Research

Current

I am working on an MSc by dissertation in the Digital Libraries Laboratory at UCT. I am investigating usability aspects in Digital Repository Systems, in particular if usability can be improved by using a content management system as a front-end to a digital repository.

I can be found in the DLL section of Room 300 in the CS building.

Abstract

Digital Library systems are still immature software, known to be difficult to deploy and use. One of the difficulties in deployment is customisation of the interface, and integration into an existing website. Digital Library systems don’t tend to use templating systems to allow web designers to re-skin the system, like popular Content Management Systems do. This project aims to integrate a Digital Library system into a Content Management System, to provide the advantage of templating and more easily integrate with an existing Content Management System-driven site.

See my thesis proposal, below.

Past

For my BSc Honours thesis, I worked on the storage tier of a large scale monitoring system, Panopticon. I have no plans to take this further, although I remain interested in the field.

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MediaWiki extensions

I’ve written several MediaWiki extensions, mainly for the CLUG Wiki. I don’t think any of them are particularly beautiful or maintained, but they are an essential part of our wiki, and might be useful to somebody out there…

Category Gallery:

Written for ClugPark, this extension displays all the images in a category together, as a gallery.

Usage:

<category-gallery category="PicturesOfPenguins" resizewidth="50" width="60" height="60"><category-gallery>

Mailman subscribe links:

Written for the Mailing Lists page, this extension displays mailman subscribe forms.

Usage:

<mailman>http://lists.example.com/mailman/subscribe/foobar</mailman>

Obfuscate e-mail addresses:

Written for the Contact a Committee Member page. I use my own simple Javascript that replaces innerHTML and href when you mouse over an e-mail link. I think it’s spambot-proof.

Usage:

<email domain="example.com">foobar</email>

403 Forbidden

It appears that you are trying to view a page that you are not allowed to.

Naughty naughty!

Try to find your way again here

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404 Not found

Things move around, and people make bad links. Sorry.

Please head to the front page and use the menu or search field to find the page you are after.

I apologise for the inconvenience.

If you find a mistake I can fix, please let me know

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Talks

As a CLUG member, I occasionally give technical talks. If they are of any use to anyone here’s a list. All CLUG talks are archived on the wiki and since 2007 have been videoed and archived on archive.org.