Tyler Mazaika

Bruce Tambling is a passionate Audio Engineering instructor at Foothill College and over the last year he has been aggressively expanding his courses’ online offerings. Having taken some of his classes in the past I fortunate to be involved in this endeavor in various stages as a helping, and occasionally guiding hand.

Bruce started out using manual content management with Dreamweaver, expanded to a custom CMS — developed by another audio engineering student and affectionately dubbed the Andrew Fitzgerald Content Management System (AFCMS) for its creator — and then settled on MediaWiki as the ideal CMS for his needs.

A detail of a Wiki-formatted portion of a software manual. Bruce uses excerpts like these to embed informative content alongside his own tutorials.

Through all stages of this project I have been active in expanding the content base for the courses, chiefly by cleaning and updating some of Bruce’s older pages and converting loads of PDF documents ranging from photocopies of out-of-print textbooks to user manuals into HTML or wiki pages. While some documents convert relatively easily this way, others require a potentially overwhelming amount of text-cleanup, image exporting and other fixings before they are presentable.

The AFCMS pages were coded in HTML/CSS but now all pages are converted straight to wiki using a combination regular-expression processing tailored to each document and an HTML-to-Wiki conversion script. In addition I’ve written a Perl script for finding images which are used in the final documents and moving those files to a separate folder to make uploading the them to site easier.

All told I have prepared about 3,000 pages of PDF source material, written a handful of tutorials for other students and look forward to continue supporting Foothill Music Tech in the future.

The public homepage of Foothill Music Tech contains recent news clippings and information about upcoming guest speakers whose presentations are recorded and archived for student viewing.

Note: The majority of the content on the site is viewable only to students currently enrolled in Audio Engineering courses at Foothill College.