CogBlogged from ‘January, 2005’

It’s a bit scary when I make a change/edit/?improvement to our Feed2JS (Feed to JavaScript) code, as any glitches or gotchas might show up on the hundreds? thousands? 3? of sites using it (I am basing some large numbers on the 20,000 files that built up in the cache directory). My apologies for hiccups the last few hours as I tried to redo/undo some recent changes, detailed on the Feed2JS updates. I will ley readers know that I test all updates on a different site/host (actually running on my laptop as a server), but often there are things that pop up which are feed dependent, such as: * it seems like del.icio.us feeds are not or slowly responding. Magpie (the RSS parser) is reporting timeouts, but it shows up as a no feed. Please verify the URLs are working (I am still researching). * A new Magpie function added to [...]

We interrupt the regular stream of yammering about rss, wikis, flickr, tags, learning objects, eportfolios, spam (actually it’s been a while for that, don’t ask why) for something meaningful to me (well it is my blog). It’s been more than 3 months since my companion and subject for the “dog” part of this site, Mickey, the Labrador Retriever, left the house. I must have gotten more comments from that (sans phentermine related items) than anything else written here, so blogs are need not just be about the “news” we write. It was a week or so ago, I quietly brought Mickey’s graphic back from the 70% transparency at the CpgDogBlog masthead. I finally got around to working up a tribute to a sweet dog who had a short life– see Mickey’s Tribute or see the story in pictures (also at flickr). Dogs (and cat too I guess) get right in [...]

Robin Good’s recent “Why RSS Search Feeds Based On Web Searches Are Important” was an interesting read for what it says about syndicating the results of web searches, but I had thought it would go down a different track. The quote that leaped out the page, from Steven M. Cohen was: The point of RSS is to get updated with anything new to appear on a page (and more importantly, customized feeds crated by the user). Is the point of RSS solely for “new stuff”? And once not new, content rolls away from ever being syndicated again? I think that it limited thinking. It certainly makes sense for where it works well, tapping quickly into the latest writings from blogs and news sources world wide. But there are places for perhaps other modes of syndication. I went down this path when we first experimented with syndicating the content added to [...]

Just days after marveling about a prototype of a combined del.icio.us + flickr service, technorati has rolled it all up into their new tagged service – combining tags from del.icio.us and flickr plus ones now extracted from feeds that Technorati crawls: Where does the stuff on Technorati Tag pages come from? The photos come from our friends at Flickr. Flickr is a great photo sharing community. If you’d like your photos to appear on our tag pages, join Flickr and post your photos there. And remember to tag ‘em! The links come from the nice folks at Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a web-based bookmarks manager. If you’d like to contribute links to Technorati Tag pages, you can join Del.icio.us, post and tag some links. The rest of the Technorati Tag pages is made up of blog posts. And those come from you! Anyone with a blog can contribute to Technorati Tag [...]

Go, Dog Go http://cogdogblog.com/code/marklet_maker.php About Previously I have described a JavaScript bookmarklet tool I wrote for myseld so I could submit websites to multiple tracking sites. Maybe you too want to be able to do a one click submit to send sites to places like Furl or del.icio.us at the same time. http://cogdogblog.com/code/marklet_maker.php Thus I was inspired to create this tool that allows you to select the ones you want and it will generate the bookmarklet tool for you. Since created, many more bookmarklet tools have been popped online, and I am willing to add them to this list if The tool is one that allows added / annotating a web site to a collection site. The site offers a JavaScript powered bookmark tool that can be dragged to the browser. The tool should be one that extracts title, URL, description, etc from a page in view and passes it [...]

I recently wrote of some JavaScript glue-ing I did to create a tool that allows my to take any web page in view, and submit it with one click to Furl, del.icio.us, Connotea, and our own Bag of URLs (see A Cup of Connotea: A New del.icio.us Flavor of Social Bookmarking (and now a 4 in 1 bookmark tool)). Since then, I’ve gotten a pile of e-mail requests (well actually 2) for help in constructing different variations (“I just want Furl and del.icio.us”), which seemed enough justification to sit down and spin a PHP tool that allows you to select any combination of these 4 into one tool, all your own. Meet the DeliciousFurlBagConnotea Marklet Maker. Are there other web site submission sites that out to be tossed into this virtual Leatherman? Update: I should not have whipped this up so fast, there is some slop. I have revised the [...]

The January 2005 issue of Campus Technology has a nice two spread on my employer, the Maricopa Community Colleges. In “Who We Are”, our IT Vice Chancellor outlines some of the big numbers about our big system (which is impressive), our recent successful .980 billion dollar bond election, and puts some prods into some areas we can do better: Are your technology implementations responding to, or driving this new market for non-traditional education? We are reacting, more than driving, right now. And too often, we respond to an opportunity a couple of years after it presents itself—we simply try to apply some technology solutions or services. There’s a need to become more strategic about technology. We need to get out in front of the curve.   In your strategic planning, which technologies are central? Technologies that can deliver services to students 24/7 are primary. And that’s a mixture of many: [...]

I recently wrote of some experiments to improved Feed2JS (see the updates fed to the site, bottom of the main page). Specifically, based on the request from a user in Germany, I attempted to change the output to encode content as UTF-8 using the new features on Magpie RSS 0.7. However, I have gotten an email and a comment from people with apparently French language sites who claim it has broken their french accents and characters. However, when I preview the feeds in question from our site using the Build a Feed tool, they look okay. For one comment to the site, I was suspicious since the URL provided had its own encoding set in the HEAD meta tags as iso-8559-1… does that mean French language sites break under UTF-8?? I am really ignorant of this stuff. But if it breaks more sites than it helps, I will have to [...]

Yes, what is with the weather? Even here in Arizona, the last two weeks have brought tremendous rain to the desert, doubling are average, flooding the dry washes. Up north, the mountain tops are getting snow by the foot. And this week, the projects here habe been coming down in torrential buckets (as opposed to buckets of torrents?). Why spend even more time blogging? I need a break from the coding! It relieves me! Whatever. I am still short staffed with absolutely no sign of any change on any horizon, meaning I am floating my projects and the ones that Colen had supported before be moved to a cushy job at ASU. These means a big slowdown, or grinding halt to working on the supposed open source version of the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX). I have a deadline now to drive me, as I am offering to build one for [...]

< ?php include '/Volumes/web/html/alan/inc/better_mt.php'?> Getting back to our series on better blogging, on this one I make the bold contention (ducking tomatoes) that all (well most) weblog software packages create archives the wrong way. It is not that they cannot do it better, but for the most part, the out of the blox templates build archives the lazy way– just tossing old blog entries into one large, never ending scrolling sack. What am I blabbing about? Just about every blog software I have seen has nicely built systems for creating archives by date of previous writings. They organize them into links by month, day, etc. Some, like MovableType, allow user defined categories, so old entries can be grouped by any hierarchy. But what happens, and what is wrong (in this dog’s opinion) is that the definition of an “archive” is just one long entry appended after another. If you write [...]