CogBlogged from ‘July, 2004’

FeedCreator.class.php- File this one away for future or near future code use. FeedCreator.class.php provides an easy way to create RSS feeds from within PHP using ease to use classes. * creates valid feeds according to RSS 0.91, 1.0 or 2.0 as well as PIE 0.1 (deprecated), OPML 1.0, Unix mbox and ATOM 0.3 format. * configurable feed caching This is code you can use within your own PHP that allows you to generate RSS files from any source you can load data into. I like the options to generate different RSS flavors, from 0.91 through Atom and a bunch in between. I might be using this rather than the RSSWriter (RSS 1.0 only) I had been using for the MLX feed generation.

Taking place in Los Angeles starting July 10, 2004, SENT brings perhaps your cheesy phone camera snapshots to a level of fine art? Images will be invited to be submitted by the public. It looks like it may be too let to send your phone snaps, but stay tuned to see the results. SENT will be the first major exhibit of phonecam art in the United States. We’ll explore the camera phone’s potential as a creative tool in two ways: through an online public dialogue in which amateur photographers and phonecam users around the world share mobile snapshots of their lives; and through an invitational exhibit in which professional photographers, artists, and public figures test the limits of creative possibilities offered by these hybrid devices. I think it is a cool idea- yes the technology and photo quality are limited compared to some of the newer 8 megapixel digital cameras, [...]

Our NMC 2004 Small Pieces session intended to make a case for creating effective net-based collaboration using a discrete set of free tools, not so tightly controlled. This was fine, fun, and (frilly), but I wanted to describe here how we are trying to implement this for some real work. We are headed into the 18th year of a faculty-led initiative for instructional technology at Maricopa called “Ocotillo” (see some history and the details on the metaphor). Dealing with technology, this almost organic organization evolves and re-invents itself, and just this past year, we “flipped” over a structure from representing college interests to topical ones (more details than anyone wants). Anyhow, bottom line, this coming academic year, we will have four “action groups” each led by a pair of faculty, who will research, promote, prod, disseminate, dissect, and hopefully engage people in the areas of: Learning Objects Hybrid Courses ePortfolios [...]

Crikies! We just got around to setting up AWstats for our “Jade” server that runs our blogs as well as the Feed2JS contraption. For just a week of running, in the middle of a hot and slow summer, we see: 561,000 hits (42k per day) 99,000 unique visitors (11k per day) It turns out 96% of that traffic is hitting the Feed2JS (well actually 38% is from the newest version of the feed machine, while 58% of the total traffic is hitting the old RSS2JS script. 42,000 hits per day is a lot considering our main site, which has 10 years of content averages 58,000 per day. Fortunately, those hits are tiny in size. No worries, the script is not going away, just having fun looking at the details on the stats and ignoring the (We can see you! ;-) It is interesting to see there are 5700 views this [...]

More and more I have needed a Mac OSX SFTP client for moving web content to various servers- we have knocked off open FTP on all of our web servers, and I need it now for loading content to SourceForge. Pity that my long friend Fetch, used since the early 1990s, has yet to jump up to SFTP. It has been a road of trying a bunch of different apps, none of which was reliable (many do odd things with file permissions). On the scrap heap is: The Truck: Transmit it worked ok (I recall) but was funly with permissions, and you had to pay for it. The Captain: Captain FTP yes shareware, not much– my programmer Colen uses it but claims it has quirks. The Dud: MacSFTP- could never use the demo, the download was already expired The Duck: CyberDuck – Free and a cool icon… I had gotten [...]

History has been made! Pat Delaney has created the first package in the new open source MLX demonstration site, with his MLX Package on Twinned Manila sites for k-12 student publishing. We still have a lot of work to do on the site, yes there are missing links, the RSS feeds are only 1/3 there, and the sourceForge site is 404 (gotta figure out the tool set)…. you see there is work today,and I am twiddling here in the blogging about it. But hey, it is a tiny milestone. Thanks Pat! Now I get to test here if this blog post correctly sends the trackback ping that ought to register with the package.

I could not resist coming up with a cute name for a blogspace for Steve Gilbert, Stephen Ehrmann, and Steve Saltzberg, all with the TLTGroup (Teaching, Learning, Technology Group)- hence 3 Steves And a Blog. This started when I proposed to the Charles Ansorge, the current maintainer of the TLTGroup’s “Low Threshold Applications of the Week” site (a static, hand coded, Front-page encrusted zeppelin) that it could be done more easily (and with more style) publishing as a blog, in the MovableType prototype I concocted. The next thing I knew, I was on a conference call with the 3 Steves, trying to explain the benefits of CSS web design, and backing far away from any veiled promise of doing a web site design for the whole TLTgroup (I do not even do that for my own institution). Anyhow, to help them understand blog publishing, the best way was to drop [...]

I just cleaned up a bug in a golden oldie web site, and it is playing music again. The Interactive FlipSite was created so long ago I cannot remember exactly for sure, at least before 1998. The purpose was to create a site to illustrate simple probability for basic mathematics using the most simple of tools- the odds of flipping coins, and the counting of “heads” and “tails” of the coin flips. This was one of our “What if?” type projects… a ways back, I met with Scottsdale Community College Math faculty to flesh out an idea he would dream up that we would produce that would make good use of online technologies. john had been doing quite a bit then with graphing calculators, and initially we were thinking of doing some sort of tie in with real world data. But just in conversation, sitting in his math lab one [...]

Browsing sites registering as users of Feed2JS I discovered this morning that there is now a feed to provide updates on the Cocktail of the Week. Who would know there was such a thing? Apparently David Berghouse has been publishing this site from Australia since 1995, quite a nice stretch! Good on ya! FYI, the recipe this week is for… a “4th of July” 20 ml Bourbon, 20 ml Galliano, 20 ml Kahlua…. well go see the rest.

pdfMachine is a $49 PC app for generating PDF files: Our pdf writer pdfMachine converts a print stream from an application directly into a PDF. Once you have installed the pdf writer, open your document that you want to convert, then click “print”, select the “Broadgun pdfMachine printer” and that’s it! A free, Lite version, PDFMachine White (rather odd choices of names) offers basic functionality. Amazing! Except that this functionality has been a basic built-in part of Mac OSX since it was released- all print dialog boxes for any document have an option to save as PDF. I use it for 99% of my PDF creation.