The wurster, the better

It’s seems that whatever I do, I put myself further behind in many other things. I seem to have been somewhat preoccupied with helping others on the support forums that I have ignored what I need to do. This is a common occurrence for all of us. There just isn’t enough time to do everything. You really have to set your priorities.

I’ve tried to help someone recently integrate the Vanilla forum into WP. It was (and is) quite a learning experience. There have been instructions by others which I tried to follow, but didn’t work. As it turned out, the person I was trying to help actually figured it out. That sometimes happens to me, too. I ask a support question and when I don’t get any help or get help that doesn’t work (for me), it makes me think harder and in different ways. I have solved problems many times and I’m happy that others have done this, too. I hope to try these new steps and see what happens.

As an aside, I have noticed that there are very knowledgeable people who manage the support forums. They could easily (in a lot of cases) answer the users questions. But if they did, the user wouldn’t learn. Managing a support forum appears to be an art and not a science. In some cases, you have to give someone explicit instructions. In other cases, simple clues will help them solve the problem. And in other cases, no response will help the user think harder to look for the solution. Managing a support forum is like teaching. You have to learn who your students are in order to adapt your teaching to their learning styles.

There are 2 solutions as I see it: complete integration with the two and just a look theme-wise for Vanilla to match the WordPress theme. I was trying to go for the theme look and did succeed by doing an iframe in a WP page and create a page template. That really seems to work for me and my type of blog. The other person wanted complete integration with users and passwords and stuff. He wanted the forum to also display in the WP content area. For their scenario, that was the proper solution. I just want to learn so that I can possibly help another at another time. Here is their site, if you want to chek it out.

Over the past couple of days, I upgraded both my local forum install and my live forum to the newest version 1.0.1. I didn’t have any problems, but then again, my forum is not used yet. Here is what I did:

1. backup software and data (just in case you need to restore everything)
2. unzipped the 1.0.1 zip file on my computer
3. deleted the extensions and conf folders (this is where your extensions and configuration settings are – you don’t want to loose what you have set up)
4. ftp’d all the files in each folder separately
5. since I use a customvanilla theme and several different styles, I ftp’d the theme files first into the themes folder
6. then I ftp’d the default style files into my default styles folder in my 2 themes

Then I went to my forum site and all was well, showing me that I had upgraded to 1.0.1.

It’s been kind of mucky this past week or so with high temperatures and high humidity and rain. I’ve been trying to get motivated to change a few programming-related projects I’ve started, but can’t. I always seem to get sidetracked (or just say what the hell).

I got a call about the classes I’ll be teaching for the Lions Club in Springfield in the Fall. There will be 2 new classes.

1. It looks like we’ll be dropping the Access portion of the MS Office classes, leaving just Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Excel class may take a more advanced direction after the organizer checks with the other person who teaches Excel.
2. I’ll also be teaching an eBay class. Apparently the person who taught the eBay class, has retired. So, I said I would do it. I hope to get an agenda or curriculum so that I can see a direction in which to teach this. I guess there’s more than meets the eye when you want to buy or sell something on eBay. maybe that’s why there are book on the topic.
3. And I’ll be teaching a Web Design course. It will hopefully be from the perspective of what the students want to do. I know a lot of tools, but I would prefer not to teach a class on MS FrontPage or just html or just php. Since I’m solutions oriented, I would prefer to help direct the user to a solution. Maybe, I will even give each student a sub-domain on one of my domains so that they can actually build a working site. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve been trying to get my forum ready for use in my classes. I’ve been playing around with the Vanilla forum software a lot and ready the support forum items. I guess I should just install it on my live site and set it up so that it will be ready. I think I’ve been playing areound too much on my local computer. I shouldn’t waste my time on this local version byt on the real “live” version.

And one more thought to throw out there into cyberspace, what is volunteering all about? Are there constraints on volunteering? Does this lock you into a situation where you are not free to express yourself in other venues? I hope to do a little research on the topic of volunteerism before I spew out my thoughts. So, stay tuned.