CogBlogged from ‘January, 2006’

Through some forgotten path I came across Podzinger, a search tool that claims to search for keywords inside a podcast, and offer audio playback links to the actual segment itself: Podcasts have been subjected to the same primitive search through categorization … until now. PODZINGER looks inside podcasts, not just the metadata, letting you search podcasts in the same way that you search for anything else on the web. When you type in a word or terms, PODZINGER not only finds the relevant podcasts, but also highlights the segment of the audio in which they occurred. By clicking anywhere on the results, the audio will begin to play just where you clicked. There are also controls that let you back up, pause, or forward through the podcast. Or you can download the entire podcast This touches on a real interest of mine, having URL addressable segments oif Big Fat Media, [...]

Sometime before the end of December. my colleague Tom Foster at Chandler-Gilbert asked me to co-lead a workshop for Maricopa library staff. Tom has helped me a lot, so of course I said “yes”. Then last week, he reminded me we had a week to prepare for our session just completed. So what does one do in a pinch, to create quickly some online workshop materials? Quick? Ride the bus… wiki wiki that is. This workshop was for library technical staff from all of our colleges. I am still not sure what they do, but apparently there are some divisions among reference and circulation people. They provided the broad, nebulous request, to “do something with new technology”. So we went with a “buffet” theme. Starting from scratch just 2 days ago, I turned to PBWiki to hoist the site. PB is great because of its simplicity, plus you could have [...]

One of the joys of flickr is discovering new features the web elves have slipped in in there. The one I discovered likely has been there a long time… but I just noticed then when you are viewing an image that is part of a set, say one of my flower shots of a tulip out of a set of flower images, the little icons on the right and left can be used to display the adjacent photos in the set (a browser reload). Well, Doh! I just noticed the little more links below: and these allow you to scroll through the thumbnails of the set while staying in the same web page. Outstanding! This is a much better way to browse a set. I am fairly sure flickr was the first site I had used that had AJAX technology likely before it was called AJAX. I remember it from [...]

I am headed back to <font>…</font> and <blink>…</blink> tags (not). I am almost too embarrassed to admit this, but thanks to an email from Keith K, it was pointed out the CSS class names used by Feed2JS are not exactly W3C valid since they use underscores (e.g. .rss_box) and this may/will cause display problems in Internet Explorer (See Underscores in class and ID Names). I’ve given some thought to this and have no clever way to do a workaround that will preserve the existing usage, so I am setting a future date when the script will be changed. This only matters to you if you use Feed2JS and have integrated the styles into your own web page CSS. This could happen in two different ways: The script changes. Any users who were using the current style sheets would have to edit their CSS to change all underscores for hyphens. The [...]

The conversion is complete. With one line of text, I have preserved every old link, every RSS feed, under the former URL/host for this blog from the old cogdogblog.com/…. to the exact same links here at the new home at cogdogblog.com/…/. Oi, that also means the spam will come here too. And the poker folks have been ratcheting up the intensity lately. This also includes all RSS feed URLs. As already noted, some smart software applications like NetNewsWire automatically change the URLs on a refresh. It is not magic at all, and web server redirection is so easy you think it is not real. I am utterly barefaced amazed at how many “professional” sites do not bother to leave a path when they arbitrarily decide to redo the web server directory structure, or migrate to some new content management system that obfuscates URLs with database gibberish. And all you need [...]

This past Friday was the largest event our office coordinates, Faculty Convocation 2006, held the first day of faculty accountability for Spring semester. We had 630 people pre-registered (online via our database system) plus well over 120 walk-in registrants. This has been a Maricopa event dating back to the era of chalk… I am not sure, but it was in place when I started working here in 1992. I remember all this fuss about “Convocation”, something I envisioned like some sort of graduation, cap and gown event for faculty, which struck me as odd since they all had one or more degrees, but then discovered it was simply a coming together after the holiday and New Year’s break, and often with a theme and/or keynote speaker, to kick start the new semester. This year’s speaker was Vincent Tinto, from Syracuse University, who gave a well received, and well done session [...]

For what its worth, I decided to give the Englaze Flickr Backup to DVD service a try. Ordering was pretty easy- pick one of the last 200 photos to be printed on the label (I chose my hammock perspective), enter a title, etc, and provide a credit card. I had a shade under 1000 photos, so it fit on a single disc and was about US$28 total in all. Hmm.. I have yet to get a confirmation of the order… Update The email confirmation was sent- I am still getting used to my seldom, but now more frequently used, Gmail account. It was marked as spam, now corrected. The disc should be at my PO box by end of the week. I was also interested in the new options for ordering prints, especially as I am interested in checking out the quality of the poster size (20″ x 30 “) [...]

… then the server move has been successful. You are viewing the same old dog blog on a new server host, with a shorter and more memorable URL: http://cogdogblog.com/ and its RSS feed: http://cogdogblog.com/feed/ If all goes well, all old links, RSS feeds, etc from the old host at cogdogblog.com/…../ will be automatically routed here. I will leave the redirects up for at least 6 months, if not longer. Speaking of which, one gripe I have always had is when web developers move directories around, create new URLs and do not leave a forwarding note or path, and leave in their wake a long tail of broken links, bad search results, and a funky smell. If you are wise enough to be running an Apache server, it is bone easy to set up re-directs, if your server is set up to pay attention to .htaccess files. This is a simple [...]

Just randomly clicking the new feature links at the bottom of my flickr collection brought me to something I should get around top doing- getting a backup. Hey, what if Yahoo falls into the ocean? Englaze Archive will create a data DVD backup of your original flickr photos, the original uploaded sizes, and preserve titles and captions (not comments). It costs US$29.95 for the first 1000 photos and then $4 for each next set of 1000 (I am now at only 954). I will likely order one pretty soon. Just in case.

Maybe its resolution time. In this first burst of 2006 and more than a few big times bloggers are hanging out their “will blog for _______ signs” or going indy. In a long tangent to a post by Will Richardson on “Reinventing Ourselves, Stephen Downes lets loose his desire for a new venue. So long Monkton? Web Standard-ress Molly Holzschlag is also putting out her offer, I Want You To Hire Me: I wander the world and talk web standards to everyone I meet. I’m really good at it. I can teach CSS. And HTML and XHTML too. I can tell you why they matter. I can fix your problems, I can make you more efficient. I need your help. I need 20k per month. I work really hard, I’ll be where you need me to be. And I’m really, really good. I need a change! Please, make an offer. [...]