Still working on the new server (see X Marks the (Jade) Spot). I am stumped why a new Apple XServer delivered in November came with OSX Server 10.2.8 pre-intalled though the current 10.3 disks were there. I had trouble getting the 10.3 CDs recognized so blew ahead with the older OS. That was silly.
CogBlogged from ‘December, 2003’
Dec 10 2003
PhotoBlogging with Buzznet
I have a pent for photography. It was the last elective I took as an undergrad, and if it were earlier, I would have taken a different career path. Blogging is great, but there are some neat niches for other flavors. Take “photo blog”. I recently stumbled along via legendary web designer Jeffrey Veen this nifty new site, Buzznet, a free site where you can create your own photoblog (here’s mine). At Brian’s suggestion, I had been playing with Fotolog where you can upload one image per day, build a collectiion, collect comments, and create dynamic links to other fotologs (mine). It was a wonderful international flavor with photos being posted from all over Europe, South America, etc. But Buzznet has a bunch of other features I am liking a bit more. First, you can upload 10 images per day. It can automatically create a slide show. You can post [...]
Dec 08 2003
LOP: Learning Objects Portal
From Seneca College in Ontario, Canada comes a new Learning Objects Portal Page: ….a gateway to many resources about learning objects and repositories. We invite you to meander through the portal sections below based on your interest. f you like to discover through interaction, we suggest you visit our “Activities” section… This site is intended to serve the needs of novice and more seasoned folks interested in learning objects.” There are quite a few places inside here, 9 sections: Information, Resources, Repositories, Tools, Best Practices, Issues, Activities, Who’s Who, and About this site. Each one of these leads deeper and deeper. Additions include a project blog, an accessible version, and a discussion board link (but yuck! there are so many more 21st century board tools than WWWBoard, which is so, like 1996…) Fun additons include things such as a learning object scavenger hunt or the Canadian “Who’s Who in Learning [...]
Dec 08 2003
X Marks the (Jade) Spot
It is in the building… not only that, it is on my desk. “It” is a brand new Apple XServe, and soon will be home to all of our MT blogs as well as hosting some experimental eportfolio services as well. “It” is a 1.3 GHz screamer replacing an old 500 MHz PIII currently hosting this “jade” server. The server is slim and sleek, though quite a bit deeper (like 2 pizza boxes!) than one might guess just looking at the pictures.
Dec 06 2003
Weather Report
With all this east coast blogging about snow and blizzards and stuff (1 blogger, 2 blogger, 3 blogger, more?) I hate to tell you but today it was sunny and about 78 degrees in the Arizona desert. We spent a day in t-shirts strolling the Tempe Festival of the Arts, a fantastic showing of arts, crafts, musicians, and tatooed freaks from all over the country. I even had to run the a/c in my car on the way home. Not to rub noses in the weather, but maybe a thought to those leaning on the snow shovels or 5 layers deep in wool. Of course, I will say nothing come June ;-)
Dec 06 2003
“Denounce Newswire: All the News that Never Happened”
Satire is a high form of art. (that was supposed to be satirical). Someone once told me, and I believed them, that satire comes from an ancient word that meant “to cut flesh.” Well, that means that DENOUNCE NEWSWIRE: All the news that never happened is the king fleshcutter for faked PR news:
Dec 05 2003
Metadata for weblogs– blizg
Go ahead, try and pronounce it… Blizg – The Blog Resource. Blizg is a blog index that focuses on metadata. We want to promote the use of metadata in the blogging community. We’re also excited about finding new ways to use metadata that will create useful connections between and among blogs. It does offer a helpful service. If you register a weblog at Blizg, it has a web form you can use and it will build you the meta tags to out in the <HEAD>….</HEAD> section of your main blog template that provide information about your blog, location, country, language, description, copyright, etc.. I had the geographic location from geoURL but that was all. Now I have a few more. One major limiting hitch with Blizg is their limit of one blog URL per domain, leaving out anyone who has a Radio hosted blog http://radio.weblogs.com/xxxxxxx They better get around to [...]
Dec 04 2003
Pssss… Have You Heard About RSS?
Just posted to the web is our newbie article “Pssss… Have You Heard About RSS?”. This is one of the features in the Fall 2003 issue of our mcli Forum, a twice a year publication published by our office for print distribution inside our college system, and electronic everywhere else (continuously published since October 1992-200 as the Labyrinth-Forum and since then as the mcli Forum). It’s about a 2.5 month process for our office to draft, assemble, proof, edit, and get this off to the printers– and it is about 2 days of HTML-izing to get the web version up. This is actually one of my more favorite web layouts, and while I reallly should get around to doing it fully with modern XHTML, I really like it’s look as a HTML table/CSS hybrid. But about that RSS stuff-
Dec 04 2003
RSS2JS Update: Date Posted Fix and Future Attractions
Yet another small fix to our RSS to Javascript tool– there was a flaw in (my) program logic so that the item posting dates from RSS2.0 feeds were not being converted correctly from their GMT+0 values. If you have a version of this running, you can make a direct edit to both the rss2js.php and the rss2html.php scripts. Change the code starting at line 209 from: // format: “Day, dd Mmm yyyy hh:mm:ss-xx” $nix_date = substr($item->pubDate, 0, 24); to read: // format: “Day, dd Mmm yyyy hh:mm:ss-xx” $nix_date = $item->pubDate; PHP needs the whole date string to convert it from the GMT+0 to a local time value in unix time stamp format, which is eventually converetd to the pretty formatted output string. Also, in the news, as many have written, the ReadingEd site is gone, 404 that had hosted the OnyxRSS PHP parser code. I’ve been in contact with Ed [...]
Dec 03 2003
“Where have all the bloggers gone?”
Cue the folk music, Pete… Where have all the bloggers gone? Long time passing. Where have all the bloggers gone? Long time ago. Where have all the bloggers gone? Spammers have picked them ev’ry one. Oh, when will you ever learn? Oh, when will you ever learn? My RSS reader stays pretty grey these days. Many of the past everyday reads of edubloggers seems to have sputtered out. The Davids’s, Carter-Tod, Davies, and Wiley are rather infrequent, maybe off chasing Goliaths. James is on “hiatus.” Even my buddies D’Arcy and Brian seem to be busy off doing non-blogging. Maybe they have moved on to Wiki-ville. To be honest, it takes a major sort of OCD behavior to keep at this (unless one wins on blogging for dollars blogging activity. Unless you have the energy and reach of Stephan, the sheer volume of links as Bruce, the internal drive of Will, [...]
