CogBlogged from ‘May, 2004’

I ought to be something else, but have been bothered by two items regarding our often used RSS2JS (allows humans to use RSS by cut and past JavaScript, processed by a PHP middle ware script). It hinged upon the defunct, gone, and un-documented OnyxRSS Parser. It could not handle Atom feeds, and since Blogger is offering that now as the default, trouble loomed. The old site needs a revamp and better documentation. So this morning I downloaded and began toying with the Magpie RSS parser and am pretty pleased with what I have been able to wrench out of it. Magpie offers the ability to cache feeds, plus its wider feed support look promising. It seems to parse the XML, and no matter what the tag is named (e.g. “dc:date” vs “pubdate” vs “modified”) returns the data as a consistently named item one can deal with. I’ve played around with [...]

I mentioned recently how one of our faculty members had created an electronic portfolio for his faculty evaluation process. Well something funny happened in a very short time span. John was contacted by the link in his eportfolio by two students on the east coast who had searched Google for “online anatomy physiology course” and his eportfolio was within the first 10 hits. One has already registered for his next course at Phoenix College, and the other one asked first if the course was accredited (and it is and very transferrable), and she and her husband are registering this week. John was rather astounded at how this happened. Does this give any indication as to how todays students make their choices? Also, this likely will not happen again. the ePortfolio is on a new server, and we had neglected to place a robots exclusion rule on the web site– I [...]

The web elves have been doing some refining of our Maricopa Learning eXchange “packing slips”- mainly in the lower portions. For reference as we blog, see the MLX slip for the Correlation Meter. We wanted to make the commenting function for apparent by embedding the comment form directly in the packing slip, and using what should be familiar as the kind of form one finds on weblogs where name and em-mail can be cookie saved. We also extract the most recent comment in display form on the slip, with a link to see the rest, In parallel, you will find a revamp presentation (and under the hood implementation) or Trackback (described more than a year ago). Thanks also to Derek at Auricle for generating some ideas on Trackback. Given that the word “TrackBack” does not really describe the effect, we took liberty to call it “Shareback” meaning if you use, [...]

(yes, something not related to spam) I had seen and recommended before the British Library’s Turning the Pages site, but was recently reminded of it in an email exchange. To me this is one of the prime examples of what the Internet can provide- a rich interactive experience with a resource that would not be readily available to most teachers and students. When I shared this site internally with my Maricopa faculty contact list, it was one of the resources I got the most excited and enthusiastic responses from. Turning the Pages provides almost a real book-like experience (okay, some may argue that it is not the same on screen) with rare and ancient texts (e.g. Leonardo DaVinci’s Notebooks, the 14th Centrury “Golden Haggadah”, from China, the “Diamond Sutra” , which penned in 868 is the world’s oldest printed book, and the Arabic style of “Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an”) in a [...]

Yes, fighting blog spam has been a huge distraction. I would rather be creating things than roach stomping. But I refuse to close off comments completely; it runs dead against what blogs should do to foster community building. About 36 hours ago, I took the approach of renaming my mt-comments.cgi script. The new name was discovered by spam bots in less than 24 hours, so I doubt they are scarfing it from Google (regardless, for now, I am excluding all robots in the server robots.txt file, though I doubt the majority of bots even pay attention to that anymore). The problem in my previous approach of funneling all comments to the individual entry form is that the HTML source clearly reveals the URL for the script to generate spam. I had done it completely backwards by removing links to the pop up comment form. So the goal is to remove [...]

It was all for nought. My research, attempts to tidy up the movabletype holes, changing names of comment scripts, did squat. I just combed through and deleted 12 blog comment spams, generously sent in a swift spurt, all related somehow to animals, by guess. I am ready to raise the white flag and kill the comments feature. Sigh. Sigh. Damnit. Help!!

Just posted the web version of our once per semester publication, the mcli Forum which our office has been publishing in print and paper since 1993 (before 2000 it was the Labyrinth-Forum). We have a mixture of faculty, guest, and our own staff authored articles that highlight teaching, learning, assessment, and technology efforts at Maricopa. The Spring 2004 mcli Forum features articles on Building a Community for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: The MIL Model A Story About Teaching Digital Storytelling at Scottsdale Community College Applying Early Brain Research Drinking Tea Down Under: A Summer Cultural Experience A Psychology Delegation in South Africa and updates on mcli programs: Adjunct Faculty Professional Growth The Arts Faculty Development Faculty In Progress Program Faculty Professional Growth Honors Learning Grants Maricopa CARES Ocotillo This publication was one of my first and favorite forays into web design by CSS– though it is still a [...]

I told you I was serious. Steps have been taken to turn the tide on comment spam roaches. The MT-Blacklist can only go so far (and activity logs show it does squeeze out the regular v*agra repeat crowd). Image courtesy of the Orphanage of Cast-Off Mascots . Next in the arsenal are steps 1 and 2 from “Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog”, courtesy of one of the quirkiest blog names in recent memory “The Accumulating Evidence of Yoz Grahame’s Infuriating Inability to Prioritise”. The first involved removing all uses of the JavaScript pop-up for entering comments from index pages, which most easily reveals a full URL for spam action in the source. Links for comments now point to the anchor link on the individual entry. The next step is to rename the mt-comments.cgi script to…. ahem…. something else. This demands an edit to the mt.cfg file to let [...]

Grrrrrrr, you’d think perhaps on freakin’ mother’s day, the spam roaches might be doing something, but they obviously have no birth mothers, hatched in the sewers form when they came. 6 blog spams related to a topic I will not even defile this dog house with, all sent to a single post in span of less than 50 seconds. All from an IP traced to a black hole of anonomyzers inside China. I am starting to look seriously at more drastic solutions, one of which might be either as severe as no comments or comments require approval.. and believe me, I have lots of technical things I’d rather be working on taher than cleaning up roach feces. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Woah, I lifted a rock on post about the pachyderm project from last month, and 6 spam roaches came scurrrying out. It seems the thoughtful folks at Cykan*ax were so impressed with the educational possibilities of Pachyderm that they wanted to share their “fantasies”, “group activities”, and other things about beasts, though they seemed to not be associated with elephants. Seriously, after weeks of comment blog spam quiet comes 6 in one swoop, to the same post, and from different IPs. I just closed the post completely to comments. It was a no-brainer to drop the steel toed boot on the buggers with the alert from MT-Blacklist plugin, and now that their domain has been submitted to the Master MT blacklist, the cykan*ax domain will soon be shipped to thousands of other MT blogs, rendering roaches dead on contact. Splat!