CogBlogged from ‘March, 2006’

Next week brings a lot of changes for Feed2JS– just posted to our Updates are a number of things that affect users of our site: The first week of April 2006 brings a number of changes in Feed2JS, all to make it bigger and better. First of all, anyone using the primary “jade” server at Maricopa, this server will be going offline for a few hours starrting 8:00am Tuesday, April 4 (MST), as the server will be moving from my office up to the main server room in our bulding. In the long run, this will increase the speed and uptime of our server. Also, due are some new code changes in the Feed2Js script. The first is to fix an issue in the generated content for the way CSS classes are declared (my mistake, we use invalid “_” characters). When this change happens, it only affects your site if [...]

Yet Another Web 2.0 List. All Things Web 2.0 – “THE LIST”: Although I continue to be repulsed by the term Web 2.0, I still thought I was keeping pretty current until I took a look at Bob’s list. While there are alot of Me2Web2 projects on the list, there’s a lot that aren’t. Browsing though this list is definitely worth the gander. For those of you who make it a point to stay on top of “All Things Web 2.0” — Sorry I just spoiled your weekend. If for anything remarkable, is the name of the blog where this list hangs: Sacred Cow Dung (for a blog name it has this dog nailed ;-). But here is my curiosity. With so many things Web X.0 out there, why is it we still see such manually edited List Of Links? That itself is so 1.0. Why are we not using [...]

It was March 27 ordered and on its way March 30 and due to arrive April 4. From China to Scottsdale in 6 days. I knew the thing was fast, but zowie!

A week from tomorrow is my last day at Maricopa. I’ll turn in my badge and key and leave the building. Today, I cleaned out another place I’ve occupied for a long while — my cubby in the downstairs locker room. For the last 10? 11? years, I have occupied locker #1 here (top right in the photo), used for my bicycle commutes to work. In the early days, it was an economical and fitness thing; as my wife and I lived in a small townhouse and shared a vehicle as finances were tight. I rode every day for three plus years, cold mornings in december, furnace blasts in the summer, wind storms, glorious spring flower days. That might be some 800 showers gone by, but who is counting? With time, salary advances, a house, two cars… the bike rides waxed and waned to none to a few times per [...]

(start with TV announcer voice): Previously… on Lost. Just kidding. Previously on this blog, I wrote of my dilemma at home of dealing with a giant unorganized stack of digital photos. In cleaning out my office at Maricopa, I had a similar problem, but here, at least, I had a spare 240 Gb LaCie FireWire Drive. So this morning I copied all of the archived photos, going back to 1997. Fortunately, I had gotten in the habit of storing them in folders than were named xxYYzz [name of event] where xx was the last digits of the year, YY the month, and zz the day. So a typical one might be 030502 FIPP Showcase for the FIPP event on May 2, 2003. This convention helped get them in date order in a file directory. So I created new folders on the HD for years, and lumped all the files in [...]

Like thousands, tens of thousands, maybe just short of McDonald’s order of magnitude (Billions and Billions) of other people, I am feeling the gaping information void of Stephen Downe’s hiatus. OLDaily been a mainstay of my ed tech input for so long I cannot remember, and it was Stephen’s work that opened my eyes to RSS in 2002. It was his pointing to my unknown blog in 2003 that brought some readers outside of my circle of comrades. Okay, the world has not ended, the sun rises every day, life goes on, all that glib stuff. Stephen’s automated distribution of content, rip, mixed, categorized, and fed, is still there as EDU_RSS. But I must say, I feel the absence of Stephen’s energy, his perspective, his sheer forceful attitude, his arcane knowledge of subjects and words that have never graced my vocabulary, and just his unique sense of ‘Stephen-ness.’ I hope [...]

As I clean up my web site directory, 14 years of accumulated stuff, I start wondering just how many web sites I had set up for our offices’ various projects and events. Not to be horn blowing, but I am staggered to see that I found 260 different event web sites dating back mostly to the late 1990s. In the early days, these were hand spun HTML, lots of table tags, and pretty much static information. Around 200, when I picked up PHP, I came up with a series of scripts I could more or less copy/paste to do online event registration using static text files. These worked well for capturing registration, sending emails to participants, providing exports to our staff’s FileMaker databases, but there was continual minor changes on every iteration. Moreover, by being essentially separate little database, we had no way to do overall stats, and worse, for [...]

Triggered by yesterday’s post on how one of our Spanish teachers started using PBWiki, I got a nice email from Ramit, one of the PBWiki co-founders, seeking ideas on how to “spread” the peanut butter / wiki concept to other teachers: I also noticed you’re involved in instructional technology, so I wanted to ask your advice. We’ve been making PBwiki better and better for educators to use, and we’re really interested in spreading the word in the educational community. It seems like educators talk to each other pretty often, and I’m wondering how we might reach them to encourage them to use wikis. Do you have any ideas? Are there specific people or places we should be talking to? I would appreciate your advice. Wikis are a fantastic way for educators and teachers to collaborate in the classroom and we’re eager to help teachers do it using PBwiki. Thanks, -Ramit [...]

Twice this week I’ve gotten requests to use some of my flickr photos (and ironically both photos were taken in San Diego, but on different trips) for use on other web sites. The first was asking to use my Gaslamp photos (1 and 2) for a San Diego tourist guide site (sorry, I lost track of the site). But weirder was a request from Starwood Lobby, a site that publishes “unbiased” reviews and photos of hotels, to use a photo they said I had taken at the Westin in San Diego, where I stayed this past January for the EDUCAUSE/ELI conference. I was a bit stumped trying to remember what I took of in terms of a photo of the hotel until I looked at the link– it was the impulsive photo I had taken of the Two Headed Shower in my room: It is a small step closer to [...]

All this spam is bad for my cholesterol ;-) The prolific blog spammer “phuong” (at least 150 spam servings in the last month) is curious since he/she/it are not leaving any URLs in the spam insertion attempt, only a cryptic message like: Xin choa, Minh den tu HK, minh mong muon luoc lam quen vui tat ca tac ban. Thanks you What might be the point here? My guess it is a foraging expedition- a script cranks these out so see what cracks phuong can find in comment spam, and then use search tools to find the sites where he/she/it has gotten the cryptic string inserted on a blog. That easily builds a record of Blogs With Possible Spam Holes. It would certainly open the door for WordPress users that require one approved comment to open the moderation door, and inadvertently approve one of these (or the cousins that write [...]