The Boathouse Gym: where we study, cultivate, and break-in emerging digital technologies and platforms.

This website is now powered by the self-hosted version of WordPress.

We have used only a few basic plugins:

• Local Analytics for Google Analytics (including local, 24-hour browser caching of Google’s tracking JavaScript)
• WP-OpenID to allow visitors to use their OpenID accounts to logon and post comments
• WP-Yadis to allow us to set this website URL as our single identifier for our multiple OpenID accounts ( Yadis)
• ShotCode to create 2D bar codes for mobile phone bookmarking
• AddThis to allow users to easily bookmark individual entries on this site (and allows us to see reports on this activity)

We did come across a few problems with the installation - most of them revolving our our use of Microsoft IIS as a server. The biggest problem was our inability to make “pretty” permalinks to each post. Additional information about this problem (and work arounds) is found here.

2 Comments »

Tags: mySQL, openid, opensource, php, shotcode, wordpress, yadis
Posted in Platforms, Software

In an effort to explore alternatives to SurveyMonkey and other similar web-based survey tools we have been exploring open-source solutions. Our goal was to find a solution powerful enough to be used for the quick creation of low-end to mid-range surveys, while providing a customizable platform. During our research we came across and are now evaluating the LimeSurvey solution.

LimeSurvey Highlights

• Open-source platform: PHP and mySQL
• Advanced reporting through integration of JpGraph (open-source) and exports to SPSS.
• Integration with company directory servers (LDAP)

Our initial implementations are set to private/internal-only. As soon as we create a few public examples, we will post them here.

1 Comment »

Tags: jpgraph, ldap, mySQL, open-source, php
Posted in Software