Casper Hints Web Site

[stevewood]

This topic has come up a few times over the last few months: having a web
site to post tips, tricks, code, etc. Well, I went and registered the
following domain name:

casperhints.com

I'm willing to host that domain here for everyone to use, I just want to
find out how you all would like it to run. I mean, do we want to run it as
a wiki using Media Wiki, or run it as a WordPress blog? Or as a bulletin
board system of some kind.

I imagine we can appoint a few keepers of the site to be site admins, and
that we as a collective group can police the data that is up there. It's
just a matter of how the content gets up there.

Please let me know if y'all are interested in this or not, and we can get
the discussion going about how to run it.

Steve Wood
Director of IT
swood at integer.com

The Integer Group | 1999 Bryan St. | Ste. 1700 | Dallas, TX 75201
T 214.758.6813 | F 214.758.6901 | C 940.312.2475

[tlarkin]

I am partial to Drupal, and is what I use on my site

www.tlarkin.com/tech

So many awesome modules you can use, and it is easy to set up. Though I am a web developer neophyte though. I copy/paste php code, heh. Though you can put me down for helping to provide content

[jstrauss]

I second Tumblr.

Jeffrey A. Strauss
Systems Administrator
Department of Educational Technology
Loyola High School of Los Angeles
1901 Venice Boulevard
Los Angeles, Ca 90006
213.381.5121 x. 265

[hasaanh]

I third Tumbler.

Hasaan Herrington
Technical Support II
Information Technology
Anchorage School District
(907) 742-4615

[#5]

Tumblr is one of the sites blocked by our organization, so we could try to
get it unblocked, or just use wiki. Prefer wiki.

--
Karl Schoenefeld | IT Department
SGS St Louis | 1035 Hanley Industrial Court | St Louis, MO 63144
Direct: 314-918-3126 | Cell: 314-680-0359

[localhorst]

Hi,

On 14.06.2010, at 20:08, Jeff Strauss wrote:

I like Tumblr too, but only for content provided by a group of editors. To build a community sharing knowledge on Casper, I see more advantages in a open system like a wiki then a content management system. How do you want to get a large community collaboratively edit articles, update information with a system like tumblr or wordpress? In a wiki everyone interested helping our just creates an account and starts working in the team.

M

[localhorst]

Hi,

On 10 Jun 2010, at 20:54, Steve Wood wrote:

I would vote for a MediaWiki instance where only registered users may edit.

Regards,
Marko

[jarednichols]

I vote for Tumblr.  http://www.tumblr.com/why-tumblr

j
-- 
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

[milesleacy]

Hi All,

As a JAMF employee, I'm not going to vote, but I think Marko makes an
excellent point. An encyclopedia-style format may be more usable than an
article-based format.

FWIW.

-- Miles Leacy
Technical Training Manager
Mobile (347) 277-7321

miles at jamfsoftware.com
....................................................................
JAMF Software
1011 Washington Ave. S
Suite 350
Minneapolis, MN 55415
....................................................................
Office: (612) 605-6625
Facsimile: (612) 332-9054
....................................................................
US Support: (612) 216-1296
UK Support +44.(0)20.3002.3907
AU Support +61.(0)2.8014.7469
....................................................................
http://www.jamfsoftware.com

[tlarkin]

*stands on soapbox*

First and foremost I am not a web developer and at best I can read enough php code to copy/paste what I want out of it, but don't actually write the code myself. I vote we use a full blown CMS system. CMS systems are already setup by design for multi user environments. For example, my site, which I already said anyone here can sign up and post content I have users and roles. I can then create a custom role, like say bog admin for example. Blog admin can get all permissions to modify, delete, add, create, etc from the blogs section of the website. Since it is all backed by MySQL this is easily done with users and roles.

Security updates are alway being applied to Drupal. There is a module for everything. You want to thumbnail pictures, but when a user surfs the site and clicks on it, a giant sized picture will pop up in a nice formatted light box (industry term). You want a wiki, add the wiki function to drupal. You want a forum, add the forum function. You want to create a role with in drupal that just allows someone to have edit rights to articles (like an editor so to speak) set up their role that way. You can have many admins by setting up roles that get access to everything in the site. Then some guy named Miles joins to the site and someone decides they want to give miles admin rights over blogs and tech articles but not over any of the web back end stuff.

Then we have a guy who is a web developer and we give him access to the back end of it, but restrict his access to the content. There are modules for wikis for drupal, there are modules for donations. I have one on my site called 'buy me a beer,' and it allows anyone to paypal me a few dollars to buy me a beer.

MY opinion is for it to work, you want some stuff in a wiki format, some in a blog format and you want a lot of it in some sort of technical web based document. Then we can add print to PDF modules so people can save whole sections of content to their machine locally for off site reference.

Now, the down side is, while drupal is all powerful, it does require a bit of web developer knowledge and wordpress, which I think is an inferior product than drupal on paper, has made it pretty darn easy to set up and use. So it is give and take. My site is ran off drupal, however, I have web developer friends who I can bribe with cheeseburgers and beer to help me fix my site when I screw it up.

Thanks

Tom

[Bukira]

nice one :-)

sounds good to me

Criss Myers
Senior Customer Support Analyst (Mac Services)
iPhone Developer
Apple Certified Technical Coordinator v10.5
LIS Development Team
Adelphi Building AB28
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
Ex 5054
01772 895054

[Bukira]

drupal should be easy to install with simplescripts.com

Criss Myers
Senior Customer Support Analyst (Mac Services)
iPhone Developer
Apple Certified Technical Coordinator v10.5
LIS Development Team
Adelphi Building AB28
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
Ex 5054
01772 895054

[stevewood]

It sounds like Drupal is the way to go, since it will give us the best of
all worlds: blog, repository, and wiki.

Thank you everyone for your input into this. I am going to begin the
process of getting this setup, and once it is done, I will announce it to
the list.

Now, on the same topic, it'd be cool if we had some slick logo for the site,
and maybe a header graphic as well. Anyone feel inclined to come up with a
graphic for the site? :-)

Steve Wood
Director of IT
swood at integer.com

The Integer Group | 1999 Bryan St. | Ste. 1700 | Dallas, TX 75201
T 214.758.6813 | F 214.758.6901 | C 940.312.2475

[tlarkin]

Oh I can install Drupal in under 10 minutes, and have a full blown CMS running. Now to make Drupal look pretty and edit CSS, and do any custom PHP tweaking, that is where I kind of scratch my head and call my web developer buddies. Drupal is a complete framework. It does whatever you code it to do. I like it a lot, but just wish I knew more about web development and design.

I am not sure how many of you keep up with current whitehouse.gov news, but their whole web team just migrated their whole website to Drupal.

[jstrauss]

I saw that... Their site looks great. I was considering moving my site over to Drupal from Joomla, on which it's built now. Good call on the CMS.

Sent from a mobile device.

On Jun 15, 2010, at 7:32, "Thomas Larkin" <tlarki at kckps.org<mailto:tlarki at kckps.org>> wrote:

Oh I can install Drupal in under 10 minutes, and have a full blown CMS running. Now to make Drupal look pretty and edit CSS, and do any custom PHP tweaking, that is where I kind of scratch my head and call my web developer buddies. Drupal is a complete framework. It does whatever you code it to do. I like it a lot, but just wish I knew more about web development and design.

I am not sure how many of you keep up with current whitehouse.gov<http://whitehouse.gov> news, but their whole web team just migrated their whole website to Drupal.

[#16]

I prefer wiki as far a style goes. I prefer DokuWiki to MediaWiki. MediaWiki, while the defacto wiki these days, is probably way too complex for what we want to do. A simpler wiki, at least to start, would likely be a better solution.

www.dokuwiki.org<http://www.dokuwiki.org/>

Regards,


[#17]

Just wanted to throw in that I think it would be interesting if there was a
Question and Answer component to the site, perhaps something like
serverfault.com [
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-clones lists
possible web application clones ]. Granted, the mailing list fills this
function, but I sure like to be able to have questions and answers voted up
and tagged with topics.

Cheers,
Clinton Blackmore

[tlarkin]

I love the mailing list, but I loathe going through old emails trying to look stuff up that I know for a fact had been discussed previously. Especially now that my casper list folder has like 4,000 emails in it or something crazy

So, this is what I am thinking the hints site should be.

1 - minor blog which only has to do with the site itself, and maybe announcements regarding jamf software or apple updates, just basic news you may need to know every time you visit the site, make it sorta like the home page. Along with a HUGE disclaimer saying all advice is free, but done at your own risk, no warranties provided, if you accidentally destroy your whole sever cluster, your bad - not the sites. Also encourage testing things out at least 10 times first. Then say something along the lines using any advice from this site assumes agreement of no warranty.

2 - technical documentation - see this for example: - http://tlarkin.com/tech/how-deploy-nwea-testtaker-64-intel-macs-casper I used composer and an apple script to automate the end goal I was trying to get. I used screen shots and explained why I was doing it. I think it looks rather nice and I think that in this sort of content, article style works best.

3 - a forum, where specific issues can have threads. The whole corei5/i7 thing on the list is getting rather large and I would rather have it in a forum thread where I could later look it up and not go through searching email archives. I don't have many core i5/i7s yet, but I know I will and I know I might pop into a few issues with them. So, if it were on a forum, easy search, and I view it there. This could also potentially keep all off topic posts off of the mailing lists as we can have an off topic forum section.

4 - a very straight forward approach of What, How, and Why for every piece of technical content. I often read people's questions on the list and I am like why on Earth would you do that? Then they explain why, and I am like oh OK that totally makes sense in your environment. We also do not need someone's epically long history with how much Microsoft sucks, or how they first learned how to write an AppleScript. Keep it in a good format. Migrate all off topic content to an off topic section on the forum, discuss away there.

I would prefer both a wiki style and a document/article style for the content. I think things like command line tips and tricks, and maybe explanations of of the inner workings of the jamf binary should be wiki style. So should the frame work, and how recon works and checks in and so forth. I think how to package up iLife as individual apps should be more like an article style with screen shots and explanations of what is going on.

Sorry if I am coming off a bit opinionated on this, but I really hate clunky websites. I think if we do this, we should stream line it so it is straight forward but is also pleasant to view. It makes reading it and understanding it a lot better if it has even the smallest amount of style to it. I am not talking flash or whatever, but I am talking the ability to embed youtube videos. My youtube video on Jamf's page has more views than any of Jamf's actual youtube videos. Not only should we have the technical documentation, but if possible, video of how it works. Seeing it work is believing.

Also, sorry for being so opinionated and not being any good at web development, hahaha.

Just my 2 cents, feel free to blast them away no offense taken as to quote the Dude, "That's like your opinion man."

-Tom

[RobertHammen]

I don't want to give anything away, and I don't know more, but Blaine from JAMF intimated, at the Chicago User Group back in early May, that there may be another online support methodology later this year. What they're intending, I have no idea. Rather not see list members reinvent the wheel. Perhaps JAMF will share their thoughts/plans. It'd be nice if users had the ability to contribute, not just JAMF-to-all (like the current knowledgebase, although I've personally rewritten KB articles and submitted them back to JAMF ;)

--Robert

[tlarkin]

Jamfsoftware.com's Kbase is very lacking. In fact, I hate to say this but the best technical documentation from any company comes from Microsoft. Their tech papers are awesome and tell you every detail you need to know.

Yes, jamf please tell us!!!!!!!!!

[Bukira]

Yes the knowledge base is very lacking, but then the BEST info come from US the USERS, which is why this list is so great as you cant beat real life use of the software, no offense JAMF but no matter how much testing you do you cant match real life scenarios

Criss

Criss Myers
Senior Customer Support Analyst (Mac Services)
iPhone Developer
Apple Certified Technical Coordinator v10.5
LIS Development Team
Adelphi Building AB28
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
Ex 5054
01772 895054