JEvents

Web Site Status as of: June 15, 2010

• Good Intentions: I (the PI, JW) think the state of California in which I live and work and the other states of the USA need "grass-roots" job retraining.  And this web site could establish some guidelines and an evolving, maturing example of a useful course development process for that grass-roots job retraining course development.
  I (the PI, JW) want to add a.s.a.p. two new sub-categories of "Tutorials":  (1) "Guidelines for Submitting Vocational Course Ideas" and (2) "Guidelines for Collaborative Grass-Roots Vocational Course Development" to this site.  In this second year of recession since the Sept. 2008 global financial collapse caused by US Banks, US Community Colleges nation-wide continue to be poorly funded by their respective states and by the federal government.  The poor funding these many months after the financial collapse is largely due to the politics of "austerity" forced upon the Obama administration by radical right wing Republicans, primarily those in the U.S. Senate. However, almost all educators and liberal public policy makers agree that Community Colleges are the foremost source to provide the much needed job retraining of U.S. workers laid off in the Recession following the 2008 financial collapse. Why wait for the government funding?  How much of that "retraining" can "we do ourselves" at the grass-roots? Can "we" at least begin the development of job retraining courses and their lessons?  If there is a "we" doing this work, and if "we" are successful to any extent, and if the Community Colleges (CCs) eventually get funding, then the CCs can "clone" the courses developed at the "grass roots" on this site and on any other work-alike course development sites that may spring up in coming months!
  
• Good News: The web site is upgraded from Joomla! version 1.5.14 to 1.5.18, the latter which is the latest version of Joomla! as of June 2010. 
  Joomla! version 1.5.18 happens to allow the installation of the free add-on "Subcategories" component without difficulty.  And there are new security features in versions from 1.5.15 through 1.5.18 as well.
  Joomla! v1.0 through v1.5.14 and 15 historically have been limited to the filing of web site content, called "articles", into "sections" and "categories" of articles where any number of categories can be assigned to one section.  That is, until recently their could be only two levels (or two dimensions) of "filing" of web site articles. And no article could be in more than one category of one of the sections.
  Joomla! v1.0 and v1.5.14-15 historically have also been deficient by making it difficult to add code that creates sub-categories of categories of articles.  However the relatively new Subcategories component is an exception.  So with it newly installed, I (the PI, JW) am looking forward to adding sub-categories and sub-sub-categories, etc., to this web site's organization of articles. The result should be a more "intuitive" organization for regular site users and for casual site visitors, making content easier to find before resorting to using the "Search for content and/or web links" feature.
• Almost Bad News: I (the PI, JW) lost last two weeks work from May 30 through June 14, which fortunately was not very much work.  My database backup of June 11, 2010, was faulty.  After the June 11 backup, I failed to check that all database tables and their contents were exported (via the phpMyAdmin site administration tool) correctly to my home-office computer.  And this was not the first time I have overlooked that 'manual-visual verification of a supposedly successful backup' either!  I should have learned the previous 2-3 times I made the same mistake in the last 6-9 months!  Therefore when I first tried to upgrade to Joomla! 1.5.18 late in the evening of June 14 using the "full v1.5.18 package zip file" by mistake and re-logged in as administrator, I got database errors.  I had done something wrong that messed up the PHP code files and perhaps some tables within the site's database as well. 
  I easily deleted the messed up code files and restored the June 11 backed-up code files. But the code files depend on a certain amount of corresponding data being in the database.  When I dropped the entire database for this site to recreate an empty database and then restore all the data from the June 11 "backup", THEN I discovered that the June 11 backup was 90% incomplete and useless!  Therefore I had to restore data from the second-to-last May 30 backup instead. And any work I had done on the site's content from June 1 through June 14 was lost which as I said above was almost nil.  The backup-restore "exercise" and this write-up of it were just "time wasters" for the record.