My dear friends,

What a incredible day yesterday was. In the morning, as each of you gave your personal reflection of what the workshop meant to you and what you would take back to your respective organisations, George and I were humbled. We are so happy to know we were able to contribute to your own professional development.

Then in the afternoon, to see all your hard work come together in the projects you presented, it was really special too. All of you thought of providing solutions that would help back home...

Cheetah... providing a business directory of up-to-date and reliable information relating to financial institutions, eateries and fast foods, and hotels and inns to visitors to Nigeria and the public.

Leopard... Leopard Konsults improving how biographical data of candidates could be captured and then shared with each examination body to improve the overall online assessment experience.

Lion... promoting tourist attractions in Nigeria, encouraging visitors to see the natural resources and game reserves, along with experiencing the Nigerian hospitality and cultural diversity.

Zebra... Zebra Innovative Technology, website consultancy concentrating in the development of website design and marketing along with building partnerships with those who were doing other specialised work.

Hippo... Hippo Restaurant, promoting healthy eating enabling visitors to place an order and choose from a selection of plant-based meals which aid to improve health and support recovery.

Congratulations, Hippo for being top, but as you all know, each of you are winners. You have all completed the course!

But it's only the start... the challenge starts now.

We covered many topics which gave you an appreciation of everything web. However, depending on your experience some will relate more to the cloud computing and setting up web and email services, others to the programming, others to CSS and web design, others to social media and monitoring... so I would encourage you to select those areas that make more sense to you and build on those. The rest may follow in time but you will always have a respect for those who have strengths in those other areas.

George and I wish you well... but we are only an email away.

I've made a zip archive of all the clean Perl source files that were used with your web site when it was first built. It is in the Workshop documents section of the workshop web site (available after logging in), file title is www.zip.

This contains the cgi-bin, cgi-bin/JAMBO and document root HTML source directories.

George

Some of you were asking about adding sub menu items to your web site.

I mentioned that once you start to build a more complex structure you should really be creating a Section.pm sub class in your project package and a corresponding database table to store properties of each web site section. It is then much easier to create some methods for updating your menu and general site structure, using easy to use forms (rather than messing with Perl code).

However, since you asked, here's another solution using hashes in Perl.

I'm not suggesting you allow this to distract you from preparing presentations for tomorrow. It is simply here as a reference for you.

See you tomorrow. I hope you all enjoy the short presentations you will be giving—perhaps you could think of these presentations as practice for reporting on the workshop to your colleagues on returning home!

George

No, it's not the weather! It's the pressure for all participants to get everything ready for the presentations tomorrow. :-)

In the morning each participant will be allowed 4 minutes maximum to describe what they've learnt during the workshop that is of most significance to them. In the afternoon each group will present to the rest of the workshop the results of their practical work on their group server during a 10 minute presentation and then there'll be 5 minutes allowed for question and answers.

George and I won't be the judges. Others from the Netskills team will be doing that job.

But today was busy with lots of practical. You learnt more about HTML5, specifically:

• New form input types
• Local storage
• Application cache
• Drag and drop
• Geolocation
• CSS3 transitions

The other presentations included more on Google Analytics, the use of social media, the semantic web and the tangible benefits of using structured data.

Now George and I are looking forward to seeing your presentations tomorrow.

It was an exciting day yesterday on day 6. We really felt that what we've been teaching has really clicked with everyone. There was a great synergy within each group and the sites and presentations were coming together. Well done!

We learnt about:

• the importance of structure whether it's in a document, presentation or a web site, so it's worth investing time to setting up Master slides in presentation and styles within a stylesheet
• CSS which is a means of styling elements of a web page
• how to use graphics sensibly in web pages
• some HTML elements relating to graphics
• preparing graphics with Google applications
• what HTML5 consists of and how it can be used on all devices

• the new semantic elements
• adding audio and video

And today, the pressure is on... time to get your presentations and sites finished and ready so that each group can present their online service tomorrow. Looking forward to it!

Yesterday, we learned:

• how to implement a login facility
• how to ensure that there are secure connections between a user and the server using encryption—private key, public certificate and session key
• how to configure HTTPD configuration files for secure connections and what to do with log files
• how to restart processes without causing major disruption
• the difference between server aliases and virtual hosts
• what Google Analytics does and how to set it up for a web site and the types of reports available and some knowledge of the most important ones

With more practical work on implementing all these on your own servers. The sites are starting to form.

Just one thing outstanding from yesterday... during practicals, I want to ensure that everyone has access to their own Google Analytics property. As discussed there are different privileges that users can have to view, edit, collaborate and manage users. Each group should consider who should have what privileges. I'm here to guide when needed.

Hi

I thought I might provide a few thoughts on what you might do in our fine city over the weekend (with web links if you want to know more).

If you are interested in shopping, you'll have discovered the Eldon Square Mall already I guess but you might not know about the Metro Centre—it's one of the largest shopping malls in Europe and is all indoors so you'll be warm :-). Its about 15 mins away on a bus or the train. See: http://intumetrocentre.co.uk/.

Also there's a market on Sunday that has some unusual stuff. Its on the Quayside so you can walk from the city centre. See: http://www.newcastlegateshead.com/things-to-do/quayside-market-p477401.

If its culture you're after there's loads to do and mostly its free.

Museums I'd recomend are:

• The Great North Museum here at the University. Its got Roman history, dinosaurs and lots more. See: http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/great-north-museum/visiting-us.html.
• The Discovery Science museum (near the station). Newcastle is famous for industrial invention—trains, ships, the light bulb etc. See: http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/discovery.html

The Centre for Life is about science (near the station but not free). See: http://www.life.org.uk/.

Two great art galleries:

• The Baltic for modern art (and a great view of the city from the top floor). See: https://www.balticmill.com/
• The Laing for traditional art, see: http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/laing-art-gallery.html.

The castle that the city is named after is impressive (again near the station), its also near the cathedral (free to enter). See: http://www.castlekeep-newcastle.org.uk/.

Some of you have discovered the football ground—well Newcastle United are playing the mighty Aston Villa (my team) on Sunday—tickets start at about £25.

If you want to get out of the city you can go to the coast on the Metro and visit Tynemouth with its priory. See: http://www.newcastlegateshead.com/things-to-do/tynemouth-priory-and-castle-p22751.

Hadrians Wall—a 2000 year old Roman structure 100 kms long is worth a visit but might be a bit far away (and cold) for you. See: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/hadrianswall/.

If you fancy the cinema a great place in the city centre is the Tyneside Cinema: https://www.tynesidecinema.co.uk/.

Hope this all helps.

If you do nothing else try to get down to the quayside—particularly in the evening. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quayside.

David

There were some network problems across campus today but we managed to use the time to cover material about setting up MySQL and exploring what a program driven web site could look like, involving processing forms and reading and writing database tables.

We also spent some time reviewing good practice in web page design, considering search engine optimisation, and concluding that what is best for our web site audience will work best for search engines too.

Best of all the groups began to form their workshop project plans. I didn't hear details of them all but the three I was involved in sound excellent!

We've confirmed that using winscp on the university PCs will be the most convenient for communicating with the group servers. You can put a shortcut to this Windows program on your PC desktop and after connecting to your group server for the first time, it's possible to simply save the session configuration then select the saved name for future sessions. The winscp program is in the CS applications portal available in the PC start menu.

With winscp you are able to drag files from the local PC folders to the DocumentRoot of the group web server. Remember that this DocumentRoot is located at /var/www/ on your group server and the first time you connect you will need to use the navigation on the right hand side of the winscp screen to locate it. For sysadm members, winscp will also allow you to open a putty session to log directly into the server and issue commands, rather than just copy files to it.

I've finished installing MySQL on all servers and also phpMyAdmin for easily administering your database through a browser interface. Access this using your server's web address followed by /phpmyadmin.

I have created a database called project on everyone's server, and this currently contains one table called tblUser with 7 fields—log into to see the fields.

Password for the ec2-user on each server was changed yesterday—see me to confirm what it is for your group if you don't already know. You may use this username for transferring files to the server, or if you are eager to add other usernames then you could do that also for team members, but it isn't necessary to progress your project web site.

The username for your project database is simply project. I will tell you the password in the lab tomorrow.

Your group web site currently has a working contact form and another form that will add records to the tblUser table of your project database. Remember, if you change your database format then you will need to modify the Perl code that is currently updating and reading the tblUser table!

Group programmers can edit the Page.pm Perl module methods (in /var/www/cgi-bin/ on the server) to change the menu items currently on your web site—adding new items, activating the two hidden ones I have put there and editing the labels etc. The User.pm module has methods that can be modified to read different database tables or different numbers of fields in the tblUser table. You will also see an example of sending email messages in the JAMBO.pm module.

There is a site CSS file in the web site's DocumentRoot in the css subdirectory. We will address CSS next week in more depth but feel free to experiment with what is there by changing some colors and so on.

Finally I have written a small form validation function in JavaScript and this is stored in the js subdirectory of the DocumentRoot. It is used on your web site contact form and the form which updates the users in your database, ensuring that all required fields are provided in the forms before submission—as well as doing a rough check on the format of the email address.

There is lots to explore and use as a starting base for your projects. Ask for help as you need it!

And have fun :-).

George

OK, as is usual first time for a new workshop we had some issues with the PCs we are using for practical work! Mostly they are lovely machines and the lab is very comfortable with great projection facility, but using a piece of software that isn't already set up proved troublesome when it came to Putty, our chosen ssh client for connecting to servers :-(.

We all set up key pairs for secure access to the servers (good practice to minimise hacking by ssh) and needed to be able to use Putty with a private key file which was on a flag drive—but the network setup in the lab confounded us and we reverted to normal password authentication using ssh. We will stay with this for the remainder of the workshop as it will work everywhere, but at least everyone is aware of key pair authentication!

This afternoon we all logged into our group servers as the default ec2-user and proceeded to install postfix. Some issues with editing on a Linux system using vi and nano, but Christine has ensured there are reference documents in the Online resources section of this web site.

The other main issue was failure when sending a test message after installing and starting postfix. Examination of the logs suggested that the virtual users database could not be read properly and postfix was not operating as it should because of this. A simple initial build of the virtual users table with the postmap command has fixed the problem on the servers I have looked at and I will ensure that all the others are ready for action in the morning! In practice we should not have added the virtual_alias_... configuration lines in the main.cf configuration file until we were ready to use them!

The other thing I will complete tonight is set up everyone with a jambo.netskills.biz email address using the short names you sent earlier by email.

We will examine all servers tomorrow morning and make sure are all up to date with the expected workshop progress. Have your questions ready!

George

We would like you to use this blog to provide feedback on any aspect of the workshop, the facilities and any of the topics covered.

First you need to register on this site. When your registration has been approved, you will receive your own personal access details by email. Use these to login, go to this Blog section and comment on any blog item you see.

The workshop instructors will add new posts every day for you to add comments to. Please feel free to ask questions and also to answer any questions that some of your fellow participants have asked!

To start with, after you have registered, post comments on this article to tell us your thoughts on the first day of the workshop and the proposed program, including the project and working in groups.

Thank you!