Omeka Plugins

These past couple of weeks, I have been working exclusively with Omeka plugins. I have downloaded, installed, activated, and read about dozens of plugins available for use from Omeka. So far, I have tested the major ones that we’re most likely to use on our test server. Some of these include Collection Tree (which allows us to create collections of items that branch off into other collections), Contribution (which allows visitors to contribute various items), Exhibit Builder (a virtual gallery with related images and descriptions grouped into pages), and Simple Pages (which lets us create simple web pages linked from the main site).

At the beginning, the testing had been going really well! I was learning all about Omeka (you learn so much more by playing around with the tools than just reading about them!) and the plugins all worked successfully without error. That is, until this past Thursday, when I started receiving error messages from Omeka whenever I tried to upload, view, or search for an item. As of now, I’m not sure why these errors are being produced. We’ll have to look at the error log and hopefully discover the source of the errors and be able to fix them.

Stay tuned...

Amanda

Learning, learning, and learning more!

I've been hard at work trying to learn the basics of graphics! After having several meetings and talking to people who have previously worked with the data from Malta and Sicily, we have decided to go with WebGL instead of Unity. This is because in WebGL you have more control over what you can do, even though it is more complex to learn and understand. Well, I'm up for the challenge!

I have been working on these tutorials: http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=28

It took me a while to get acquainted with WebGL, and I couldn't figure out why my code wasn't displaying anything! I finally figured it out so now I'm working through the tutorials. There are a lot of confusing and new words but I'm doing my best to learn what they mean. The tutorials have a lot of new words so I have to read them 5-6 times before I understand them, but they are really specific and helping me understand.

I also just got this book in the mail yesterday: http://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-ES-2-0-Programming-Guide/dp/0321502795/

It is guided towards OpenGL development in phones, but Zoe recommended it because it explains the concepts very well. I will start reading it and doing the book tutorials this weekend.

In my online tutorials, we had to draw a triangle and a square. I decided to make a house! At first I was confused because I couldn't get it to draw more shapes, but then I figured out I needed to first create the shape inside the initialize shader method, and then I had to translate, bind the buffers, and draw the arrays (the points of the shapes are stored in a 3D array, see below).

Here is my house:

Pretty cool, right? It's awesome how I just set the z of the shape and it magically becomes 3D. Okay, it's not really magical but since I only worked with non-3D stuff before it's awesome!

Here's how the shapes are stored:


        squareVertexPositionBuffer = gl.createBuffer();
        gl.bindBuffer(gl.ARRAY_BUFFER, squareVertexPositionBuffer);
        vertices = [
            -1,  0.0,  0.0,
            -3,  0.0,  0.0,
            -1, -2.0,  0.0,
            -3, -2.0,  0.0
        ];
        gl.bufferData(gl.ARRAY_BUFFER, new Float32Array(vertices), gl.STATIC_DRAW);
        squareVertexPositionBuffer.itemSize = 3;
        squareVertexPositionBuffer.numItems = 4;

As you can see you have to do a lot just to create the shape itself, and later in the drawing method you have to bind the buffers and draw arrays. It's pretty complex, and I have yet to figure it all out yet. But I'm learning a lot and hopefully in the next few weeks I will be able to work with real data!

On a side note, I applied to go on the Malta and Sicily trip for next quarter (last 4 weeks). I am really excited because it would help me so much with this project (I would be taking a graphics course too!).

I can't wait to become more comfortable with WebGL and start developing prototypes of the actual data :).

-Vanessa

Researching and testing Omeka's features

In the past couple of weeks, I have been exploring other sites using Omeka to see if they use Omeka’s features effectively and to discover the different plugins that are available. I found a few good examples that we can refer to when building our site, because they have added plugins and features to make their sites more interactive, which is something we would like to do. Here are a few of the sites that I liked and are similar to ours that I think we should use as examples:

http://vagovernmentmatters.org
I like this site because it has great organization and has similar pages that we’d like to have: activities, case studies, and teaching resources. Each item has a picture and short description to make browsing easier. They also incorporated a lot of plugins: Coins, Simple Pages, Custom Routes, Dropbox, Exhibit Builder, Tag Bandit, MyOmeka, OaiPmhRepository

http://www.civilwarinart.org
When you first enter this site, it is very visually impressive. I also really like the “classroom projects” tab, which features 3 different lesson plans available for middle school and high school teachers to use in their classrooms. The lesson plans are designed to take 5 class periods and are very well planned out. We should definitely look at these lesson plans when creating ours. However, they didn’t use any additional plugins besides the most basic ones that Omeka offers.

http://www.floridamemory.com
This site has the greatest variety that I’ve seen. There are photographs, documents, timelines, educational resources, video, and audio. I think this is a great example of a site that works as an “online classroom”--something we would like to incorporate into our site.

I’ve also been doing some more research on Omeka’s features and how we can best utilize them. We just got the server installed this past week and so far, I’ve installed the "Simple Pages", "Collection Tree", and “Contribution” plugins. I have been playing around the the features of the plugins and have tested the Contribution plugin as a site visitor. I was able to contribute both stories (by writing text or uploading a text file, or both) and images (by uploading an image). There are a few minor problems that I have with this plugin, but I’ll work more to see if I can adjust the settings to fix these. I will also continue installing and testing more plugins that we might be interested in using.

-Amanda