CogBlogged from ‘November, 2005’

Ivan (The Trouble With) Tribble has quite a following. If you have forgotten or never read it, Ivan is a psuedonym for someone who thinks blogging is a bad practice for professor wanna bes (See Bloggers Need Not Apply from the July 8, 2005 Chronicle of Higher Education– at least they had the savvy to leave this one public). I think I had composed something vitriolic and trashed it w/o posting. To me, Ivan wants to keep his hand securely stowed in the sand and do education as usual. But here is what is neat– if you follow the who links to Ivan features of Bloglines Citations, you will wade through perhaps 500 blogged responses, a wide spectrum of opinions weighing in on “Ivan”. Will this attention bring him into the light or will he continue to write in disguise? What will be his next target? How many agree? Do [...]

If I were a student in Blog School, the parental note they send home from my blog teachers might bear the comment, “Alan writes a lot, but he does not blog well with others”. What I hope to get at by the end of this ramble is how, to me, in my opinion, this is not a universal rule… the power and enticement of blogging is the sense of ownership of a place of your own making. You own it, it is a relfection, sometimes fun house mirror distorted, of yourself. It is what the storytellers refer to as “finding your voice” (and using it). You are an editorial board of one, and the review process is instantaneous. But as your own place, you have a lot of investment in what is there or a lot of reason to focus your energy there. It is yours and yours alone. This [...]

It’s rare I feel like passing on something forwarded via e-mail, but this message form my colleague Jan in Melbourne is too good to pass up. Look carefully at the double meanings in these URLs (all real and well meaning): Make sure you don’t make the same mistake when setting up your web page. It’s not always easy choosing the right domain name… but you can’t do much worse than these people. First there is “Who Represents?” – a database for agencies to the rich and famous: http://www.whorepresents.com Second is the Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views: http://www.expertsexchange.com Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island: http://www.penisland.net Need a therapist? Try: http://www.therapistfinder.com Finally we have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales: http://www.molestationnursery.com And my own story… my personal domain dommy.com is named for my first canine friend, a [...]

I’ve always valued a new issue of EDUCAUSE REVIEW — not only is it cleanly published, tastefully illustrated, it typically features a number of excellently written articles in my field. It’s got a comfortable feel in your hands, not to heavy like a scholarly jouurnal, and very readable, but not light and fluffy like a grocery store glitz magazine. But in looking at the November/December 2005 issue online I’m struck by some new features showing that the publication is becoming more blog-like: First of, all the publication features an RSS feed. Stick it in your aggregator, and you will be able to jump to the newest articles before reading a review by Stephen Downes (well, you will need to read fast). One note to EDUCAUSE, and for others adding RSS feeds- please run them through a validator — the current ER feed has several problems (I was just peeking at [...]

The CD is here! As the tale told previously goes, a rock band in Germany named The Sealevel somehow found my photo of my 1972 Ford Maverick parked next to a “Sea Level” sign in Death Valley and asked if it could be used on the cover of their CD. I just popped by my PO Box and sure enough, Berni sent a copy of the CD, Beach from Last Summer: and as promised, I got a photo credit in the liner notes: And the music is pretty good too! Peppy, modern beach rock music. I’ve already got it iTuned over to my iPod. Check out the band and their music at http://www.thesealevel.de/

Hmmmm, something is different around here…. what is it? Oh yes, more than a year since I jumped ship to WordPress as my blog tool, I got around to customizing the look. Until now, I pretty much had gone with the stock default Kubrick template (which is more than okay) with my own banner image. But a cool dog must stand out on its own. So I shopped around a bit at the WordPress Theme Browser and landed on the Headspace Theme. Lucy for me it is based on Kubrick, so the amount of updates were not too significant, though if you change anything in WP, the style sheets, the sidebars, it becomes more than a download and drop change. There will likely be continued adjustments, refinements, and picking up a bit of poop. So in the Go Dog Go! spirit, I ask, do you like my new blog hat? [...]

I’m liking adding some audio recordings of our Ocotillo Online Learning Group monthly meetings to the notes. It should add value for people who cannot drive to a meeting. I’ve just posted the notes from our November 4 meeting about Testing Centers for Online Students. But we sure are not talking about high end ITConversations like production value. The recording is quick and dirty by placing my iRiver MP3 recorded in front of the room. It does well for speakers and can mostly pick up, though faint, questions from elsewhere in a classroom sized location. I decided to join the fray and add a little bit of introduction, using a Creative Commons audio instrumental I found by “Cjacks” at OpSound and me doing a cheesy quick intro into Audacity with my USB headset microphone. I am hoping Gardner Campbell does not listen in as he will recoil in audio disgust [...]

I’ve been bothered by the issue of inccorect displayed time stamps for Feed2JS, so I diverted from a few tasks at hand to take a new approach. The MagpieRSS library has a nice function that returns the date/time stamp of any item, in its myriad formats and tag names, as one of those values of number of seconds since January 1, 1970. The problem is that this value is offset by my server’s local time. So my time becomes your time. So first I have a new logic that determines our server’s local offset from GMT (it changes on time of year since we boycott Daylight Savings Time in Arizona), so our offset is either GMT-7 or GMT-8. So internally, I am converting all those date/time stamps to GMT time. And now, Feed2JS has a new option that allows you to enter your local offset from GMT. The Build a [...]

Thanks to some keen observers who have recently noted a long standing problem with Feed2JS– for the display of the date and item was posted, we had been using some Magpie and PHP functions to convert the date/time stamp of an item to a milliseconds value and then using the php date() function for the screen display. Yet I was overlooking the fact that the functions were converting the time into one relative to the local time on my server. Of course, when testing against this blag, the date/time stamps were okay since its on the same server and in the same timezone. Doh! To calculate the time zone offset will take some effort since the date/time formats of feeds have about 5-10 different variations. One option is to include a new parameter that will allow a user to indicate the timezone offset from our local time– this can be [...]

Readers and my most sarcastic fans know my reluctance to blandly use the “Web 2.0″ word, but bear with me– the decimals don’t matter, what I struggle with is the ratio issue. Daily I interact, participate, create, dwell, explore in this place of “folksonomic social networked connective reading/writingWeb 2.0-ish world” — yet I work in a large organization that feels mostly around Web 0.75. One of my peeves is the pervasive use of email as a sole communication means. What I am referring to as almost daily, there are 4 or 5 fully formatted HTML, graphic laden emails about various events and programs in our college system, and there is no corresponding related information on our colleges’ web sites. That means the only content “repository” is the inbox, which has no legacy record, no memory, no search. Our lack of a coordinated event calendaring system (beyond the clunky one to [...]