CogBlogged from ‘August, 2009’

cc licensed flickr photo shared by K_iwi “I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant, tweeting.” (since I cannot use a copyrighted cartoon!)

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Melissa Maples Probably sending messages to @Geritol or @Depends… maybe arranging a bingo meetup… “@Methuselah I’m spending my grandkids inheritance on iTunes movies. Know where I can score some good v?” Yeah, that’s you and me and everyone else on twitter. See also how old people use Facebook. Now where are my dentures? I have a Skype video date tonight.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by .m for matthijs with apologies to Don McLean… Not so long, long ago… I can still remember How those tweets used to make me smile. And I knew if I had my chance That I could make those people retweet And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while. But tweetspam made me shiver With every @message I’d deliver. Bad news from TechCrunch; I cant tweet what I’ll eat for lunch. I can’t remember if I cried When I read about how Ev’s fortune did slide, But something touched me deep inside The day twitter died. So bye-bye, micro-blogging pie. Took my status to Facebook, But its interface makes me cry. Them good old internet boys weren’t asking why Singing, “if I cant tweet, I doubt I’ll die. “this’ll be the day that I wont die.”

cc licensed flickr photo shared by tourist_on_earth I’ve written previously (not that I remembered, I had to use my own blog search) on the challenge of tag juggling when one’s tagging habits have sprawled so much one wonders how many can they keep in the air. And its been something we’ve been discussing for the tagging we ask people to do for the Horizon Project… can they remember the tag? Will they remember the tag? Will they tag? My delicious tags are messy, and rather than clean them up, I just keep sweeping them under the rug, and nudging the door so maybe the guests wont notice my lack of tidy tag keeping. Bu I just lapsed into the more severe case I now coin- Tagnesia- the loss of memory of a tag you have used in the past. I had come across this great flickr set of Academic Evolution [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog You can tweet but you cannot hide. If you mention "Clippy" in a tweet, that *#&$ing paper clip will hear you and reply, in that "I’m trying to be helpful but am annoying as biting ants in your shorts" way. Try it. Tweet something snarky about Clippy. Insult his bulging eyeball. Vow to Kill Clippy. And for the sake of humanity, do not follow http://twitter.com/”>MSClippy Next thing you know, Bob will be tweeting too.

I hope you enjoy this teaser for my presentation next week at the Open Education Conference: Talkin’ Bout Open from cogdog on Vimeo. I could not help selecting the D’Arcy Norman Bigger Than Life glare for the freeze frame! These quotes from colleagues near and far were taken from the 34 longer interviews I collected for Amazing Stories of Openness, and the full stories will be made available after the presentation next Wednesday. I got the videos in a variety of ways; in person with my Flip Mino (the best quality); Skype video interviews (doh, guess who did not mute his mic and ended up sounding like a wheezing phone pranker), response videos to my YouTube Call for Stories video, ones people just sent me, audio recordings I set to images, even from my little Canon pocket camera at a dark bar in Hawaii with subjects lit by LED flashlight. [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by jamelah Mmm, sliced bread! So far maybe 140 people have installed my Flickr Creative Commons Attribution Helper- a GreaseMonkey script for Firefox. I use the sucker almost every day. It takes what used to be about a 5 click, 4 copy/paste operation to give me, in one motion, the HTML needed to embed a Creative Commons licensed flickr photo in my blog- and– the format is consistent every time. But last week, a tweet from Alec Courous got me thinking, that there are times when you want an attribution string that is not HTML, e.g., when you are using flickr photos in say a presentation. I took about 10 minutes to add that feature. The new version 0.3 of my script at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/49395 now adds a second text box that has an attribution string in text: Either box is automatically select when you click [...]

After years of publishing snippets of HTML and PHP code in this blog, I’ve yet to find an elegant way to represent the code when published- there’s a bit of a trick, since you don’t want the HTML or PHP to do what it normally does. For a few years I have used the Preserve Code Formatting plugin, since it allows me to wrap all the code in <pre>…</pre> tags, and it honors spaces and does not process the code as source code. Yet it’s not all that readable, and I’ve had to play tricks to get it to not run off the right side of the page. But no more, I found what I hope is The One Code Plugin– SyntaxHighlighter Plus which is a WordPress implementation of the SyntaxHighlighter package for formatting JavaScript code. I just installed it and tested it out on the last post that had [...]

One of my web hobbies is peeking at the source code of web pages– and I love it when you find something there that does not make the front page, and HTML Easter Egg if you will. I actually do this if I am trying to see how something was coded for a page or more usually to see what sort of content management system might be powering a site (WordPress and drupal sites leave a lot of tell-tale signs). So tonight, by way of the Arizona Department of Transportation tweet stream (@ArizonaDOT) I saw the story of stunning photos at the Las Vegas Sun site on the progress of the new bridge being constructed to span the west end of the Grand Canyon, an arched path that will be some stunning drive when it is done: I was looking at the design of the site, and my gut was [...]