LeMill blog

In 2000 Steve Krug wrote a book “Don’t Make Me Think“, that became one of the most influential web usability books in the last decade. Krug claims that web sites should be designed so self-evident that they don’t make people think. This is a principle that we want to follow also in LeMill project.

Our current focus is on improving and simplifying the core features of LeMill. The main idea of LeMill is about collaborative authoring of web-based learning resources. LeMill is part of a Web 2.0 ecosystem that is constantly evolving. Successful services are often focused on one certain feature in which they are the best.

We have been thinking on the existing feature set of LeMill and decided that in some areas we should not try to compete with specialized web sites. YouTube is better in movies and SlideShare in presentations. All this content that is created and shared in other Web 2.0 sites can be easily embedded to LeMill resources.

We are planning to remove the following content types:

Presentations. Our first implementation of presentations required quite a lot of manual work because each slide had to be uploaded separately. Last autumn we changed the presentation template so that presentations could be embedded directly from SlideShare. However, presentations are not as other LeMill learning resources, because they cannot be collaboratively edited. Therefore we should think about presentations as any other rich media content that can be embedded to web pages and exercises.

School projects. In autumn 2008 we added two new templates - lesson plans and school projects. While teachers have created quite a lot of lesson plans we have got only 19 school projects during that time. When we were looking at these projects we realized that as a feature they are overlapping with collections. The idea of collections is to combine content, methods and tools that are used in a learning activity. Typically these collections cover a longer period than just one lesson (for which we have a lesson plan template). The aims, activities and outcomes of the school projects can be described in the teaching and learning story.

Print resources. Our idea behind print resources was to provide a simple way to share learning resources that are designed for print (exercies that are used outdoors, etc). However, many of the print resources are documents that could be more useful as web pages. If our focus is on the collaborative authoring we should guide people to share their resources as web pages that other teachers can edit. If you still want to share documents you can use services such as Scribd. As a benefit you can embed the document in a LeMill web page or exercise.

Source files for media pieces. This feature is used very little and one choice less would make LeMill easier to use.

All the content that is currently in LeMill will remain here. Presentations will be converted to web pages. School projects will be converted to collections. Print documents will be converted to references and can be downloaded in their current format.

As a result it will be much less confusing to choose between new content types. Our aim is to make LeMill so simple that new members can start creating content without having any training or reading any manual. Think about the content you create, not about LeMill.

We are interested about your comments and feedback before we implement these changes.

Just a head’s up notice that our servers will go down for 5-15 minutes tonight, at 11:00 PM CET. Functionality of LeMill will not change, this is just to upgrade the infrastructure beneath LeMill.

Last week our storage for media pieces maxed out at ~32000 pieces, preventing uploading of new pieces. During this week we have reorganized storage to use directory schema that allows practically unlimited amount of pieces and all of the pieces are now copied to new storage and the storage is activated. Uploading pieces should be working.

This change could also lead to some kind of speed gains, as we don’t have to deal with one huge directory anymore.

Teachers in Georgia have especially been very productive with great photos and images and we hope to see the flow of great resources continuing after this unfortunate pause.

Our hosting service found the cause of late performance problems and LeMill.net should now be much more comfortable to use.

There still is an issue of us having too many great media pieces, and the directory where they are stored cannot hold them anymore. This requires us to reorganize the storage, which will take few hours some night when there isn’t much activity.

Hello, and apologies for late slowdowns in LeMill. We have been working really hard to fix them, but unfortunately my efforts have often been misguided: I have found some slow operation that seems to be the cause and found out how to speed this operation on our test server, and when we finally have the fixed version running in actual LeMill site, we have found that the service is still as slow as it was — the problem was elsewhere.

Now we have extremely professional people from LeMill’s hosting service looking at the issue, and as he has much more better view on how the data moves in our system, he can probably soon point where the problems are.

In mean time, I’ve found two possible causes or minor causes of slowdowns and fixed them.

Making the problem worse is that the slowdown is at its worst when restarting the service, so activating our fixes at daytime is often not worth the uncertain benefit.

I hope I can get some of the problems cleaned during tonight 15.12-16.12, 23:00 EET onwards.

We had to pull LeMill into read-only mode, as we fix some catalog issues. Service should resume in a few hours, our goal is 14:00 EST (GMT+2) today.

During last weeks there have been an insidous defect with print resources: you can create them, and they seem to be saved properly, but when trying to download a newly uploaded pdf, it will give an 8kb file that won’t open in pdf viewer.

Last week we became aware of this defect, and found that all of the new print resources were saved in temporary folders and not in their proper places. All of the print resources created before thursday, 19th were moved to right place and should work fine.  At sunday we finally found the cause: After any object is renamed or moved, there are certain scripts that need to be run, but these are run in such way that if there are errors, they are not visible in usual places and running of these scripts just stops, thus leaving some important cleaning operations undone. Now print resources should work fine. Also this was the real cause behind many problems we have had lately with broken catalog objects breaking some collections or member portfolios.

Now we still have to repair those print resources created between thursday evening and monday midday, and check the catalog once more for new broken resources. But in total things should be better now: there are no data lost, and recent slowdowns are also caused by time-consuming creation of error messages and extended looking for missing objects.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

We are happy to announce that now it is possible to download collections as PDF booklets. The booklet will contain a table of content, teaching and learning story and content, methods and tools that have been added to the collection. In addition to PDF booklet it is also possible to download collections as zipped HTML files and SCORM packages. An example PDF booklet that is created from LeMill collection is embedded below.

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Some things went wrong with the last upgrade. We replaced the old WYSIWYG text editor with the new one that supports also Safari browser. You can see the new editor in Methods and Tools section. Unfortunately the editor is not working correctly in the web page and exercise templates (#1927). The second major defect is related to presentation template. People receive an error message after the presentation is uploaded (#1929).

It might take more time to fix these defects. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update: both problems were fixed on 09.11

At tuesday, 27.10 there still may be problems with some broken search results, but they will be fixed during the day. Also some of the background installations to allow nicer math equations and saving collections as pdf are done today, but they shouldn’t affect LeMill use. Small slowdowns may occur when some of the servers are restarted.  I will comment here on how things are proceeding.