A few nights ago, with heart in mouth, I installed Liferay, the widely acclaimed open source portal, on my laptop. This is not any old laptop. It’s my trusty Mac, configured jut so – in particular as an Apache server (localhost only) using MAMP. I know enough about Liferay to know it doesn’t run on standard Apache, but rather Apache Tomcat. And while I love the name (memories of the many marvelous male cats dancing through my mind) about all I know about Tomcat is it’s Java based. So I also had visions of Liferay blowing up my machine.
Why run this kind of risk? I could claim being game for any popular open source technology, and while I wish this were the case, who has that kind of time? No. It’s because of a work project I’m part of. A group needs an online collaboration tool, including document sharing. More to the point, they need it quickly. Drupal (as of version 6) is weak at document sharing, though strong on some of the group’s other needs. Several of my IT colleagues know and like Liferay, and think it may be a good match for document sharing. They tell me it’s a competitor to SharePoint. So we’re off an adventure — exploring whether to use it, Drupal or a combination.
Basic Instructions
My laptop survived. In fact, it turned out there’s a very simple way to do this. I used the BitNami Liferay Stack for OSX 10.4 or later. I considered doing it from scratch, but my eyes started to cross reading the documentation, plus I don’t aspire to be a Liferay expert.
If you’re considering doing this too, the only caution is to be sure your MAMP (or other server setup) is running on a port other than 8080 – the port Liferay will use. MAMP defaults to 8888, so if you haven’t changed that, it should be straightforward.
The result? A cool new technology on my laptop in just a few minutes. While I’m digging into Liferay in more of a stakeholder mode, setting up pages and “applications” like a software hussy, I’m also exploring how to change its themes. It looks fairly straightforward for someone who has dealt with Drupal or WordPress themes.
One final tip: the themes in a BitNami installation will be buried deep in the following directory:
[your liferay folder] > apache-tomcat > webapps > liferay > html > themes
It got me thinking about the driving force behind this blog: happiness and the web. The article doesn’t mention the web, but for almost 15 years, the web has been a bulwark of happiness for me. In the early days, it was a release from a difficult situation and the tendrils of despair. At times I even wonder if the web saved me. Now it’s part of what conference experts label “sustainable eudaemonia.” In other words, these days (with the bad years long gone) it remains a sure way to augment everyday peace of mind with happiness. And that’s with it now being my day job. Wonder of wonders.
But what is it that works this magic for me? It’s not surfing, and it’s certainly not email. It’s not hardware, nor software much either. Rather I notice it most in two ways.
First is the sheer wonder of the things people do with the web — and how it’s there to be shared. Humanity takes the bedrock of web standards, and from them creates the most astonishing things: elegant web apps like Backpack and Google Analytics, clever communication tools like change.gov and Twitter, everyday fare like RSS feeds and handsome sites, and most of all, the powerful search engines and knowledge banks that tie this super-abundance together.
But even more, I can feel that surge of happiness in the act of creation — when I jump into the web not as a spectator, but as a participant — when I’m building websites. It doesn’t matter if it’s for myself or for others. Nor does it matter if it’s a new site or an overhaul of an old site. It’s the fusion of HTML, scripts and databases; it’s the rhythm of code, save, refresh; it’s learning the latest techniques; it’s catching an unexpected glimpse of a site I helped build; it’s the teamwork and appreciation of others. And it’s other evanescent aspects…. “A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud.”
So fleeting, but so sure.
And you? Does the web bring you happiness? I’d love to know.
Other Analytics Resources (in no particular order)
Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic: Mashable, June 2007
Extensive links of analytics and related usability tools, grouped into five categories: (1)
Web traffic visualization, (2) Blog and RSS Feed Analysis, (3) Market Research Data and Site Rankings, (4) Analytics Software Packages, (5) Log File Analysis
How my dad would have loved Obama. He rebelled against his staunch Republican family when in high school, plastering FDR posters around his high school. Later, his cause became Africans and then African-Americans. We moved to Nashville so he could teach at Fisk. And how he loved technology. I am my father’s daughter.
I never imagined that a presidential campaign would make me remember him so much. And yet it does. Today it comes in the form of wonder.
It takes great management support to build a great website. Obama has a brilliant web team, but I have no doubt that his understanding of the web plays an enormous role in how successfully he uses it.
For me, and I hope for others, it cuts the media wall away. While I doubt I will ever come face to face with Obama, nonetheless between his books and his web presence I have a much better sense of who he is. Josiah Bartlett aside, all other presidents have had a distant cardboard feel — even Johnson and Nixon, whom I did see in person.
I always wondered about my father’s FDR worship and my grandfather’s FDR loathing. Now I see more clearly. And I hear Obama’s call to help each other through this economic crisis. What can I do to help?
Have you ever heard of the Tenneessee College Public Relations Association (TCPRA)? Me either. It turns out they’re a delightful group that enjoys each other’s company enough to meet twice a year. For their latest gathering they were in search of someone familiar with Google Analytics and happened upon me.
I expected it would be beautiful in upper east Tennessee (Harrogate, to be precise) this time of year, but I underestimated. It was breathtaking. I can see why that part of the world breeds authors. But more than that, the TCPRA people were delightful. Belmont University had a large contingent of their PR staff, with wonderful inside stories about the historic Belmont08 Debate, while Sam Watson of the Johnson City Press had an upbeat prognosis for their newspaper business. Astonishing. A newspaper that’s not at death’s door? They’ve embraced Web 2.0 and are making a go of it.
To TCPRA members (Doug Williams, in particular), thank you for including me. I promised I’d post my slides, so here they are. I’m not sure they’ll be much use out-of-context, but a promise is a promise — and in the next few days, I’ll also post a list of my favorite Google Analytics resources for you.
Google accounts are confusing. Marvelous, mind you, but nonetheless confusing. The most common mix-up I run across is people thinking their “gmail account” is just that. In fact, it’s much more. That same user name and password can give you access to Google Documents, Google Reader, Google Calendar, and a host (so to speak) of other rich and fruity Web 2.0 appolicatons. — even Blogger. Your “gmail account” is in fact your Google Account.
Understanding this a wonderful thing, unless you slip into thinking it’s the only type of Google account. This is where I fell into trouble. There’s at least one other: a Google Analytics Account. Your Google Account can give you access to multiple Google Analytics Accounts. And people can share administrative rights to the same Google Analytics Account. Can you blame me for getting confused?
Specifically, I ran afoul setting up Google Analytics for my church. After getting comfortable with it at work, a few months later I set up what I thought was a separate set of analytics for my church. Wrong. In fact I’d set up a “profile” of my work’s account for my church. Church and state. Hmmmm….. But the important point is that profiles are subsets of a Google Analytics account, and if you want to share administrative rights to that account, you share all profiles.
Now it’s a very good idea to share administrative rights to your Google Analytics accounts, assuming the website is not just yours. But could I share this hybrid account with anyone at work or at church? Well, actually I could have. There is one member of my church whom I work with, but I don’t think he would have been happy with this faux solution or with me.
Given that my church had much less data and need for the data, that account was the one to go. What I did was set up a separate account for my church and uploaded the new tracking code. The next day I checked to be sure the second account was working. It was, so I exported a boatload of PDFs from the old account – essentially archiving this data in case we ever need it in the future. And now all is well.
Meanwhile, a picture being worth all of the words above, here is a quick graph of Google Accounts vs. Google Analytics Accounts vs. Google Analytics Profiles. May it prevent you from falling into the same trap.
Boagworld, my favorite web developer podcast, has a juicy forum topic active right now — tips for new web designers. Here’s more or less what I wrote for it.
1. Learn as much as you can – and plan on keeping that up for the rest of your professional life. You can learn in whatever way suits you best. My preferred venues are books for new skills and RSS feeds for staying on top of the latest. But some like online tutorials, others classes, and still others prefer trial-and-error.
2. Devote time almost every day to following web design technologies and trends. RSS feeds, Twitter, email newsletters…. Again it’s whatever suits you best. Just don’t overwhelm yourself. Whenever I subscribe to a new RSS feed, I unsubscribe from another.
3. Understand the main skills involved in creating an excellent website. You certainly don’t have to master them all, but it’s good to have a grasp on what they really are and how they overlap. The primary skills for almost all sites are content creation, standards-based coding, design, and keeping the site current. For larger sites, they expand to project management, programming and information architecture.
4. Of these skills, know your strength in each. In areas where you’re weak, either work with someone who has them or develop them in yourself.
5. Follow your passion. There are many ways to grow within web development, so once you have basic mastery in the broad range of skills (within your abilities, of course), develop yourself in the areas that interest you most.
