CogBlogged from ‘March, 2004’

Trying to teach and old RSS feed some new tricks? At first RollUp seemed like a nifty idea- build a customized collection of RSS feeds into one site, theoretically coalescing a pile of feeds into one sensible pile. And that becomes a web page you can customize some layout- colors, fonts. And then that single collection itself can be re-syndicated, it having its own RSS feed URL. A way of repacking feeds sounded interesting. I created an account, tossed in a few instructional technology feeds from my RSS reader’s collection, to create CogDogBlog’s Rolled Up Feeds and its RSS / Syndication URL. I had first thought it would combine feeds by date, but it just seems to append one blog’s feed right after another. Worse, it has a multiple page display set up, but you are limited to “next”, “back”, with no indication of how many pages there are nor [...]

Tuesday is my keynote presentation at the NMC Sipring 2004 Online Conference – register now to tune into “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange”. For this presentation I, ahem, went well over the suggested length of 20 minutes, to more than 50 (!) but it covers a lot of ground, and is all pictures, animations, a video, lots of external links, and well, entertaining (that remains to be seen). Note also closing credits with Creative Commons licensed audio. This was another opportunity to use Macromedia Breeze to create the presentation, authoring in (ugh) PowerPoint, overlaying audio, but publishing to very efficient Flash delivery. I love what it produces- not only much smaller than bloated PPT, but it streams, it scales, you can jump around to any slide, well it is slick. It even manages to provide content passably on a dial-up modem. Well almost- I tried this morning from [...]

Back in November 2003, when I was wasting a lot of time dealing with blog spam, I wrote blogged the approach I took to close comments for this site after an entry had been up for 30 days. In a nutshell, I have a timed job calling a PHP script that rummages through the MT database and closes comments for entries that are more than 30 days old. It worked great. Except yesterday that it was doing this not just for this blog, but all the other blogs hosted on the server. Not quite what everybody may want, though we heard nary a complaint. But I found out when Bob Stepno wrote asking, Is that real or phony blog spam in demo blog? While following links about the NMC conference, I found my way to your previous Breeze thing about RSS… not a bad tool, it seems, and a nice [...]

My position have been made too many times regarding the apparent over-obsession with learning object meta-data, 4 words guaranteed used together will put most ordinary humans into a mild coma. I’ve given thought to meta-data and our Maricopa Learning eXchange, where the “M-D” words will never appear, but certainly lurk under the cover of our “packing slip” metaphor. Like Bigfoot, Nessie, Yeti, and other fuzzy photographed un-worldy beings, meta-data is something I have yet to see used by those ordinary humans. Not to say it does not exist, but it sure is hard to find. Some recent RSS cruising over the last few months have on occasion made me wonder, ‘what would happen and what would we gain if we created ‘standard’ meta-data attached to MLX items?’ Would there be loud operatic music? Parting of the skies? Raining gold coins? I even quickly sketched on paper one day a mapping [...]

This will likely be a first and last blog entry referencing politics. I might be judged as apathetic, but I do my research quietly, make my decisions, and vote, without foaming at the mouth or making it an obsession. However, after some hasty mulling, I decided to share my summary of the political scene. We are in blandville. It is like going for ice cream and finding the 31 flavors are slight variations of vanilla. it is like a small town bar where they boast, “we have both kinds of music- ‘Country’ AND ‘Western’”. I feel like I am Charlie Brown listening to his teacher say, “Wahhh wahh waaaah wahh wahhh wahh wahhhh. Wah wahhh waaaaaaah waaah waaaah wawahhhh.” It’s hardly limited to the nationals- our local city councils, state elections are operating at the same level, but usually with less class and much less polish. I am not apathetic, [...]

I am coming up for air…. gasp…. gasp… This is crunch week for prepping my keynote session at the NMC Online Conference, scheduled for Tuesday March 9. My Breeze-d up show is called “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange” and should be action packed, irreverent, and over the top. This will be a guided tour top to bottom, from the Executive Washroom down to the folks in the bowels of the database, covering our technologies, several layers of content syndication (by new-ness, discipline, search results, colleges, personal, special collections) and modes (RSS, RSS to JavaScript, Trackback) with detailed examples, a walk through the package creation process, how people are using content, a blustering show by our Marketing folks, a greeting from our CEO, a few tidbits from the crack legal team. See the 6-story high package! The breeze is might be turning into a I’m already at 70 some [...]

Today should be an international holiday, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Theodor Geisel. Yawn? Better we should have said, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Suess, that’s right today is the Suessentennial. Who cannot connect with a favorite child hood read? Therefore a re-iteration of an earlier post on this dog’s favorite Suess book (scratch your heads hard to figure out this one!)….

As part of our support for some of our system-wide Arts programs, a few months back I agreed to build a web site and some online registration tools for the March 2004 American College Dance Festival (Southwest Regional) being hosted by our Scottsdale Community College. There are some 350 attendees from 31 different college dance programs. This was a fun design project as I got to go full bore into using pure XHTML design, two sets of style sheets to mask out those pesky NetScape 4 users/abusees (plus a print style sheet), a one template PHP output template, random background images, use of fancy CSS for a navigation bar that looks like the kludgy JavaScript image swaps, but renders iin source as a good old, accessible friendly, <ul> list…. They did not give enough lead time to set up totally online registration, but we did take some weakly formatted materials, [...]