CogBlogged from ‘February, 2005’

Just a few clicks after posting about digging out interesting link information via del.icio.us and furl, a comment there from Carmen highlighted some more tools to my toolchest. It had been some time since I had seen Durl, which accesses data from del.icio.us and eeks out some backlinks trends, a mini screen shots. In addition, there are more links to other tools, ones I never heard of– OpenBM, Jots, ixquick, a2b, Gigablast– a whole raft of new things to explore…. I am getting weak, dizzy, overwhelmed… anyhow, see the link Carmen shared that parses out the info on the URL in my post. And then BlogPulse, which aims to pull together threads scattered across different blogs– in this case too, I found many mroe references to my URL than had been trackbacked or commented– see the “Conversation Seed”. So maybe good news for those that have declared Trackbacks dead or [...]

Whew! Today was the day we triggered announcement emails on the final reviews of our internal grants program, MCLI Learning Grants. This is a completely homegrown, online system where all applications, reviews, management, and year end reports are done online. The task today was to run a script that rummages through the database, pulls the records for the current grants, compiles a complicated email recipient list (applicants, co-applicants, department chairs of applicants and co-applicants, deans of affected colleges, staff developers of affected colleges), and sending one of three notification messages- * Not Funded (ouch) * Partial Funded- with the amount and instructions for how to log in an modify their budget to meet the amount funded * Fully Funded (yea!) We parcel out about $184,000 a year for grants of no more than $10k each, and the goal is to spread it as wide as possible (44 out of 67 [...]

A week silently passed on my simple IT help desk request (read the sad story). There was now a consequence as the main page for our site was hijacked via the vulnerability I reported (see the blurb on this, we were definitely not alone). So since the requests were not answered, I resorted to the trump card, firing off emails up the management chain to the almost top, and asking for help in closing a security hole that could affect numerous primary web sites. I got a response in 6.5 minutes.

This is one of those found be serendipity things, what happens when you just freely poke around the web. Maybe it is obvious to many others, but it’s new to me. Some folks rely on technorati for taking a pulse of links going to their content, and it sure provides some good insight. I just blindly stumbled into two ways to look at how other people are connecting to specific URLs you may be responsible for (or just curious about). So it started with an email notification of a Trackback from my post first on A Cup of Connotea: A New del.icio.us Flavor of Social Bookmarking (and now a 4 in 1 bookmark tool) and a new site created to be a “Delicious-Furl-Connotea-Bag” bookmarklet tool, now abbreviated to Site Submission MultiTool– Alan’s Marklet Maker. Now although Trackback is now a spam problem and many smarter than I think it is [...]

It is re-assuring when a faculty member investigates a new technology and runs with it. I got a recent email from Liz Dorland, chemistry faculty at Mesa Community College, and maybe one of 7 people in our district who read this blog (You are never famous in your own country, Hi Liz!). She shared form my mentions of it she had done some experimenting with using Furl to have her chemistry students review web sites relevant to their course content– the problems she was running into was not being able to separate her own professional Furling from a class Furl without having two separate accounts (though I thought folders were an answer. So when I told her about del.icio.us, off she went: Below is the link to the first week collection. I told them to find sites with information about elements. Naturally, they found lots of periodic tables. I had [...]

Apologies again, as this server, also the host of Feed2Js, went south for about 10 hours Friday night – Saturday morning, just like last week. I had found in the server logs where the services were crashing, but nothing to indicate a cause nor why it was able to restore itself. Given it occurred at the same time, I am suspecting a back up application I set up on the XServe I am using until a new copy of Retrospect arrives. I vow to isolate it this week, as I am away from town the next 2 weekends. If anyone has been trying to reach me by email, our system’s email is gone haywire too, I think, with some switchover to a new “secure” email. The inbox has slowed to a trickle, and all my messages to people in our system get bounced. The only thing getting in is spam. [...]

flickr foto Hashknife Ridersavailable on my flickr One of the many members of the Navajo County Sheriff’s Posse who participated in the Hashknife Pony Express, which re-enacts the delivery of mail by horseback, riding from Holbrook to Scottsdale. They did not look tired at all. It was cowboys, cowgirls, clowns, dogs, young republicans, vegan protesters, baton twirlers, manure shoverles, little and big ropers, tricycles, marching bands and more at the annual Parada del Sol parade in Scottsdale. It has a hoor and a half, pure fun human spectacle. Memorable quote- a young lady at the front holding tha main banner. Us: “Are your arms tired from waving?” “Her: “No, my cheeks ache from smiling”. Parade job hazards. More on my flickr slideshow or the tagged photos with captions.

Now that the Furl-Delicious-Frassle-CiteULike-Connotea-Bag Bookmarklet Tool (a simepl web form to help you build a one click browser bar tool for adding web sites to various collections) seems to be working– I decided to make another tool. This one helps you create a browser bar button for quick searching of any MovableType weblog, as described December 5, 2004. So here is the new MT Search Bookmarklet Maker: http://cogdogblog.com/alan/mt_search_maker.php I use this extensively to search my own blog without needed to load the main page, or to do a quick search from any other web page using highlighted words on that page (like the Google Search button).

Does anyone still look up number, business names in a big thick yellow pages phone book? Is that still the first reflex when a net connected computer is in reach? Two recent observations indicate that for many folks, not just techies, but Jane and Joe Citizen, the web is becoming the reflex. We have a new site up for a regional theatre festival our colleges are hosting — it is a hugely complex multi-day event, with maybe 1000 attendees. I got 3 concerne email messages lasy night (rightfully so) as the address I had for the main conference hotel site was listed as 523 West Peoria Ave when it is actually 2523 (I hacked off the leading “2″!). Note what these emailers said a similar statement to this one (my emphasis added): On the hotel information page for the program, the hotel’s address is incorrectly listed as 532 W. Peoria [...]

I keep a pad of frequently called numbers near my office phone- there is a number next to a label called “Helpless desk”. In theory, this is how our helpdesk works. I go to a web site and fill submit a problem request form. It gets routed electronically to someone who addresses the issue. The helpdesk ticket is closed, I am notified by email, and merrily continue to perform my job. In practice this is actually what happened this week. I got an email from a white hat hacker who informed me that a particular perl script we use on our site has a vulnerability, and that an update would take care of it. I got the update, but sadly found out that the script was in a directory that our IT department had installed it, and the directory permissions were set that prevented me from making any modifications. Permission [...]