CogBlogged from ‘July, 2008’

Besides manually updating six separate instances WordPress (to version 2.6) in the NMC fleet of sites, I also finally paid some over due attention to the version of WordPressMultiUser I have had up since November 2007. This tool some rustling to get it to the right version and also what had not been done in a while- making the front door. I am hardly a WPmu guru, certainly no bavatuesday… maybe a bavalatethursdaymorning. Most places running WPmu are doing it to provide a blog hosting service, like edublogs or the crazy stuff the Rev does at Mary Washington. My need was to have a series of separate sites hosted in WordPress w/o having to have an even bigger fleet of separate installs (Heck, maybe one day I can rope them all in under the WPmu hood). No these are all a series of online publications we have done at NMC [...]

I Am So Un Cuil by cogdogblog posted 31 Jul ’08, 3.01pm MDT PST on flickr I did not spend much time poking at www.cuil.com since it was pretty well blasted across the blogosophere. My ego search left me depressed, nothing for cogdogblog but plenty of "cat piss" Oh well, they must have wised up, as the search now finds my buried bones It’s still rather lame.

Perhaps your head is exploding with all the new stuff coming out of every electronic orifice. It might be useful to consider how you go about getting your dose? Maybe it’s RSS, it might be clicking every link shared by a Jedi master, or slogging through the plaff of twitter, heck it might even be from a magazine. I have a technique that never fails to give me a lift (when it works), yet I can hardly claim it is reproducible. It’s equivalent to kicking over a rock when hiking just to see what might be hiding underneath, when you find something cool (or just as not, squishy) in an expected place. For a while I have been saying I should keep track of all the useful or interesting things I have found online by sheer serendipity. The best part is the surprise factor, and that it is very likely [...]

Again I am embarrassingly late to embrace a trend. Moo cards have been around like since Web 1.6 – those slick half sized business cards that feature a different image on each card, and quite often images personally picked from flickr. Thanks to a friend who slipped me a promo code to get a discount on my first order, I tipped the cow… er scale, and ordered my first set of cards: The Moo tools are as easy as dipping Oreos- you give your flick credentials and you can then start selecting images from your photos, from your tags, sets, or just poking around. I rummaged around my hundreds of my photos flowers and dogs. You don’t have to select 100 pictures to make 100 cards (if you use less you get repeats). You can customize the info that appears on the back, including your flickr icon (yay) and either [...]

I can’t stop going back for more GraphJams. I am wearing my GraphJammies eating peanut butter and GraphJam sandwiches. But I am waiting for my own submission to be portrayed, based on a recent blog post of my own. But for now, cue up that CD track that starts with scratchy vinyl sounds and get the funk toes tapping: more graph humor and song chart memes GraphJam even give you the video! GraphJam! (Where It’s At!) GraphJam! (Where It’s At!) GraphJam! (Where It’s At!)

Wordle Does Feeds by cogdogblog posted 28 Jul ’08, 10.57am MDT PST on flickr The uber nifty Wordle tag cloud generator now can take any URL that has an RSS feed and generate one of those lovely word maps of content. Here is what the latest blabber from CogDogBlog has in it- heavily weighted by my serious examination of the Pooh- Eeyore Debate. What would be cool is to grab a time series of these to see how word use changes over time. And now if I ran a new Wordle, my Wordle would contain “Wordle” since I am blogging about it. Oi, the recusrion!

Calling drupal jedi masters! I need some advice. When planning the structure of the NMC web site I had only a fuzzy idea of how to use taxonomies for organizing content, and ended up creating one taxonomy for staff to organize content that is a bit problematic as it serves multiple purposes, and I want to split off a branch and make it available to logged in users. My sloppy taxonomy includes now: Terms used just to organize special content types. The problem is that some of our staff keep forgetting that and use them as general l content descriptors, when they are more like special tags that trigger content to be part of certain views. Regular terms our staff uses just to categorize any content. Wider terms that I want to make available to all logged in users (the current one is set so only staff roles can access). [...]

As a kid I was immersed in the House by Pooh Corner it was the ancient “book” technology and a few 72 rpm LPs of someone reading the stories. I did not have too many of the accessory toys, maybe an inflatable set of characters. I really wanted a heffalump. The stream of memories was triggered by Stephen’s mention of the “debate”, which was but one part of the fabulous Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, where he asks the deep philosophical question, “Who would you rather be, Tigger or Eeyore?” the well known Tigger versus Eeyore Debate. I have not combed all the literature yet, but am pretty confident data will show for the hundreds of thousands of people taking this question, the sum total of people standing up and saying, “I am an Eeyore” is approximately Zero. (Hey, this ought to be on GraphJam!). That makes poor Mr Stapled [...]

It’s been almost a year since my half baked idea emerged for 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story — I presented it 7 times, which for me, a reluctant presenter is a lot of repeats. But it is a fun show, and the highlight was getting a packed auditorium at Northern Voice 2008– I was sure everyone had my session confused with celebrity keynote. I was shaking in my cowboy boots. By the time of the last presentation at the University of Delaware, I had achieved the Magic Heinz Number… 57 Tools…. and since then I have added another 12 on the “to do” list (sometime when I can stomach doing the same story again) including 280 slides, flowgram, SlideRocket, dipity, gloster, and more. A few of these are in beta, and I have access, but hope they emerge soon. Vuvox Collage has been in beta a long [...]

I’m loading up my duffle bag with mosquito repellent, mess kit, multi-tool, flashlight, sleeping bag, laptop, blog…. woah woah… well I am not taking all that stuff but I am going to camp… WordCamp! WordPressCamp! Thanks to a direct message nudge from @lloydbudd as a reminder, I hemmed and hawed and then just spelled out WTF. I’ve got a bunch of miles on United to get there … ouch… speaking of WTF… WTF is a “close-in processing fee”? United charged me, a sort of frequent flier, $75 because I just used my miles for a trip less than 21 days out. How is that costing them money? Next thing it will be the seat-belt usage fee and the ramp extension charge. Oh and the landing gear deployment fee. Geez. Oh well, its still an inexpensive trip, and a chance to spend a day in total geek out WordPress mode. I’m [...]