This Blog is Merging

From this point on, all news about QuestGarden will be posted on the WebQuest News site. No point having two thinly-updated blogs going. Now that QuestGarden is open for business, it's all part of the same work. See you at http://webquest.org/news/

From Saarbrücken with Love

Jüergen Wagner, a longtime WebQuest watcher, has just written a piece titled
QuestGarden - WebQuests erstellen ohne HTML-Kenntnisse for the German language portal Lehrer Online. We might be seeing a lot more umlauts in the QuestGarden soon.

48 Hours without Mishap

It's 2 nights ago now since I sent out the notices to all my lists and made links to QuestGarden from webquest.sdsu.edu and webquest.org and opened things up to anyone interested. Things seem to be holding up nicely. The QuestGarden page got over 700 hits since the doors opened. Yesterday, 57 people created WebQuests, and today another 31. Almost all of them are empty and untitled and came into existence only because people were getting acquainted with the tool. But already there are three WebQuests that are almost complete. It's clear that they were pasted in from existing quests, but there's nothing wrong with that.

Zafer Unal, creator of the Instant WebQuest site, kindly took the time to work his way through QuestGarden and uncovered a couple of places where I'd left myself open to security breaches. They're now fixed, and I hope he'll continue to provide that kind of advice.

It's cosmic the way some things cycle back to a new version of an older event. In 1982 I set up an electronic bulletin board on a spare Apple ][ in our lab at SDSU. As far as I can tell it was among the first 2 or three BBSs set up specifically for teachers to communicate with each other. After testing it by calling it up repeatedly myself (you had to ... gasp ... dial up a phone number to get to it), I spread the word that it was up and ready. The very first person to call was Al Rogers, who would later skyrocket to fame as Mr. FrEdWriter and then Mr. FrEdMail.

So it didn't amaze me at all that the first person to hit QuestGarden after I threw the switch Thursday night was again Al Rogers.

QuestGarden Goes Public

At a wonderful event hosted by the Educational Technology Department of San Diego Unified School District, at 4pm today I demoed QuestGarden at its new, post-beta-test URL: http://webquest.org/questgarden/.

It was a great venue to be in, as I spent many hours with the group in the early WebQuest days helping with the Triton and Patterns projects. Some of the teachers and leaders from back then were in the room, along with telecommunications legends Al Rogers and Yvonne Andres, and four former presidents of San Diego Computer-Using Educators (including two Dodges). Lots of old friends and some new ones. Got great questions from the group and a list of new ideas for features and partnerships. They're archiving the presentation for later streaming.

There's an overview of QuestGarden here.

The baby is born. Now on to version 1.1.

Hats Off to Beta Testers

No new features added lately, but several little things fixed that I would never have known about if there weren't a lot of new users coming in and finding things amiss. Having the luxury of a 17 inch PowerBook toasting my lap has sometimes blinded me to how the site looks on smaller screens. Aggie in New Jersey helpfully pointed out that the submit button on the Appearance module was out of sight on a typical screen, thus making hard to change the looks of things. Now fixed by adding a scroll bar to that frame (but only when needed).

And today, for reasons at first inscrutible, the map suddenly stopped working. Something at Google's end? Nope. The problem was that Bindu D'Souza logged on and the apostrophe that her ancestors thoughtlessly acquired centuries ago threw everything off and confused the Google Map API. Now fixed by outputing all user-inputs within double, not single, quotes as I should have done to begin with.

For the next few days I have to throw myself headlong into redesigning a course I'm not even teaching this semester. As recreation, though, I hope to add the zip archiving feature here some time duing that stretch.

Two Steps Forward, One Back

Not much to show for yesterday and today. Tweaked the members home page a bit and added the long awaited ability to delete existing WebQuests in one's workspace. In some of the earlier workshops when the system kept timing out on people, they ended up with a load of Untitled, empty WebQuests. Now those can be deleted.

Also added an Overview page which, based on my experience with the equivalent page at the SDSU WebQuest site, will get a lot of hits.

But then I learned from one SDSU colleague that there's a problem with the publication script. Turns out that the WYSIWYG editor is inconsistent with the way it saves the path names for the image files. Sometimes it puts in an absolute link, other times it's relative. As long as the published page stays here on QuestGarden, the absolutely linked images will show up and the others won't. And if they move the lesson elsewhere, all the image links will go bad. Same is true when I move this whole thing to questgarden.com (which better be soon!).

The solution is simple. Within the publication script I need to strip the paths down to where they're all relative to the WebQuest .htm files. Easy to do, but I'm past my scripting prime time now. I'll get up early to bang that out. (Hard to believe I used to be a night owl like Alex, who stayed up all night working with June on his amazing announcement system for the school parent's association.)

Also (finally) tracked down a couple of potentially useful scripts for doing the zip compression. Three cheers for phpclasses.org. They had what I wanted, while the usually reliable hotscripts.com site did not. Three cheers also for all the generous coders out there who make their work available to others!

Profile Edit Page completed

Now people can change their names, passwords, map location and so on. This will get me out of the loop as users have already been asking me to do it for them as they didn't realize that the way they registered is the way their names and affiliations will appear on the top of their WebQuest. From looking at the database, it's clear that a lot of folks are in the habit of using all lower case when they register for a site. Now they can change it themselves. A minor triumph.

I've already gotten a couple of hints that the one layout available for the WebQuest won't be enough. Have to bump that up in priority.

Spent the morning getting the signup form to work with Google maps. Turns out it wasn't Google messing with things at their end. IE on Windows is particularly fussy about javascripts that affect the layout of a page. You have to put the script after the body. Doing that fixed the signup page, but I still can't get it to work for the access-report page that shows where the users are who logged in during the last 48 hours.