but in the long run it became more of a nightmare than an asset.
So, as soon as I saw the MuTags plugin for WPMu sitewide tags from Mr. Henry I jumped on that, and made that the default tag cloud for UMW Blogs, and used Dr. Mike’s hack as an archive for posts throughout the environment (sans categories). But Mr. Henry’s MuTags had two problems: it had no sitewide feed for each tag, and it couldn’t incorporate categories into the tag cloud. Moreover, when we bought the $50 extension for the plugin which allowed feeds for each tag, I found the feeds to be pretty poorly parsed and ugly 
But I was hopeful enough to blog it, and when Stephen Downes took issue with our paying $50 bucks for this functionality I wore all black for weeks and couldn’t sleep at night (this was before he discovered and broadcasted the beauty that is EDUPUNK —welcome back Stephen 
).
So, that kind of brings us up to date, and it is also when a new era begins for WPMu. Because all the functionality I needed at least three plugins for, a separate WordPress installation, a brain surgeon, and a hammer to make work have all been bundled into one little WPMu plugin developed and shared by the inimitable Donncha: Sitewide Tags Pages for WPMu. This plugin gives you all the functionality that the original hack did, namely a searchable archive of posts and sitewide categories with feeds, but adds a few as well such as sitewide tags (which are really tags not categories called tags –we have figured out the difference, right?) and sitewide feeds for tags, a built-in “spamming tool” that just republishes the post from throughout the environment onto one blog in your WPMu environment at the URL http://tags.yourblog.com. And more than that, the permalink points to the original blog and the author is immediately populated in the tags blog making the whole process seamless and clean. Not to mention the fact that given it is a blog within your WPMu environment you don’t have the overhead of a separate install with outdated versioning because you don;t want to surrender the archiving functionality all together.
So, how to use this? First off, keep in mind Donncha has made it backward compatible for older versions of WPMu, but I would recommend using it on 2.6 only, for it seems there are still some glitches on older versions (at least WPMu 1.3.3). Here is how I am thinking about using it on UMW Blogs. As a sitewide category/tag cloud with feeds galore, which will actually be useful for syndicating class content as I talked about in the e-portfolios post here—not to mention a few other ways of thinking about course blog -but more on that soon. And given all the posts with both their tags and categories are in one blog, I can actually use Simple Tags to display the tag cloud, make categories show up as tags, and get a consistent feed with some related tags and posts contextual goodness. Laying Simple Tags over this blog and playing with it will make all the difference in my opinion. I have started this process as an experiment here.
Moreover, we can starting thinking creatively about archiving the posts on UMW Blogs with little or no hassle. We could actually archive a whole semesters worth of posts, or year’s, by simply exporting the XML file for the tags blog, or dumping the database. In effect, starting fresh every semester, while creating a separate space for the large, searchable archive of all the posts in UMW Blogs. This plugin has the potential to solve so many problems all in one fell swoop, I’m excited about it, and will be keep you updated with the process as UMW Blogs makes the transition to WPMu 2.6.
P.S>–After just checking my sandbox version linked to above, it seems like this plugin also pulls in pages from around the environment, which is fascinating. And I will have to think about the implications of this, i I am, indeed, correct.
I recently came to the realization that my best friend in Fredericksburg is my 12 year-old neighbor. I just can’t avoid the fact that I have never really progressed beyond the sixth grade; I am still so dearly enthralled by the product-inspired wonder of my youth. Whether it be Star Wars (and this encompasses everything from the movies to figurines to stickers to trading cards to comic books to UnderRoos), Raiders of the Lost Ark, Clash of the Titans, Pac-Man, our first family VHS player, or the Atari 2600, culture from the late 70s and early 80s is the wellspring of my strong penchant for nostalgia. My 12 year-old neighbor feels the brunt of my unfortunate condition.
Our relationship began benignly enough talking about Lego Star Wars sets, the associated video games, and the current state of Star Wars culture more generally. When I found out he hadn’t seen the real Star Wars movies (namely episodes IV, V, and VI 1/2) I lent him my DVDs and asked him to think about where our shared myth system began. I haven’t been able to convince him of my opinions on the far superior quality of the original trilogy, but I am working on it.
More recently, we’ve been focusing on video games. He is enjoying [[Battle Front II] at the moment, and the thought occurred to me that he is experiencing modern video games devoid of their beautifully vectorized history. He has no real sense of the Old Gold games, and that’s a crying shame. So while I didn’t walk 5 miles to school in the snow, I did experience the colossal disappointment that was the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man first hand, and I thought he might need to understand my pain and experience a bit more intimately. So, how do I go about this? What method should a video game sensei take?
Well, in the age of educational technologies and the beauty of the internets, there is really only one way to emulate the experience…that’s right, you guessed it: to actually play those games and experience their dislocating magic. There are many ways to do this, and luckily I have access to just about all the original consoles and games I am talking about here so I don’t have to worry about all the moral, ethical, and copyright ramifications that bog down those with fewer resources. The fact that we have to agonize over “stealing” the culture” they” (who the hell is ‘they’?) used to shape us with, the very culture we made relevant bac —it’s an outrage! So, in sympathy (or is it solidarity?), I’ll share below some of the resources available for getting your hands on a few select emulators that are freely available online. And, if you use them in the spirit of enlightening your 12 year old neighbor with an impressionistic history of video games, you may even be able to claim educational fair use
CLASSIC CO-OP ARCADE GAMES:
It all really starts with classic Co-op Arcade gems, games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Ms. Pac-Man, Tempest, Pole Position, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Asteroids, Gyruss, Ghosts and Goblins, Battlezone, Asteroids, Punch-Out!, Star Wars, Rampage, Q*Bert , Galaxian, Joust and on and on. In fact, two of the first things I did when I first got on the internet in 1994 was search out all resources on the classic 60s show The Prisoner along with any and all information on the history of classic video games. A bit later, my friend and co-worker at UCLA’s Audio Visual Services, John Spellman, discovered MAME, and it has been an on-going love affair ever since.
The stand-up arcade games are a treasure trove of memories. Our local comic shop “The Incredible Pulp” had Galaxian and Joust in the back of the store, and my friends and I would spend hours playing those games in a really amazing setting surrounded by comics, beautifully painted D&D lead figurines, the beautifully illustrated AD&D handbooks and modules, along with countless other artifacts that make up some of the most vibrantly imaginative and obscure objects of my adolescent desire. And there was the Grand Bald Pizzeria that had some pretty good pizza (even by NY standards) and a new series of arcade games constantly streaming in, everything from Track & Field, to Ghosts and Goblins to World Karate Champion to the grand poobah of them all Pac-Man (and still my all-time favorite video game bar none). Finally, their was the Baldwin Pool Hall, a smoke-filled billiards parlor that took a corner of its huge floor plan and put in an arcade, with everything from Make Trax to Pole Position to the Star Wars vector game, Tempest, Battlezone, Defender, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Popeye, Pooyan, and a few more I can’t remember because I didn’t play them.
In fact, these stand-up coin-op games are so intricately linked with the small stores of the community I grew up within. And while I had Atari 2600 when I played most of these games, the experience of going up the block with friends to various stores to play these games was different. It often led to other connections and discoveries in the community, whether making new friends, getting in the occasional fight, or having a space as a ten or twelve-year old that was not entirely dominated and dictated by one’s parents. having these video games in these various stores allowed you to hang out regardless if you had bought anything (well before box stores like Borders made this a “unique experience” and charged you accordingly for it). You were in many ways a part of the world you played in, and I knew the proprietors of each of these stores quite well. I was a kid in the neighbor and that meant something to me, my friends and I were people they knew and the folks behind the counter were people we also knew quite well, joked about, and imagined lives for them beyond their role as shopkeeper.
I wasn’t a god damn number they were ordered to sell a rewards card to; I don’t want your stinking rewards card, I want to talk to a human being! Sorry for that…but arcade games were an integral part of the built environment of my growing years and they framed my person in so many ways beyond the actual game itself. it is complex series of relations that often get discounted when you just look at the game, or isolate that game within one family’s living room.
For some more information on the Golden Age of Video Arcade Games check out this great Wikipedia article.
So, in short , if you are looking for the Classic Coin-Op Arcade games for your computer then MAME (for Windows) and MacMame (for the Mac) are one, precarious way at it. Precarious because when it comes to getting the actual ROMS for each of the games, you’re on your own because they’re still under copyright and it is illegal to distribute them. This doesn’t mean they aren’t easy to obtain. In fact, a quick Google search will do the trick, but you still have to weigh the onus of ownership and how our culture is being imprisoned by draconian copyright laws that are incongruous with the digital flow of information and resources.
ATARI 2600:
Without question the Atari 2600 home game console will forever be a part of some of my most splendid memories of consumer culture. The idea of going to Sears or Playland to buy a video game cartridge remains one of the most vividly expectant moments of possibility in my paltry life. The history of Atari 2600 is in many ways a fundamental history of media in the 80s that is as important as the VHS home recorder or the death of the single-screen movie theater. I didn’t know this at the time, but as of 1981 there was as many as eight million Atari 2600 systems sold, at a $100 some-odd bucks a pop that’s $700 million dollars. Moreover, the Pac-Man cartridge alone sold 7 million copies, making it the best selling 2600 cartridge of all time, not to mention one of the greatest disappointments for any console since. Check out this list of ten Atari 2600 cartridges that sold over a million copies. It seems kind of crazy now, but when you do the math from just the two figures above, Atari in the early 80s was probably a billion dollar company, insane! And seems like the dividends won’t ever stop coming in. Interestingly enough, according the the Pac-Man Atari 2600 Wikipedia article, the video game crash of 1983 is linked to such disappointments like Pac-Man and E.T., in fact despite selling seven million copies of Pac-Man and 1.5 million of E.T., Atari seems to have lost on both:
Although Atari sold seven million units (of Pac-Man), out of a 2600 user base of ten million, twelve million cartridges were manufactured, under the expectation that the game would re-stimulate sales of the console. When this did not happen, Atari had to write off the five million unsold copies, incurring large losses.
The same held true for E.T a year later, four million copes were manufactured, but only 1.5 million sold. The millions of unsold cartridges have become part of an Atari landfill legend that gets mentioned in the E.T. wikipedia article (so fun!):
In September 1983, the Alamogordo Daily News of Alamogordo, New Mexico, reported in a series of articles that between ten and twenty[18] semi-trailer truckloads of Atari boxes, cartridges, and systems from an Atari storehouse in El Paso, Texas were crushed and buried at the landfill within the city. It was Atari’s first dealings with the landfill, which was chosen because no scavenging was allowed and its garbage was crushed and buried nightly. Atari officials and others gave differing reports of what was buried,[19][20][21][22] but it is widely speculated that most of Atari’s millions of unsold copies of E.T. ultimately ended up in this landfill, crushed and encased in cement.[23]
So much of this waste had to do with Atari’s move to capitalize on a video game or film’s popularity, which meant entirely disregarding both the design and play of their games. Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the few games in this circumstance that most agreed was relatively unique and forward looking with the use of more than one controller for action/adventure narrative game play. Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600 still remains one of my personal favorites, along with Popeye (a beautiful adaptation from the original Coin-op), Kaboom!, Pitfall!, Warlords, Asteroids, Chopper Command, Superman, Haunted House, Adventure, Night Driver, Combat, and Space Invaders. For a full list of all Atari 2600 games go here.
And while the Atari 2600 games occupy a large part of my imagination from back-in-the-day, they were just about all inferior to the arcade coin-ops save a select few (Pitfall! being one of them). Nonetheless, the limitations of this gaming systems offers a fascinating space for disorientating a contemporary game fan. I plan on having my neighbor play the 1979 Atari 2600 game Superman, which may be one of the most de-familiarizing and confusing games for a kid who is used to a more seamless and congruous narrative game play. Not only are the sound effects extremely grating, but the game play is terribly disorientating. Try mapping space in this game, it ain’t easy (in many ways these early games are similar to the early 1900s films that film historian Thom Gunning talks about as experimental and alternative spaces that would later be modified and codified into more dominant film narratives, most famously exemplified by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation).
One more thing, I recently discovered a whole series of adult-themed games for the Atari 2600. A whole underground I never knew about
So, all this nonsense to say that there are a number of Atari 2600 emulators (see the list at Atari Age here). I have played with the Z26, which works with both Windows and Linux, and it gets the job done. Stella is an emulator for Windows and the Mac that I haven’t played with, but plan on trying out sometime soon. Same drill with the ROMS for the Atari 2600, they are available, but the questions remain.
COMMODORE 64
I have far less experience or knowledge of Commodore 64, and much of my experience with this system comes from friends who actually had one. I got one second-hand almost a decade after it was popular, and it is quite fun, but I wasn’t really into computers in the 80s as much as I was into video games, and a full-blown computer seemed like a whole lot of overhead for what I wanted to do. That said, I wasn’t oblivious to the classic games like Pirates!, Boulder Dash, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Conan: Hall of Volta, Lode Runner, and Choplifter. I still have a lot to learn about this platform, and the list of games is actually two Wikipedia articles, which suggests just how many there are (it’s kind of overwhelming!).
The emulator available for the C64 is called VICE, and the ROMS once again are plentiful. In fact, the amount of non-copyrighted material for the C64 will probably be far more plentiful than the Atari or classic Coin-Op emulators which are almost entirely proprietary.
OK, that’s it, I’m officially shot. This post is all over the pace and I could still talk about the first Nintendo system and how games like Mario Bros. and Blades of Steel were amazing to me, but I don’t have it in me at this point. Just more fodder for the next nostalgia outburst.
Jeff McClurken’s Adventure’s in Digital History seminar is (or is it “was” now?) a pretty amazing thing. The driving logic of the course was that four distinct projects, each dealing with a unique facet of local history, were be framed for the world-at-large as online digital resources. This is a quite ambitious goal, and as the class finished up today I think most would agree it did far more than meet expectations. I saw two of the groups present their projects last Friday, and all four groups presented their work today (or is it now yesterday, which I unfortunately missed). The projects, in no particular order, are as follows:
- The James Farmer Project This group focused on the life and achievements of James Farmer, Civil Rights Activist and late Professor at the University of Mary Washington. They capture this larger than life historical figure through quotations, video, an extensive biography, and countless photographs.
- The James Monroe’s Papers: Both a site for the James Monroe papers housed at UMW as well as a focused site on Monroe’s letters while an ambassador in France during the 1790s.
- The UMW Alumni Project: This group interviewed various alumni of the University of Mary Washington. They produced a site where other alumni can also add your own biography. They also created an extensive time line of the school’s history to commemorate UMW’s centennial year (1908-2008).
- The Historical Markers Project: This group created a functional website containing the Fredericksburg City, Stafford County, and Spotsylvania County Historical Highway Markers of Virginia. For each marker, they provided extensive research and further reference material for seventy different markers.
Take a look at each of them, for they collectively represent a valuable contribution to historical resources online. What’s more, each of these sites are Google-friendly, free, and open to the public, as knowledge subsidized by the public should be. And finally, to seal the deal, they even have Creative Commons licenses! It’s a model for future courses that want to use the web as a place to create and share a series of long-standing historical resources.
I was at Richmond for the bulk of this course and the rest of DTLT did all the heavy lifting, yet I was lucky enough upon my return to sit down with Shannon and think about making WordPress Multi-User bend to the imagined site design of the Historical Markers project. The group had to research and present 70 markers within Fredericksburg, Stafford, and Spotsylvania counties. Each marker had an extended resource framer a broader context for its historical significance. This is remarkable because the few sites that deal with historical markers in Virginia that are online only reproduce the marker text, failing to give any larger frame of its history. This group filled that void by remaining keenly focused on the extended history, buttressed by a bibliography for further reading. It’s an invaluable resource, and this group put a tremendous amount of labor into amassing the sources for each of the markers.
Thinking about the site architecture with Shannon was a lot of fun. The guiding question was as follows: “How do you get enable visitors to easily browse, search, and find markers within a puny “blogging” platform like Wordpress?” This was further complicated by the fact that the search function on WordPress displays keyword searches chronologically. For example, if you search for a common term you’ll get numerous results but it won’t sort for relevance by that term based on it’s place in a post title or its recurrence, but rather chronologically. For example, when searching “George Washington” the first five search results make only passing reference to him, while the sixth item is a marker dedicated to his childhood home. The logic of this search is determined by how recently the post was published rather than its relevance to George Washington. So, we were further restricted by an inadequate search engine, so what to do?
Well, we came up with three simple things: First, categorize each of the markers by county, by century, and by common topics and have these on the sidebar for quick browsing. Second, use tags to keep track of keywords and then use the Simple Tags plugin to create an alphabetical index of terms in the form of a tag cloud as well as integrate a related post feature for each post. Third, create a page where all the markers are listed by county, each of which has a link to the post for that marker. This worked in large part because there are a finite number of posts. Nonetheless, I think it manages the task at hand well, and does a nice job of getting to any marker on the site in two clicks, much like a search.
And as I often do, I tried to push Shannon into including all the historical marker images as well as the geo-tagged google maps locations of the 70 markers. All of which, by the way, is freely available on the Virginia Department of Historical Resources site (a good sign when a gov’t agency is geo-tagging all its markers with Google Maps, then making that info freely available along with high resolution images). But Shannon was smart for she understood that the key to this project was not the bells and whistles, which while potentially useful, would only detract from the core mission of this site: the research, extended bibliography and discoverability —all of which was accomplished brilliantly. Bravo!
Sitewide tags is a feature of UMW Blogs I spent a bit of time working on this past Summer. In fact, one particular workaround allows you to have a sitewide tag cloud as well as sitewide searching of blog posts and a dynamic archive of posts–all without any hacks to the core files of your WordPress Multi-User installation.
Keep in mind, however, that this is a hack and will be deprecated sometime soon with the recent introduction of tags (as opposed to categories which this hack is utilizing) with the WPMu 1.3 release. That said, given it enables a tag cloud, a centralized search for posts, and a dynamic archive might make it valuable while the WordPress Multi-User community gradually ramps up to the full potential of the new tagging feature.
Site-Wide Tags & Search
Creating site-wide tags using categories is a really intelligent work-around which–as an additional bonus–also allows for a centralized search of blog posts and a dynamic archive.
The basic concept of this hack is made possible through a very unintuitive move. That move is to create a separate, single installation of WordPress in a subdirectory (named “tags”–if you like) where your WordPress Multi-User installation lives. Once you’ve done this upload the same theme you are using on the main page for your WPMu installation and you have basically faked another part of your main site. After that use the “fixed” WP-Autoblog plugin (which pulls post feeds and their categories–the secret sauce!!!–from your WPMu install) and the Sitewide Tags Permalink Replace plugin (which redirects the permalinks in the single WP installation back to the WPMu posts) in the single WP installation to feed all the posts from your WPMu install into this single blog. You do this by placing the feed for all the posts on the WPMu install (this feed is made possible by ITDamager’s awesome WPMu Sitewide Feed plugin) into the settings for the WP-Autoblog plugin under the options tab.
A look at the WP-Autoblog settings–really straightforward!
Plugins on the single installation “tags” blog. Click for larger version
I am keeping this overview rather simple because the complex details for creating this sitewide tags hack were originally worked out in this thread on the Multi-User forums (peruse that for more granular information and alternative strategies). Even better, the hack is documented in a step-by-step tutorial on the WPMu Codex by mrjcleaver here.
These instructions are thorough, the only thing I would recommend different is to use the “full post” option in the WP-Autoblog settings rather than “excerpt” so that you can use the single installation as a way to search all posts (that’s right, sitewide tags enables a sitewide search–pretty sneaky sis).
As for the tagcloud, just pick your favorite plugin to display WP categories as a tagcloud. UMW Blogs is using the WordPress Heatmap Plugin that displays your categories on a page by including a PHP call in the page template that the plugin will provide you with. Parenthetical note here: I titled this page view so it wouldn’t be repetitive in the URL -so instead of http://umwblogs.org/tags/tags you have http://umwblogs.org/tags/view–I stole this idea from edublogs which is using this same workaround.
Finally, if you include the minor hack to your page template for the WP Heat Map plugin on a page within the single installation blog you have a tag cloud (well, technically a category cloud) on your WPMu site. You can see this in action here.
Sitewide Archive
It follows from such a hack that you would be able to create a more dynamic archive of all the posts in the single installation. So not only can you use the single installation to search all the blog posts, but also organize them for browsing by month or even show the last X number of posts. You can see an example of such an archive on UMW Blogs here. This was done by simply using a gently hacked archive template that comes stock with the MistyLook theme.
I guess this “tutorial” has been more a series of links to other cohesive How-Tos and innumerable plugins, but I felt it was necessary because I was somewhat thwarted this Summer by the lack of any organized approach to explaining and integrating such a key feature for tagging, searching, and organizing the content of a WPMu instance.
Please ask me questions about anything that is unclear, for I’d hate to see you waste the same amount of time I did
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