CogBlogged from ‘August, 2003’

We have barked about MERLOT’s lack of RSS feeds for some time. Not that anyone really listens, or that this is even announced in the woods where trees makes sounds, but you can actually find MERLOT RSS feeds. Now the question- is this a smooth vintage or supermarket swill? Here is what is wrong with RSS a la MERLOT (read on!)

From Quinnipiac University comes this gem: Blogging Across the Curriculum. Pattie Belle Hastings from the Interactive Design Department shares this resource that rose from her 2002 experiments on using student weblogs as alternatives to paper design jounrals. Her site provides a nice overview of blogging, how to blog, the role of blogs in teaching, lots of resources, and links to the student projects. A good ideas is the Bibliography that includes the entire web site as a PDF. It is encouraging to see more and more of this resources pop up, and its one of thise net based grass roots efforts that rise out of teachers exploring potentials for new technologies (not from administrative decrees that “we must blog”… well not yet). Also, any project that go through a research or development phase, poiints to a weblog as an ideal to provide a reflective chronology of the project, as we [...]

A very well written introduction to RSS: RSS – A Primer for Publishers and Content Providers (I cannot locate quickly what the “EEVL” acronym stands for but it is a UK resource for engineers). I like the plain language yet the forways into some of the details of producing RSS. <tiphat>Tip of the blog hat to ResourceShelf</tiphat> This document is aimed at publishers and content providers with the intention of introducing & explaining the concepts behind RSS and addressing some commonly expressed concerns. It is primarily intended for a non-technical audience who require an overview of RSS in order to allow them to make decisions regarding the possible use of the technology. However, the guidelines do provide recommendations for good practice, case studies on RSS production and links to tools and specifications which will provide useful starting points for those tasked with actually producing RSS feeds.

I am all for expanding the use of RSS, and new things are popping up every day. However, stuffing an entire newsletter inside an RSS feed as listed at Lockergnome (referring to Barbara Feldman’s “Ezine-Tips” on Using RSS to Deliver Newsletters seems to me a bad trend of stuffing a lot of things into RSS feeds that need not be there. As an “EZine” maven, Barbara is proposing alternatives to sending electronic newsletters than email, but what she is suggesting is sticking the entire contents in an RSS feed. Many are familiar with RSS as a syndication format for blogs, because most popular blogging platforms automatically publish headlines, summaries, and links in an RSS format. Newsletter publishers, however, are just beginning to use RSS as an email-replacement technology to deliver full-content feeds. Was RSS designed to deliver full-content feeds? No. Is it the perfect technology for delivering such feeds? No. [...]

We just added a new feature to the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX)- every person that creates an account in the MLX receives their own unique URL that produces a publicly viewable web page that lists all packages entered by that person. For example, my packages are one link away: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/mine.php?id=160 If you notice, the results also provide an RSS version for the same content (more on that below) This is presented to each person inside the area they create their packages (the “loading dock”, in a few days I will blog an overview of the dock since those outside Maricopa cannot enter), but here is a screen shot. [View image] Our thought was this might be of value to faculty, so they could have a single link on their home page to show all they have contributed, or a URL to email to their department chair to let him/her know [...]

For those not lucky enough to attend the MERLOT 2003 conference (any conf in Vancouver is worthy), I just posted the content from our MLX poster session: Building the Maricopa Learning eXchange (Using a Bit of Competition and Bribery). How do you cultivate the use and contribution to a learning object repository? We will share some strategies we have used at the Maricopa Community Colleges. The Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) is an electronic warehouse of ideas, examples, and resources that support learning at the Maricopa Community Colleges. We dashed the typical pasting papers on board approach for a metaphor-overload “mini-town” with model buildings (the warehouse), trucks, houses, satellite dishes, etc all with ties to their meaning in the MLX. I am not sure if people were interested in the MLX or just wanted to play with the toys (one of our sports cars is missing ;-), but we met lots [...]

Anti-Virus detection systems are removing viral email attachments, but they waste my time and clog the net with un-needed traffic by bouncing messages back to people who did not actually send them. So far, about every 8 hours, I have to delete 60-100 Anti-Virus detection messages from my inBox. I waste more time writing filters to catch them (then forget to take the updated filters to my home machine). I may be naive, but since likely 99% of the stuff neing caught with virus-infected atttachments are spoofed emails (not actually sent by the sender, but forged by the virus program), what the hell is the use of sending an email back to the spoofed sender letting them know a message they did not send had a virus? It borders on abuse. Wake up Symantec and others. This is confusing a lot of people in our system, and the helpdesks are [...]

It’s been bad enough delting the email crud generated by the latest virus, but today I got my first porn content inserted into a comment on this weblog, with links to just about everything possible you could imagine being enlarged, shrunk, photographed, made money on, etc. So if you exercise IP banning on your blogs (this is my first one listed, and I suspect it is not much protection), make sure you ban this piece of dog poop: IP Address: 61.181.5.80 Name: vig-rx Email Address: bushlee@yahoo.com Judging from the tracerout below (I removed the starting path from maricopa out to our Phoenix path), it wades through the usual suspects (Hong Kong, China, and likely into some anonymized zone: 5 phx-edge-05.inet.qwest.net (206.80.195.185) 4.23 ms 6.335 ms 4.893 ms 6 phx-core-01.tamerica.net (206.80.192.246) 4.308 ms 7.518 ms 4.589 ms 7 den-core-01.tamerica.net (205.171.8.77) 25.961 ms 32.907 ms 23.603 ms 8 den-core-02.tamerica.net (205.171.16.90) 25.454 ms [...]

Wow, a variation on the BlogChatter, this nifty site shows, in near real-time, the World as a Blog… Real time and updating display of weblog postings, around the world… Weblogs.com + geocoding + RSS But what is it? You see a world map, and as weblogs entries are posted around the world, they appear on the map (from geographic location specified by GeoURL tags and RSS feeds provided by weblogs. Your blog tool must be set to “ping” weblogs.com on new posts. Items are updated every minute. Again, not sure beyond the “cool” factor, what one might do with it, but it is a powerful demonstration of tyiing together different simple communication protocols to do something new. With luck, I can snap a screen shot after this post! Update: It worked! I blogged this and appeared on the world map 3 minutes later. View image [52k]

Wow. If you are just reading some of the buzz (it’s about time!) about RSS, check out RSSlets – Functional RSS Feeds a series of prototypes for getting at RSS content that may be on the fringe of your idea scope. These are a whole raft of new services that are creative ways to syndicate content that is not static. My ultimate vision for RSSlet is a service that allows users to generate dynamic RSS feeds that actually do something functional from any web page. I’m a big believer in iterative and interactive design and development. So in line with this, rather than developing the service in its entirety and then releasing it to the world, I’m starting with making some of my prototype explorations available for use and feedback. Since this is a work in progress everything here is labeled as use at your own risk. As I add [...]