One of the reasons that testing JavaScript can be so pesky (and perhaps one of the reasons that so little JavaScript is tested…) is the fact that you have to maintain a library of HTML “fixtures” for the tests to run on. What’s a fixture? Basically, just a little chunk of markup that provides a…. More.
Acceptance Testing for Omeka Plugins
For the month of December, I’m going to be heads-down on NeatlineFeatures (project page; Github). This is an Omeka plugin that lets people associate geo-spatial metadata with Omeka items by drawing on a map. Before I started coding, I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing, so I wrote a few user…. More.
Last week in Open Source
Another busy week in the Scholars’ Lab R&D offices. If you have anything to contribute, remember, pull requests are welcome! Rails 3.1 Template Eric Rochester (erochest) spent some time building a template for Rails 3.1 projects which include HTML 5 Boilerplate and 960gs for erb template layouts, along with rspec-rails, annotate, faker, webrat, spork, and…. More.
Web Development Template: Rails 3.1, HTML 5 Boilerplate, 960.gs
One of the best things about web development is that there are so many tools around to make the job easier. One of the worst things about web development is that there are so many tools around, and they just don’t play well together. Often, they’re not fighting publicly. Instead, they’re digging at each other…. More.
This week in Open Source
After reading a post on one of my favorite blogs, Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots, I was inspired to start this series chronicling highlights in our Open Source development efforts. It was a busy week for the Scholars’ Lab R&D team, with updates to the FedoraConnector, NeatlineMaps, and Timeline plugins for Omeka, as…. More.
Introduction to Linked Open Data at Rare Book School
Yesterday, I was fortunate to be invited by Andrew Stauffer and Bethany Nowviskie to present at their Rare Book School course, Digitizing the Historical Record. I talked about Linked Open Data (LOD), and afterward, Dana Wheeles talked about the NINES project and how they use RDF and LOD. I tried to present a gentle, mostly…. More.
Omeka Development with Vagrant
For the latest information about this system, please see the README file. It contains this information, plus I’ll keep it up-to-date. One of the biggest annoyances in a developer’s life is managing the software required to work on several different projects. Usually, this doesn’t just mean having different systems or programming languages, but having different…. More.
Announcement: BagItPHP Library
The Scholars’ Lab is pleased to announce the initial release of a PHP library implementing BagIt 0.96. BagIt is a specification from the Library of Congress for bundling and transmitting multiple files along with their meta-data. You can check out the project page at http://github.com/scholarslab/BagItPHP/. Our work on BagItPHP stems from the open source “Omeka…. More.
Building Omeka Exhibits with Fedora Repository Content
Our NEH-funded Neatline project has inspired the Scholars’ Lab to develop or enhance several new Omeka plugins recently. (See our full list.) One of these is FedoraConnector, which is designed to enable administrators to attach Fedora datastreams (a digital object — whether image, XML like TEI or EAD, or video) to Omeka items. This is…. More.
Synchronizing Development Databases
As a developer, I routinely work on multiple machines during the course of a project. One of the biggest pains is working on a database-driven project is that I often need to move the data on machine X to machine Y, make changes, then move the updated data from machine Y back to machine X.…. More.