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Tutorials on site
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brad
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Joined: 22 Feb 2004
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Location: Atlanta, GA USA

PostPosted: Sun Feb 22, 2004 2:00 am    Post subject: Tutorials on site Reply with quote

from Justin
-------------------------------------

Brad Anderson wrote:

Hi guys,

You both had mentioned an interest in helping out with tutorials on the website. I appreciate the offer, and welcome the help.

Do either of you have thoughts as to how to do this? My question is more centered around how the site will deliver the tutorials.

- are they just html pages?
I've just been working on html pages. Have you been able to view it at http://jcc_7.tripod.com/d/tutor/? Jeandré menioned that he couldn't access the site. I haven't noticed frequent outages and I'm not over my bandwidth limit.

One of my main goals is to exploit dmd's capability to process html files with D embedded. All of my examples are designed to be self-contained compilable programs.

Save the web page and send it to the compiler:
dmd.exe for_loop.html

I've got a version D2HTML that correctly syntax highlights my examples. I think the webpages it produces looks good, but I'm probably going to change it to make use of CSS.


- do we store the content in mysql and serve it via php (and have php/mysql take care of navigation as well?)
I don't know how that would work because I don't have any PHP experience. (I have 3 webpages on 3 different servers, but none of them support PHP.) I'm sure it could be done, but I'm sure what the benefits would be.


Do you have any examples of good tutorial sites that really work smoothly from a learning perspective? www.w3schools.com is okay, because some of it is interactive, but at the same time, they're teaching web stuff on the web. We'd be teaching D stuff on the web.
I think there are a lot of places for inspiration. Any tutorial out there that teaches C, C++, Java, Pacal, etc. I saw a page about VBScript today that gave me an idea. I don't know of a particular site to point you to that says "This is how I think it should be done." I've just been experimenting with my web pages. (Something is better than nothing.)

I'm thinking there should be a 50?/50? split between commentary and simple examples. Maybe it should be more like 75? commentary. If you've seen my tutorial, it's about 5? commentary and 95? examples. I've been planning on eventually adding commentary, but the examples themselves are fun for me at the moment.

I have some books on my bookshelf for teaching Java and Pascal that could be used for inspiration (after porting the examples to D, of course).


Any thoughts on how to begin this part of the site?

You could start off with a simple list of links to existing tutorials, such as mine and Vathix's (http://www.dprogramming.com/tutorial.php).


Thanks,
Brad

P.S. There's nothing there yet, but the site is http://www.dsource.org - let's keep it low-profile until we have some content up and running.
My lips are sealed. Smile

Catchy name.

Please don't wait for everything to be absolutely finished and finalized before you open it up to the public. We don't need any "Under Construction" animated graphics; web sites are always expected to be under construction.

I think the forums could likely be the most popular part of your site. A lot of people (myself included) aren't very comfortable with USENET newsgroups; we feel more comfortable with phpBB. It sometimes seems like we're talking past each other on the newsgroup these days. The traffic seems to pick up every month.

By the way, I'd like to have this discussion in a more public location (so that others can join in). Since your forums are available yet, maybe we should start a thread on http://s3.invisionfree.com/ln5yrestgv/?


Justin
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brad
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Joined: 22 Feb 2004
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 22, 2004 2:13 am    Post subject: Re: Tutorials on site Reply with quote

justin wrote:

Please don't wait for everything to be absolutely finished and finalized before you open it up to the public. We don't need any "Under Construction" animated graphics; web sites are always expected to be under construction.

I agree. Subversion is up and running, but I need to put permissions on it because it's wide-open. Forums are up and running, and as soon as I get some html/php pages up and running, I'll probably announce it. I'd like to get Subversion instructions on the site as well.
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jcc7



Joined: 22 Feb 2004
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 22, 2004 12:42 pm    Post subject: Forum Reply with quote

Looks great so far.
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jcc7



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PostPosted: Mon Mar 01, 2004 11:05 pm    Post subject: PHP/MySQL Reply with quote

Brad,

I'm warming up to your suggestion of using PHP and MySQL for your tutorial section. I'm beginning to understand how it might be more convenient to store the examples in a database and then create the particular page with PHP.

In order to provide myself with a sandbox I installed Apache, PHP, and MySQL on my home computer last night. It went very smoothly. I found a nice PHP/MySQL tutorial to get me started.

I'm certainly a novice with these tools, but I've worked with similar tools before. I know HTML/CSS. I've done a lot of database work (but I haven't done much with MySQL). I'm probably going to keep on playing around with this stuff. I'll post another message around here if I come up with anything in particular.
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brad
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 02, 2004 1:32 pm    Post subject: PHP/MySQL Reply with quote

I think this may be the way to go. Imagine a form like this for an administrator to type in another page of the tutorial, and click submit. Organizing and/or re-organizing it would be a breeze, and hyperlinks would be easy enough. I'd like to number each tutorial, chapter, and page.

If you make any progress on this, making tables for tutorials, chapters, and pages, with content, let me know. If you get the php working as well, I'll post it and we can kick the tires.

BA
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JJR



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PostPosted: Tue Mar 02, 2004 1:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Is there going to be some kind of submission guidelines? If multiple authors are going to submit tutorials here, it would be nice if there were some sort of similarity among the submissions: paragraph structure, teaching style, presentation style, etc. Obviously individuals should have some flexibility in teaching, but following guidelines may help make the tutorials look more professional.

Or is it going to be a "variety is the spice of life" sort of thing? Wink

Later,

John
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JJR



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PostPosted: Tue Mar 02, 2004 1:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Oops. I guess you kind of described what is expected in the first post of this topic.

But perhaps the web page could have a "Submission Guidelines" link.
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jcc7



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PostPosted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 12:55 am    Post subject: Re: PHP/MySQL Reply with quote

brad wrote:
If you make any progress on this, making tables for tutorials, chapters, and pages, with content, let me know. If you get the php working as well, I'll post it and we can kick the tires.
I'm getting close to giving you something to try out. There's a major feature (syntax highlighting) that I want to try adding before I ask you to upload some PHP and tables.

Other than that I think I have a basic design that works. It's not fancy, but it seems to work. Hopefully, I'll get D2HTML ported to PHP pretty quickly. I've ported it to JScript before, and it seems to port pretty quickly to PHP as well. Maybe I'll have it ready this week, but next week is probably more likely.
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brad
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 9:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bring it on, please. If I can get some content on Tutorials and Projects tab, I'll probably announce the site in the NG. But we can shake through your tutorials code and tables to see if I can help at all. After that effort, you'll know way more PHP than I do Embarassed
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jcc7



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PostPosted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 9:30 pm    Post subject: Tutorial code Reply with quote

Brad,

I've uploaded my work on a tutorial database to my website at http://jcc_7.tripod.com/d/dsrc_tutorials.html.

I've created a database with two tables: examples and d_keywords. I exported the tables into sql using phpMyAdmin. If CSV or something else would work better, just let me know what you need.

I was thinking that you'd upload the index.php file to dsource.org/tutorials/. It "includes" load_d_keywords.php and d2html.php (which are expected to be in the same directory). I've tried to match the style of the rest of dsource. Feel free to change it to suit your tastes.

I don't know what you had in mind for the adminstrators to log in with so for now it's wide open. I guess we could disable the "delete example" mechanism to put a little fence around the sandbox.

I know it's not finished (e.g., it could use a mechanism to edit an existing example), but I'd like to get some input before I go too far down the wrong path.
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brad
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 10:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Nice. Hopefully it won't have to wait until the weekend, but it's looking that way now. I'll see what I can do and try to get it posted asap.
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jcc7



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PostPosted: Sun Mar 14, 2004 12:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Brad,

If you've had a chance to look at the PHP I've submitted, I'm curious what you think about it. If you won't have time to look at it for a week or so, I might do some more refinement on it and release another version. Just let me know what's your status.

I do have some concerns about the stability of the d2html portion of the code. I think it could lock up if quotes aren't matched, for example. Also, I suspect that certain valid WYSIWYG strings could make it hang up. The d2html module could be disabled if these problems manifest.

I've considered the idea of rewriting d2html so that if doesn't make use of exceptions in D and would be more reliable in PHP, but I'm afraid that would be biting off more than I would want to chew.
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brad
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 14, 2004 10:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Justin,

That's some good work on the Tutorials framework. I think we'll need some more organization when it grows. Like the first page being a list of the "Topics" with counts of tutorials within, and then you click on a topic to see the tutorials under each.

But anyway, that's another tab filled out. Thanks again for the help. I'll have to noodle on how to get you SSH access. I have a user account, but I just su to root right away. So maybe I'll make an admins group and start doling out permissions so I don't have to use root and I can let you in under that group as well. (Gets me to stop using root)

I don't think I'll have everything tied together like I wanted (i.e. Create A Project pages doing all the heavy lifting, making a SVN repository, creating users, forums, etc), but I don't think this site will be that big. I can see 20-30 projects, and I'll be weeding out inactive ones, so that vision of everything tied together may not be totally necessary at first.

I'm setting up a mail server so I'll be able to give out mail accounts for project admins, etc. At least there will be a www@dsource.org and one for me. If you want one, let me know. I can probably even set up forwarding to another account, which is what I may do...

Anyway, it's coming along, in spite of my lack of attention to it. I'll probably announce it after SDWest or after Walter goes 1.0 with the compiler.

BA
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jcc7



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PostPosted: Sun Mar 14, 2004 11:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm glad to see that it works. I already found a tiny bug (I'm sure it's my fault, but I haven't tracked it down yet). I also think there are some new features that it needs, but that can come later. I'm just pleased to see that it runs. I've already added a few more examples.

I don't particularly need any more e-mail addresses. I already have more than I can keep track of. If you want to set me up with a dsource e-mail, I'd probably just forward it to one of my existing e-mail addresses.

I tend to log in as root, too. I think that's partially because I'm too familar with Windows. In Windows if you're not logged on as an admin, weird errors will occur from time to time. It wasn't until today that I finally put a password on my MySql database.

Since you're trying to put something up on all of the tabs, you could start off the projects pages with a links page to where projects are located on other websites. That would be a whole bunch better that what's currently there. Very Happy

Have fun at SDWest!
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JJR



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PostPosted: Mon Mar 15, 2004 12:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Nice additions to the Tutorial tab. I've been checking up on it now and again and was pleasantly surprised to see the update.

In April I may be able to contribute something. Smile

Tell us all about SDWest when you have a chance!

Later,

John
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