CogBlogged from ‘December, 2004’

We’ve promoted many different times (see the Breezed NMC Oct 2003 presentation) the notion that weblog Trackback technology provides a simple, and working now, method to connect descriptions of usage of learning objects stored in “thingamotories” (or “repositories if you like). Or, as we deemed it Learning Object Reuse Acknowledgment (LORA). Yet. while well received, it is not happening anywhere. We run a summary of all MLX trackbacks and it is pretty meager, 47 total in more than 18 months we have enabled this feature… and I am responsibile for about 40 of ‘em. it’s pretty simple. If you compose a weblog entry (especially in MovableType, were the pinging is built in) and link to any MLX URL, the blog publishing platform checks all URLs for an embedded RDF ping address. Upon finding it, it transmits to the source (the MLX) 3 tokens of information that “trackback” to your newly [...]

There was dust and some missing pieces to my sidebar list of blogs I read regularly- which I spit out from Bloglines using their JavaScript insert to list on the sidebar of CDB. A number of old favorites have gone quiet, and sorry, but have slipped off my radar, quite a few I added, especially from some good ideas from the EduBlog Awards. These are the sites I have in my NetNewsWire, where the 2.0 version exports nicely to a formatted OPML file that supports group lists, and that I can directly upload to Bloglines. It is not all inclusive, and ought to be tuned up more often. In my mind, reading (and commenting and trackbacking) is just as important as publishing in the blog-o-verse.

Appearances, aside, I copy others quite often… and reading Scott’s note on successful migration from MovableTYpe 2.x to 3.1, I am pondering dragging the CogDog up a notch. I’d resisted for a while because (a) The blog is doing fine as as; and (b) I have about 12 MT blogs on 3 different servers and a pile of authors, so I was unwilling to shell out $$. But Scott’s post got me thinking about just upgrading my own site (hee hee selfish dog). I am trying to sort out the best strategy to migrate my one MT blog without messing up what works and the other 11. Does anyone have any thoughts? Right now, I would be considering making a clone of my site, cloning the database, and then migrating just that part. I may have to weed out the other blogs, or just make a copy of everything and [...]

I am not sure what he is doing with the results, but it looks like John Graham-Cumming is collecting data on people’s attitudes and annoyances with e-mail spam– check out the Spam Filtering Survey: This survey will lead you through a number of pages asking about you, your attitude towards spam and spam filtering, your experience with spam filters and ends with a short exercise where you act as a human spam filter.   The exercise was kind of fun (and very familiar)– you are provided some information and a simulated inbox where you make decisions on which mail to keep or not based on sender, subject, and the little bit of info you know about the persona. The irony was the first few screens where there were 3-5 messages to deal with, and the later screens where there were 50 to skim through. I look forward to hearing of John’s [...]

Just following the cue of Señor D’Arcy, here is what popped of the shuffling of my meager iTunes song list (I hardly ever tune in and cannot even remember why I loaded these)… 1 Destroyer The Kinks 2 Girls Got Rhythm ACDC 3 Polythene Pam The Beatles 4 Pure And Easy The Who 5 Love In Vain The Rolling Stones 6 Lithium Nirvana 7 Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeing Elton John 8 The Magnificent Seven The Clash 9 Drowned Pete Townshend Live 10 The Brothers Cup Red Hot Chili Peppers See the meme rules for the details on how to play

Edward Tufte‘s short course “Presenting Data and Information” is coming to town in late January… can anyone who has attended one of these or knows a friend who has (or a second cousin of their mother-in-law’s dentist) let me know if it is worth it? Or should I just buy the t-shirt?

No, I did not have writers block or a novel to compose. Actually the email question was not even mine, but written to be sent under someone else’s name. Could this be Alan’s Secret Neutron Bomb that would eviscerate spammers? Nahhhh, ya must be dreamin’. Now, these are some messages that get generated from our 100% online Learning Grants applications system. This is an internal grants program that faculty and staff from our college apply for on a yearly basis, and we are in our 5th year of having this online. The entire application, review, and notification is done on our web site, another brilliant system developed by Colen, my former student programmer who also did most of the back end work on the Maricopa Learning eXchange. The Learning Grant application period closed at 6:00 PM last Friday, meaning many of the grants came in… a bit before 6:00 PM [...]

flickr foto Arizona… Believe It Or Notavailable on my flickr December 4, 2004 and it is snowing up at our cabin in Strawberry, Arizona. Yes, believe it or not, Arizona is not just shifting sands of Arabian desert, certainly not here at 5600 elevation. Just returned from a delightful extended weekend at our cabin, and we enjoyed watching about 4 inches of snow fall on Saturday. And another celebration– I’ve turned pro with flickr– meaning I am paying a few bucks a month to get 1 Gb of upload power, unlimited photo sets, and the pleasure of supporting a cool technology. I am kind of picky about technical services I will pay for– ecto is one software I have found worthwhile shelling out for, and without a doubt the folks at flickr have earned my respect and dollars. The only limit now is time to pick photos. But hey, now [...]

Spamshirt.com will help you make a customized t-shirt out of of your favorite email spam subject line… or choose from their library. We at spamshirt have come up with a plan: recycling useless spam into sparkling new t-shirts! environmentally conscious, and a new lease of life for all that spam that floods your in-box…. Spamshirt.com was created out of a determination to find a use for spam, the curse of the in-box. spamshirt came up with a unique solution: a way of recycling irritating, useless spam messages into an expression of personality and style. Spamshirt does exactly what it suggests, we take spam and we put it on a shirt. But not just any old shirt – spamshirt use a range of comfortable, stylish cotton shirts to ensure cheap, nasty spam is transformed into quality fashion items, turning spam into glam. Only 25 bucks to make your own…. The possibilities [...]

I’ve written before about the sheer joy of getting feedback on a now 11 year old online Writing HTML tutorial…. see [1] [2] [3], but still get a warm feeling with emails like this one that arrived yesterday: I have read this material for one month (Writting HTML). I think that this material is very good. I could make a simple web page for my teaching. (I am a Informatic teacher in Viet Nam). I hope You can help me to make a E-learning web page on Internet professionally. Thank you very much I hope that I may hear from you soon Sincerely yours Nguyen ___________ For what its worth, Writing HTML tutorial is a free, self-paced tutorial for those that seek informal learning (for their own interests), but I also hear of teachers who use it with their web classes. But to think something we wrote and slapped up [...]