University Skins and Resources

Hello Everyone,

So far this week I tried to balance the creating of skins for other universities to use our project, skins for UH to use, and resources gathering. The RSS feed and the form conversion seems too complicated to work together. But I guess the only way to do it is directly through a spreadsheet because there is no one in blogs asking about a form and import feed conversion. So, I've been putting things manually. If really used, the RSS feeds could be created in a separate page in the project and students could choose certain feeds to look at.

What I worked on this week was skins for different universities. Last week I tried making themes that we could use for different weeks, but the layout doesn't work so well. But What I did mostly for the skins for different universities was to recreate the look of their home pages. You could see the university's home page compared to what I created. The only thing that I could not change yet was the tabs at the top of the page, which are green. Once I figure where the code for those tags are then I will change them right away. But I was told from my group member that he has changed a bunch of things in the layout so I'm not sure what is compatible now with mine and the new one. So hopefully not much things will break.

But here are the following skins that I have worked with so far:

Cambridge University




Harvard




Chamiade




Yale




MIT




HPU




Since this is the last week for the first summer session, I will be able to balance everything more easily and get more work done. So get ready for a lot of input from me.

Hello everyone,

Last post I talked about RSS feeds, which is really a great feature that could be used for gathering information for users to look at for our project. However, the way we set up our google spreadsheet to gather information is through a form. I would really like to use RSS feeds because it is recent postings from others about a topic they advertise, such as news RSS feeds, energy websites RSS feeds, teachers of the university in the sustainability field RSS feeds. Instead of the "project makers" going around and looking for information and manually entering it into the form, I am trying to figure a way for the command importfeed and the form that we enter the information we find to work with each other. Also, if the form gets to a limit, it will delete entries so that it does not get full. Any ideas of getting this to work would be greatly appreciated.

I don't mind looking around for information because it teaches me about things also, but I think that it could be very useful for us not to manually enter information all the time.

Other things that I am doing this week is CSS file for the website. What I have thought of doing is different themes for each type of energy savings, such as solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro. Also, I tried to make a base page that follows the UH Manoa theme. What I have done so far is the following. However, the different themes for each energy savings is tasking because the pictures I try to gather looks odd when displayed on the homepage. It takes up a lot of time to try and make the pictures flow.

This one I tried to follow the main UH Manoa website theme with the symbol on the top left. I added the picture of the 4 different types of energy savings to add a little of what the website is about.


This one I just tried to fool around with looks.



The following is the beginning of the different types energy themes. If you look at the windmill one, it looks a little odd. Not with just these two pictures but other pictures that i experimented with also. I chose to display this one because it looked the best of the others.


The solar theme i was going to have the sun and a solar panel, but like I said it doesn't look that great. So I tried doing it like this and I think it came out better, but I still want something like the sun and solar panel.


So far I think the themes look a lot basic, but I want the themes to work with the website. I am not a great visual graphic person but if there are any other ways that could help me would be really really appreciated because the things I did so far looks a bit funny. Themeroller was the first thing I used but it only puts color in tabs and changes fonts. The page still looks plain. That is why i am putting pictures in the site, but that comes out weird also. So again any help would be appreciated.

Energy Resources & Configuring Themeroller

Hello everyone,

Last post I talked about a great feature that I found is using RSS feeds with Google Spreadsheets, how to do this could be found here. This is such a great feature because what we need for our project is many resources about energy saving. And what RSS feeds in Google Spreadsheets does is gather that information and display it. However, one difference in the gathering is that what is imported to the sheets is not permanently saved. The command =importfeed(url, , T/F - Display the headers of what is gathered. Title, url, summary..., # of entries you want to gather from the feed.) will gather what you want from the feed and update itself every time a new entry is entered in to the feed.

Other things that I have gathered for the project that does not have an automatic gather, which I wish it did..., is videos and other information such as websites, articles, and news entries. These resources can be permanently saved, however it is so much pain in the butt because it is done manually. But through the gathering process I did learn a lot of things myself that I did not know of.

TED is one of the great websites that I stumbled over about today's technology, issues, and energy topics. Information on this website could really educate a person on what is going on in today's technology, issues, and learning. One great topic was a boy named William Kamkwamba who was 14 years old and read a BOOK about windmills at a library. He later then went back to his village and built a windmill out of a bicycle and wood.

The next thing that I believe that would be great for our project is podcasts. All the information gathering that I gathered, whether it be RSS feeds, videos, and websites, I always saw a podcast feature also. A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and downloaded, and could be listened to via a computer or a ipod. For the competition this could be used by the students or whoever is on the website to listen to the podcast that talks about how solar energy works or how to make a solar panel.

The last thing that I worked for this week was themeroller. I am designated to make different themes that pertain to the different universities in the US so they could use our website for their university if they choose to do so. I have made a couple of themes that I believe closely match the university, however, I am unable to run it with the website as of right now so I cannot really tell if it is close or not. I have to speak with my group member George to get it going.

Resource Gathering and Themerolling

Hello everyone,

So far I have learned about CSS and my newly bit complicated project, pinax. After having a good talk with my professor, I now know that I have to get down and dirty to learn, acquire and use software that is available out there. So right now I am still working with CSS for the project to have different themes for different universities to use our website if they choose to do so. The following slide show is some of the university websites that I will follow.

What I am also doing is researching for many resources about Energy Savings. May it be video, websites, papers etc. One great resource that I am looking at to automatically update itself is RSS Feeds. There are may RSS feeds out there that people post to, just like a blog, that contain different materials, such as Energy Savings.

To contain the many RSS Feeds I am using Google Docs. There is a great feature in Google Docs that can gather RSS Feeds via its spreadsheets. The feature could be found here.



It is an amazing feature. This feature will update itself because it imports the feeds directly from the url that is specified in the import command. It could also retrieve the feed, feed title, feed author, feed description, feed url, items, items title, items author, items summary, items url, and items created.

The only thing I need to do is organize this information in a way that could be retrieved for the project.

Other things that I am doing is manually searching for other Energy Resources. This is done manually but should be able to be done in a couple of days.

CSS Learning and Python and Pinax installation

Hello all,

I'm back again to show and talk about what I am going to do over the summer in my Independent Studies 499 class for the UH Dorm Energy Competition. Yes I am still working on it, but I am going to be in a different part of the project. So... no more Joomla!

However, this is not the only class that I am taking, which I wish I was so I don't have to stress... I am taking English 200 which should not be much of a problem and I am also taking Japanese 102 which I don't remember much because I took Japanese about 2 years ago SO..... remembering everything is the challenge. Ganbarimasu!!!!!

I will not bore you with Japanese and English because that is not where the cool technological stuff is. haha. So what is Pinax, Python, CSS!!!

First off I am now working with a new person: George Lee. He is the leader and main project manager for the UH Dorm Energy Competition Pinax Website. I am working under him to create CSS to brighten up the website and make it look good. What he is doing is the structure of the website.

So... so far I have been trying to learn CSS and install the Pinax website. The CSS for the website so far looks like this. I will be creating more of these in the future. I will also be using JQuery which will allow others to easily choose a type of theme/CSS for the website. Installation so far of the website has given me trouble. The trouble so far I have found is the execution of x64 and x86 executables. I downloaded Python 2.6 (x64) and it runs perfectly. Then I need the Python Imaging Library which only has x86 and is the one that gives me problems. It may sound dumb in how I did not see something as easy as that but the error I saw is: Cannot find Python 2.6 in registry. But by using regedit, I found that Python 2.6 is there!!! And by looking around for a long time I found this post. It will download the correct PIL for 64 bit machines and run perfectly.

The next wall I have run into now is the installation of Pinax. I now have the error ValueError: [u'path'] and 0.7.2 failed with error code 1.

The other bad thing I have run into is that I forgot to meet with my group yesterday!!! It completely slipped my mind. I think it was the Monday holiday. So I hope my professor is not too mad and I want to get this Pinax running so I can get on to working on the project.