Urban Media Archaeology 2010

URT Tool Links

I wanted to share with everyone the links to the sites I was demo’ing in our last class.

You can log in to the URT tool here:

http://urt.rorys.webfactional.com

As I mentioned, your username is the same as your WordPress login (but all lowercase, if your WordPress login had any capitals). And your password is the same as your username. We should probably change that. If you manage to login, you can change it yourself by going to the admin area.

You can access the admin area here:

http://urt.rorys.webfactional.com/admin/

Through this interface you can more-or-less do anything in terms of creating Projects, Subprojects, Records, etc, but the workflow is pretty heinous for some of those tasks. So we are working on re-implementing all necessary tasks in a more user-friendly way in the part of the site accessible through the first link above.

Development Process

I’m really interested in the suggestion about following along with the technical development process. Regardless of whether we actually dedicate any class time to that, I wanted to share some ways you can follow along now. We are using an open source project management tool called trac to manage the software development process. You can access our trac site here:

http://urt.parsons.edu/stage/trac/

In particular, you can check out our list of open tickets:

http://urt.parsons.edu/stage/trac/report/1

“tickets” are the term trac uses for small, singular todo items for anyone involved in the development process. Our process generally involves filing new tickets, and then closing those when the tasks are complete. Some of the new mapping features that will come up in class will probably end up as new tickets. (For ex, we’ve already added a ticket to create a “draft” option for new records.) If you’d like to get more involved in creating tickets, let me know — currently, without a login, trac provides read-only access.

There are many software development methodologies out there (Agile, Scrum, Extreme Programming) and we are not abiding by any too strictly, but trac generally supports a fairly “Agile” style of project management. In this way, we group together open tickets into a “milestone” which has a fixed deadline date. You can view all upcoming milestones here:

http://urt.parsons.edu/stage/trac/roadmap

Clicking “Active tickets” on any of those will show you all tickets that have been grouped into that milestone.

And finally, you can see what tickets have been recently marked complete, and also see any recent code changes (“changesets” in trac parlance) by clicking here:

http://urt.parsons.edu/stage/trac/timeline

I’d be happy to talk about this more if anyone has any questions!

PS – Anyone catch that reference in the title to one of my favorite Descendents songs? 🙂