CogBlogged from ‘April, 2009’

My colleague Rachel Smith presented a nice little WordPress challenge to re-create what she had done previously as old skool manual HTML page updating into her WordPress blog (see Postcards back through time). In the spirit of previous documentation of WordPress Theme hacking, here is the under the hood things I did, some variations on ones I have written previously WordPressing Dissected: Pachyderm Services and Making of a New Site: NMC Virtual Worlds. This current write up includes a custom category template, direct database querying, custom fields, and maybe a little elbow grease. Firstly, the original site of Rachel’s postcards features her original artwork, with the most recent one at the top, and icon links to previous works below. I would guess creating a new one is making a new HTML page, copying some source code to the top of the index, and updating the icons below. Maybe it’s not [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by me! (do I need to attribute myself? will I sue myself? This was not the photo I wished I had taken at Northern Voice 2009. There was a moment in the back of the auditorium, during one of the big keynote sessions, when I glance at all the open laptops- more than 50% were open to TweetDeck. I like discovering new tech tool features just be poking around. In Tweetdeck, when you mouse over the icon of someone’s message, you get 4 useful buttons- one to reply, one to direct message, and one called “Other Actions”… I’ve never even looked at that last one: There are a bunch of things you can do there! You can follow/unfollow said user, link to their profile, add them to a TweetDeck group, and this is neat- search will create a new column that searches twitter for all mentions [...]

mashup of cc licensed flickr photos Arizona State Goes Solar by kevindooley and my own Black is the Old T-Shirt Beyond the handpawful of petty blog posts about my beefs with various service providers, CogDogBlog has stayed cleared of anything important in the world. Maybe it’s time, or the times, or advancing time, but gnawing at the back of my brain the last few weeks has been a desire to Do Something. Whatever that means. So I’ve been mulling over some new issue to focus some energy on, maybe blogged here or elsewhere (or not blogged at all- if a blog falls in the woods and no one else is around to hear….) And I have landed on solar energy. I know nothing about it really, but am awakened to the obvious fact that I live in an area of the country (Arizona) where literally most days of the year [...]

Help! Please. I am taking 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story on a spurt of road shows over next 2 months- Barcuch College, Penn State University, Salem State College, and online version for Wooster College, and then a session at Ed-Media. Gulp, am I becoming one of those shlock presenters that milks a show til it wont bleed anymore? I hope not. The entire presentation mode is going to change, and I am rolling in some new secret pieces. In the next 2 weeks, the content is going through a sweep– links checked, 4 dead tools dropped, and several to be added. Currently I am down to 63 (from 64), but have at least another 5 I could add. Recently added are Prezi the sweeping swoopy cool presenter too (see example) and Pixton- a rather powerful comic creator (see new example). I could use some input, and you [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by Zervas One can hardly read a twitter stream these days without tripping over a boat load of hash tags (for those knot sure of what twitter is or what hash tags are, please go check out Oprah or some other oracle, I am not feeling like explaining everything…). First of all, I completely get, grok, and am on board with the desire, the reason for hash tags. Twitter as is, lacks anything in its architecture to allow cross grouping oh content. And hash tags do fill that purpose, though IMHO rather awkwardly. But before going there, I again wonder about our cranial capacity to keep track of hash tags. Event ones are of course short lived. I have been gaming them, toying with them for a while but creating what I call #totalUselessAndRidiculous tags. Just for the fun of it. Just to through a spanner [...]

C’mon twitter people, you are liming up zombie lemmings marching off the cliff. I see a stream of people in my stream tweeting something from a site boasting that they were in twitter before @Oprah. Monkey see, monkey click, monkey tweet. So there is a simple box on the site http://herebeforeoprah.com. In theory, you enter your twitter name, it does not complex communication with the twitter API and returns an appropriate response. C;mon people think a bit more critically before transforming into a twittering meme-bot. Play this out with me. how about if we try someone who hopefully obviously is not on twitter, say: I am so sure that Zippy The Wonder Lizard was on twitter long before Oprah, right? It is so logical…. let’s press ENTER: OMG, Zippy was such a pioneer. An early twitterati, not just someone who gets in line behind the sheep. Except…. Of course there [...]

cc licensed flickr photo by Wade from Oklahoma … in which the technology blog author bares his ignorance by discovering a tool that is several years old…. With a new sense of urgency, I implore that some big web company buy and save Yahoo– if not just to preserve the most valuable important vital web 2.0 app in the universe but…. Yahoo pipes must be kept alive. I’ve not of the concept of Pipes for a long time, but for some reason, never ventured inside (although I have the a personalized use of Social Media Firehouse in my reader). I follow with amazement how deftly Tony Hirst pipe work weaves together feeds from disparate data sources, performs complex transformations, tosses them out to some Google spreadsheet, and produces some geo-data mashup with photos on a map. It seems magical. But its not. Yahoo pipes really allows you to perform programming [...]

If I was tweeting this, I might make up a silly hash tag like #CoolNewTechnologyIJustFoundThatsBeenOutForEons I use Gmail extensively, got my CogDogness, as well as over the last few weeks, I have ditched the desktop email client and using the Gmail version of our NMC Google Apps email. By finding my oldest Gmail message, I’ve been using it since July 2005 (and have amassed pile that is 3% of the capacity)– yet a lesson of the web tech crazy pace is that there is always something new to learn. You never get to the end. Since I’ve been Gmailing so long I have pretty much ignored the ticker tape of “web clips” or news/ad-like things that sit atop the inbox. Until today. I noticed a link to “edit” the web clips, which is a tab inside the settings, and likely has been there a long time (learn more about Gmail [...]

Zamzar is a very powerful striped cone-headed frog…. Actually Zamzar is a very handy, web-base, free tool for converting files – different types of graphics, audio or document files (dealing with those infernal Microsoft Office *.docx or *.pptx file types). You upload a file, and Zamzar the Wonder Converter emails you later with a link for the download. But there is a new exciting feature. Ribbit. That’s right, you can upload a document file (.doc[x] or .pdf), and it does text to speech to turn it into an audio file. I tried it today with a one page PDF, this handout I use for my 50 Ways workshop. Zamar the Wonderfrog reads my document The voice of course is a little robotic, but not horrible, The mistake I see here is sending it something with a pull out box, as reading goes left to right, across the lines, so you [...]

Nice guys by Sebastián-Dario posted 26 Oct ’08, 7.57pm MDT PST on flickr Cachorritos de Lila You can hardly glance at twitter or open your RSS feeds these days without reading about zombies. WTF? Lumbering flesheaters are somehow fashionable? Time magazine gushes about them. The New York Times loves ‘em. Jane Austen now embraces them. Education Technologists are suspect of becoming them. Enough zombies! I am yawning. We need more cute puppies. That will set things right.