StigmergicWeb

Open Thinking - a new site/community for anyone who is interested in open content, open source software, open publishing practices or open content formats - is now open. Here’s our current definition of open thinking:

Open thinking is the tendency of an individual, group or institution to give preference to the adoption of open technologies or formats in regards to software, publishing, content and practice. Open thinkers critique, question and seek to reject technologies or formats that compromise the power of adopters, especially in the freedom to use, reuse, edit and share creative works and tools. Open thinkers value group-based problem solving and give preference to tools that enable social collaboration and sharing. Open thinkers actively strive to replace adopted technologies and formats with open alternatives. Open thinkers advocate for the adoption of open technologies and practice.

If you are interested, why don’t you head on over and join in the discussion.

As part of my M.Ed. project, I’ll be building a web site. Most sane people would do this using Dreamweaver or some similar product. I, however, am not one of those people - I prefer to create web pages by hand-coding the HTML and CSS files. I suppose if I wanted to be uber-geeky about it, I would write my own text editor (in assembler, if I wanted to be really hard core about it), but I’ll stick with ones that are currently available for the Mac.

My requirements are fairly simple. I need a text editor that I can use to write HTML and CSS files. Any text editor could do this. Heck, I could use vi if I really wanted to geek out. I’d like to have an editor that did some of the coding automagically. I like to hand code, but I don’t mind using some tools that help to automate the typing. I could use the code editor in Dreamweaver - I’ve used it before and its actually very comfortable to use. Using Dreamweaver just to do handcoding is like buying a Ferrari just for driving to the local grocery store - a waste of money and not using the functionality to its fullest. Besides, with Dreamweaver I might decide to use the WYSIWYG mode, and that is the way to the dark side.

I also like to use some open source software, if possible. The free (as in beer) part certainly appeals to me, but so does the speechiness type of freedom. In my experience, a strong user community around an open source project is usually a better source of application support than the support available for commercial software. Also, if I am really stuck on something or I have suggestions to improve the program, I can contact the developer(s) directly. Try that with most commercial software! I did a little bit of research into this, and thought I should share the results with others. Lest you think I am being overly concerned with this, a good text editor is to a coder what power tools are to a carpenter. We can get good results with mediocre tools but its an easier job to do, and more fun, with good tools. Admittedly, my needs as a coder, not to mention my skills, are minimal but I still like to work with proper tools. OK - here are my thoughts on the text editors I reviewed. I won’t claim that I’ve done a thorough job of testing each editor, so some of these descriptions are based on limited experience.

1. TextEdit Free with Mac OS (equivalent to NotePad in Windows). Nothing fancy for editing tools, just straightforward text editing. Free with all Macs, and apparently the source code is open and distributed with Xcode. TextEdit also has some nice word processing features, but I don’t need those. Rating: 1/5 (as an editor; for other uses it would rate 3.5/5)

2. JEdit Nice editor, many good plugins available including an XML plugin that does automagic tag closing for HTML tags, and makes tag suggestions when creating tags (similar to Dreamweaver code editor). No built in auto XHTML file templating, but a macro was easily written to do the job. Macro recording (or writing, if you aren’t afraid of a little coding). Feels very Emacs-ish. Open source.

Rating: 4/5

1. Smultron Open source, Mac OS only. It has a very Mac-ish look and feel to it, with the toolbar at the top. Multiple windows can be open simultaneously, with a pane showing a list of currently open documents. Keyboard shortcuts to move between open documents. There is a built including XHTML template. Full screen edit mode for distraction free writing/coding. Includes a command line tool - this editor has many command line connections, including ability to run shell commands, or run the file or selected text. It can auto-close tags, and can make text suggestions for partially completed word. This would make a really nice HTML editor. There is a lot of well-thought out functionality in this editor and may end up being my choice.

Rating: 4.5/5

1. TextWrangler Proprietary, but free, from the good folks at Bare Bones Software. This is essentially a limited version of BBEdit. It excels at using regular expressions to transfrom text, but as an HTML editor it isn’t as fully featured for coding HTML as Smultron or JEdit. Has an Emacs-ish feel to it.

Rating: 3/5

1. BBEdit The 500 pound gorilla of Macintosh text editors. I remember using BBEdit on my old (OS 8 era) Mac, and it was a joy to use as an HTML editor (I didn’t do much coding back then). I’m not sure if my memories of BBEdit are correct or if my expectations of an HTML editor have increased, but I find that BBEdit, like Text Wrangler, is an adequate HTML editor but not a particularly great one. The functionality in BBEdit is perhaps too much for my meagre needs, and it is verging on becoming bloatware (IMHO). It is also the priciest of the Mac text editors at US $125, which works out to $145 Canadian, quite a bit considering the availability of free editors like JEdit and Smultron, and the availability of lower price editors like TextMate. Rating: 4/5

2. TextMate This is an newer text editor but unlike Smultron, TextMate costs 39 euros, which works out to about $60 Canadian. As an HTML editor, it is as sweet as candy. New (X)HTML documents can be created from a template, which is editable. Keyboard shortcuts are available for almost all standard functions such as moving word by word or to the end of the current line.

An interesting variation on keyboard shortcuts are tab triggers. These are short strings (such as ‘div’ to insert a new div tag) that activate an action when followed by a tab. I typed in ‘div’ followed by a tab, and a pair of div tags were created including a placeholder for an id property; if I want to use it, I tab then type in the id for the div, and if I don’t want it, I hit the delete key then a down arrow and I’m ready to add content inside the div tag. It took me about 30 seconds to create a snippet (piece of text that is used frequently) for a paragraph tag (which suprisingly is not included with the program, or at least I couldn’t find it), then another 10 seconds to assign a tab trigger for it. Sweet!

TextMate was the winner of the Apple Design Award for best developer tool in 2006.

Rating: 5/5

Final thoughts I’d narrow my choices down to JEdit, Smultron and TextMate. TextEdit has no pretense of being a programmer’s editor, even for something as simple as HTML, and would only be suitable if you liked to type everything out one character at a time. I need something with a little bit more HTML programming finesse. Text Wrangler and BBEdit have great text processing capabilities, but feel a little too emacs-ish for me (not to start a series of comment flaming, but I’m more of a vi guy), and aren’t especially welcoming for someone who just wants to do some productive HTML coding. I like JEdit. It is free software/open source. Its extensibility by plugins is terrific, and there seems to be a strong community (always a good thing for an open source project). I have used it in Linux and Windows environments, and will continue to do so. The Mac-ishness of Smultron and TextMate, as well as their design as coding tools, make them my clear choices. Given my preference to use free (as in both beer and speech) software, Smultron will be my first choice. I may still be lured to TextMate, definitely my favourite of the entire bunch.

After a long and rejuvenating summer break, the EdTech Posse is back with some new podcasts. In our first podcast of the new season, Rick and I talk with brand new Posse deputy Heather Ross about open source in education.

EdTech Posse 2.1 - Open Source in Education

Notice to Linux users

In response to demand, Statistics Canada has removed the restriction for Linux. This change takes effect May 13th, 2006.

I think this is the first acknowledgement by a government in Canada that Linux exists, let alone that people might actually be using to fill in census data. There are still a lot of sites at different levels of government that still require IE on Windows so that ActiveX can be used, mostly for functions that could be replaced quite handily by some half-clever scripting on a LAMP platform.

I have played around some with SuprGlu, a web service that allows you to take some RSS feeds and munge them all together in one blog-like page (I have an example that pulls together the web sites for various members of the EdTech Posse).

Never content with the web services where the code is locked behind closed doors, Stephen is starting to put together some similar services, which he refers to as MyGlu, complete with code so the you or I or your great-aunt Mathilda can run it on our own servers, and even tweak the code to our requirements. I suggest you take a look at the code, then spend the rest of the day playing with it.

I think the title says it all. Despite constant rumors, mostly FUD based, that open source software does not provide a lower total cost of ownership, many schools are finding out that this is not the case:

Using Open Source software Noxon School District saved $92,675.20. Linux and Open Source software allowed this school district to provide cutting edge technology to students.

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Its great to see that Alec Couros, the open source sheriff of the posse, is spreading the word - Couros Blog » Blog Archive » OpenOffice.org 2.0 Officially Released

I expect there are going to be a flurry of downloads over the next little while. I would suggest you download openoffice.org 2.0 via bittorrent, then leave your bittorrent client open for a few hours to help speed up the process of spreading the new release. This will help to alleviate the traffic on the regular download sites, and you’ll get amazing download times - I downloaded the entire 75 MB in about 10 minutes!

I’ve heard about this through a number of sources, including Alec, who views this as I do - a signal that North American institutes of higher learning may start adopting open source software as part of their learning infrastructure. Alec puts it aptly:

Leading innovative institutions will continue to switch to open source software once there is a clear realization that good software does NOT have to be purchased, and that decisions around software are best made in rooms without salespeople.

The original source of this news seems to be this thread on the Using Moodle forum at moodle.org. (You can log in as a guest to access the forum, but you might as well create an account for yourself). The thread begins by quoting this from Cindy Xin’s summary of CADE:

Athabasca faculties were using three different LMS systems at the same time. The University finally decided that it would only support a single system. The questions was which one. Sounds familiar? Selection committee was formed and it decided on WebCT. Bear in mind that Alberta has province wide license on webct. Faculty member didn’t like the decision and consequently formed its own committee and conducted its own evaluation to rate the three systems - webct, moodle, and Lotus Notes Learning Space. Moodle won head and shoulder. The University accepted faculty’s decision. Now Moodle is the choice at Athabasca.

Via Slashdot, I see that The Definitive Guide to Plone is available online. Plone is a really solid, open source content management system, built on top of the Zope content management framework (and as an added bonus, its written in Python!). I’ve noticed a few educational technology blogs, notably that of David Wiley, are run using Plone.

The biggest drawback, from my point of view, is that you basically need to run your own server in order to install Plone, as opposed to some of the PHP/Perl + MySQL content management systems, such as Drupal. These can be installed onto any server that runs PHP or Perl scripts. There are some hosts that provide Plone hosting, but at a premium that makes it less attractive.

I realize that this is a question that quite a few people have been asking for a number of years. I think the time may have come, however, when the answer is unhesitatingly maybe

In a recent post (Confused about Linux? This may help.) by Alec Couros on his blog, educationaltechnology.ca/couros, Alec points to a review of SimplyMEPIS, a Linux distro of which I was unaware, but which sounds pretty sweet. I have recently installed UbuntuLinux on a spare machine at work, and was impressed with the ease of installation (hint - just keep pressing Enter), and the usable desktop interface that came with the install. I don’t think it is any coincidence that both distros are based on Debian Linux. Its great advantage to desktop users is that once it is installed, you’ll never need to boot from an install CD again in your life since all upgrades can be done online.

Installation is really no more difficult for these or many other Linux distros than for Windows or Mac OS. The advantage that Windows has over Linux is that it comes pre-installed on machines. But if more great distros like SimplyMEPIS or UbuntuLinux keep coming out, I get the feeling that those preinstalled versions of Windows might not stay on the hard drives of new machines as long as they used to.