CogBlogged from ‘July, 2010’

I’m really excited to be making my first trip ever to London next month (too late to meet up with Scott or Brian) for a few days of NMC meetings. I have set aside a few extra days to be a tour dog. But I am a total n00b in my London knowledge– so I am asking to crowdsource my free days here (August 19-21). Give me some ideas what to see/do, where to stay, etc, or maybe arrange a meetup? Leave me some tips over at http://cogdoghouse.wikispaces.com/LondonCalling /me wags in appreciation.

If I was teaching a class in logic, I would frequently use the Chronicle of Higher Education as a rich resource– of faulty logic. Hardly a day passes in the feed reader without some preaching headline that one cannot get from point A to B without a psychic leap of thinking. Try this one on. YouTube Better at Funny Cat Videos Than Educational Content, Professors Say While many students turn to YouTube when looking for help with their homework, it can be hard to find good-quality educational clips there, according to two professors who did a preliminary analysis of several video search engines. The research was typing the word “mitosis” into various video search sites, and analyzing the top 20 results. And thus, in finding not prime source materials, ergo, everything is Cat Videos. Or, Because You Can Find Some Crap in a Large Pile, the Whole Pile Smells Like [...]

I’m going to leave it to John Ittelson to tell the full story, but I am a bit embarrassed to all my friends and colleagues who responded to my call for More Amazing Stories of Sharing. Like the wascally wabbit, there was a mixup, and the event at which this new version was supposed to be presented… did not get us in the schedule. Eeeek. Will this be the last time I can pull out the Tom Sawyer Paint My Presentation Fence trick? I don’t think so. You see… I got this great new collection of stories, they are really good, and I can still share them with you. In fact, you, me, and everyone else does not need a conference to present something- we can share these anytime, without the bad conference hall fluorescent lights, ugly test pattern hotel carpet, and without the Dreaded Conference Chicken. cc licensed flickr [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Today (July 24) is my day to honor my first and most special dog, Dominoe, who left this world in 1993. Is it really 17 years? That’s a full generation. And it was long after that that I told her story like 50 million times. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It’s been a long way too since Rossridge Apartments, in Baltimore, the place I was living when I took her in, when my room-mate Kevin literally called me and said, “do you want a dog?” This was a cusp of time in many ways, leaving the life of a place I grew up in and hardly left, and turning that whole leaf less than 10 monts later, by packing all my stuff, including Dominoe, into a 1973 Ford Maverick and driving it all the way to Arizona. You should never forget [...]

There are tons of plugins available to embed audio/video in your blog. The things I don’t like with many of them are (a) they usually use “short codes”- things you hand write in brackets to indicate the location and source for the media (plus some options. Writing these means have to remember the structure, but more so, if you ever have to change to a different plugin down the road, you are left with short codes that might not mean anything. For years I had use Anarchy Media Player for the simplicity that all you had to was create a normal hyperlink to your media, and Anarchy would replace it with the suitable player. However, I had some major conflict issues with Anarchy last year, I noticed its javascript was hanging on loading, and in term hung my entire blog. I zapped it. For some reason I was thinking today [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Duncan Kinney Oh what a tangled blog I weave mangle. I thought it would take a few posts and days to document the work I started in April to use the then beta features of WordPress 3 to develop the NMC’s MIDEA web site. And just trying to write up the last few, I can see it is a heap. So while I have maybe two more to write up, I wanted to make this to be the hub post to all the others. You can also find these (and whatever comes in the future) tagged here as wp3 http://cogdogblog.com/tag/wp3/. Overview of WordPress 3.0 Content Types- my plans to dive in Creating the content types. The easiest part, and the beauty of functions.php Leveraging child themes- my newly discovered best practice for chopping apart themes. Adding the meta data field editing boxes (add_post_meta). This [...]

After a bunch of lead weight code riddled posts, let’s lighten it up. I can always count on GraphJam for some laughs, but also for the clever ways people find to represent ideas, thoughts, jokes, in graph form. Yes, when I was a kid, Pluto was a planet, but scientists have kicked the cold rock out of the planet club. And as the post cites, the best comment (or as GraphJam lists them, “TPS Reports”). Graphite Mickey Mouse says, “Of course he’s not a planet! He’s my DOG!” I WANT YOU TO MAKE ME A PLANET! cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

cc licensed flickr photo shared by QualityFrog In a previous long winding post, Dressing up and Displaying WordPress 3 Custom Post Content (a), I tried to document the first part of my WordPress 3 site I manipulated the new Custom Content types. It seems it takes longer to explain that to build, and in the end, I’m wondering if it is even explained. Leading up to this, I began by overviewing the plans for a new web project, we set up the places to create the new content types, and introduced the benefits using child themes. Then we dove headfirst into the code to create the interface and data elements to add/edit the custom meta data for each of the three content (post) types. Getting your content onto your site is a matter of manipulating The Loop and then writing new side loops where needed to put things on the [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk Yikes, where did the time go? I’ve let slide the next piece in my now fractured series on using the custom post types added in WordPress 3.0. As a recap, what I am sharing is what I learned back in April (using the beta version of WP3) to create the NMC MIDEA web site. This site had a need to create, besides the usual page and blog post types, other content for projects, organizations, and events, each with its own extra custom meta-data. Before I go crazy with PHP here, I want to note that this will get technical and is written really for myself as a set of notes and others who have no hesitation to roll up their sleeves and muck around with templates and code. This is not the optimal way to use the new WordPress features, and it [...]

I’ve made my share of snippy jokes about the silliness of foursquare, of tweeting evert burger joint you visit or your latest new badge. That’s not to say there is not some potential in this geolocation app, it may just be waiting to be found. But take it on a simple level- you carry a device around which can sense where you are, and using foursquare (or its variants) you can “mark” your locations, see others that have been there. I put aside my criticism to last month as we learned from Beth Kanter how some museums were putting it to use (or see this strategy by a NY theater group and more ideas for museums), especially again, the notion of “listening” in social media. So check this out- in two steps you can generate a google map of your foursquaring. I had to try. It works (click for larger [...]