Fairly cool. I don't get much from top designers like http://www.stopdesign.com/ or http://www.zeldman.com/, maybe their colors are tucked away.

In fact, in those days (late 1993), the correct URL to get to the MCLI main entrance was:
http://hakatai.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/homePage.html

Using a few little tricks of web "redirection", this 11 year old URL actually still works and gets you to the current main entrance at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/. Is it magic? Not at all, and it is easier than you think. The biggest mystery is why so many sites, big and small, are willing to leave old links hanging in the breeze.

I will show later how I have been able to 3 times migrate a 70+ Mb web directory to different servers yet never produce a bad link message for that pile of content.

But I am not writing to be nostalgic about the web of the early 1990s (remember those ugly grey pages? Title tag animations? The Green Netscape logo?). Let's take a look at scenarios that might happen among the people who create web content:

"We've improved our site to use interactive scripting so all web file pages will be changed from *.html to *.asp"

"That is an effective data analysis web site you built in your personal directory, Smithers, but since it gets so much traffic, we want to provide it a shorter URL by moving it to a top level on our main web site."

"Most of the web content will be re-organized from a directory structure based on department names to ones based on services provided."

"That is sol old, let's just delete it from the web server"

What do these have in common? Let's talk about Linkrot...

For more fun things like this, or if you have some large amounts of time to idle away, check out the 404 Research Lab, which beyond featuring some of the better 404 Server Messages, has an explanation of 404, tips for web site visitors for getting around 404s, and suggestions for webmasters to do something more elegant than the out of the box server error message.

Since then, I've gotten a pile of e-mail requests (well actually 2) for help in constructing different variations ("I just want Furl and del.icio.us"), which seemed enough justification to sit down and spin a PHP tool that allows you to select any combination of these 4 into one tool, all your own.

Meet the DeliciousFurlBagConnotea Marklet Maker.

Are there other web site submission sites that out to be tossed into this virtual Leatherman?

Update: I should not have whipped this up so fast, there is some slop. I have revised the tool to provide an input field to accept del.icio.us usernames, and cleaned up a JavaScript gotcha that was messing up Firefox. The problem child browser now is Internet Explorer, and right now, it does not work in IE (cursing their JS implementation). I'll have to defer this to later.

Update: I've got it working now (maybe) having tested on Safari, Firefox, IE 5.2, NetScape 7 (Mac) and Firefox, NetScape 7, and IE 6 (Windows).

I am in search of someone, some benevolent group, maybe a web design/development class project, willing to do an overhaul of a writing site that very much needs an update. Is this a lot to ask for? I just lack the time and resources to do it myself, and despite some flakiness, some 20,000 people have managed to create content on this site, and more come every day.

Here's the background. The Hero's Journey was built in 1998 to bring to the web what was already a successful class exercise created by Mythology faculty Liz Warren, at South Mountain Community College. It is a creative writing activity based on the workThe Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. In a nutshell, on our site, people create their own accounts, being a story, answer a series of questions about their character, and then build a story by responding to the prompts for the 17 steps of the Hero's Journey.

What the web site added to Liz's work was making it easy for people to share stories (published as a URL), features to add images or sound files to a story, and creating a giant collection in one place. We built a nice reference section with explanations of all HJ steps, and examples lifted from a wide range of examples. For a bit more, see a presentation I did at the Open Learning 2000 conference.

The problem with the web site is that it has very much outgrown its technology. The current version is heavilty dependend on HTML frames, a pile of inter-frame JavaScript communication, a series of not so pretty perl scripts. All of the data is kept in a giant directory of text files. About the only update we were able to make was to move the user accounts to a mySQL database from its original flat text file.

I've had this in my "todo" list so long it has rusted, which is why it dawned on me that perhaps, someone out there in net universe, might be some group that could pull off an update of a great project. I've not fully thought out the conditions, so anything is negotiable, but thinking quickly:

* It would need to be, at least on our site, something that is open to anyone and free to use
* It would need to be a server side technology I can support (unix +/- PHP. perl, mysql ...)
* It needs to be database driven-- or maybe XML is the right approach. The stories all have a predictable structure.
* The interface needs a complete overhaul to be Web Standard compliant; I guess it could be Flash as well
* It would be great to add some community tools, such as commentary, story rating.

I guess this is wishing into space, but if a talented, committed, inspired groups of developers wants to do a worthy project, well give me a bark. It seemed like it was worth a shot.

Alan,

I just upload my personal portfolio on the net that I built my self. I am so happy with it. Base on jClicker slide show, I modified to fit with my need, clean design. I hope you don’t mind with it. If you can put my site, www.asw-design.com in your example list, I will be proud and happy. Thank you so much for creating jClicker and publish it for public use.

Take care,

Addy

If you check our Addy's Works, there are some amazing images alone worth looking at, regardless of the use of our little slide show template. From model prototypes to woodworking, this is someone who has some real talent (as opposed to us you spend their days pecking at a keyboard). I really am fascinated with the "Maquettes" which look like detailed architectural models.

Wow, two emails in a row of real feedback, what is the world coming to?

Nahhhh, ya must be dreamin'.

Now, these are some messages that get generated from our 100% online Learning Grants applications system. This is an internal grants program that faculty and staff from our college apply for on a yearly basis, and we are in our 5th year of having this online. The entire application, review, and notification is done on our web site, another brilliant system developed by Colen, my former student programmer who also did most of the back end work on the Maricopa Learning eXchange.

The Learning Grant application period closed at 6:00 PM last Friday, meaning many of the grants came in... a bit before 6:00 PM last Friday- actually we had 67 proposals, asking for $420,000 out of a budget we have of $185,000. The next phase is where our project manager uses a web-based admin tool to assign readers from a pool to each grant, and notifcations are sent to readers. They then log in to the system, and complete their grant reviews online.

The troublesome email was one we send to each colleges' Dean of Instruction as a summary of the proposals from their particular college, as well as cc:ed to a list of faculty developers at each site. Scripting an e-mail to send out via PHP is easy, but this one needs to chug through the database, select out the grant details from this year, create an HTML message with a pretty chart, and then make sure it goes to the correct people. Then there are custom isntructions for these people to know how to log in tot he site. These are the sorts of things one does not want to have OOPs messages and messy follow-ups, so there were several rounds of tests to he screen, then test emails to ourselves, one gack mistake that fortunately ended up in the dead mail bin, and finally, by 5:00 PM they went out okay.

Wow, scripted emails can be complex, do spammers work this hard? ;-)

S⁵ is a fully web standards compliant XHMTL slide show creator- you can assemble a presentation by merely editing the text of single text file, and design it to your heart's delight via CSS. To see it in action, check out the S5 Introduction.

You get next and back buttons (also advances by space bars and arrow keys), and a hidden slide menu in the lower right corner. It plays back in any browser (well fuggedddaboutit if you use NetScape 4, go back to the 1990s ;-)

Now this is your basic text and bullet slides (about 85% of what people twiddle their time in PowerPoint doing), as an images that are used must be pre-loaded and thus slow down the initial display.

The ability to change your slide show by editing a simple text file is slick, maybe a bit too geeky for some, but it offers some potential for building tools that could generate these slide shows dynamically. People commenting on Eric's blog are already pushing the edges.

What is Linkrot? Jakob coined it early, when web sites are "improved" or "redesigned", often web urls are changed, or files are moved to a new directory, or just taken off the server. This is the case where a web developer only sees what they work with, and they completely forget when they move files around on a web server, that they leave stranding out there:

• anyone who had a bookmark to the abandoned URL
• Anybody who had a hyperlink to a foresaken URL
• Search engines who still have the crufty URL listed.

There is no excuse for not leaving a forwarding address, a "this page has moved" message, or better yet, an automated forwarder (see below).

This happened recently when someone asked about one of our older web pages. I had a link to an article on learning objects, from what was then called elearning magazine, at the once published URL:

http://www.elearningmag.com/elearning/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=5043

which, as you can click, generates a rather ugly, and mostly un-informative "page not found" message:

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.

Now that is very meaningful to the layperson. Does that really build "brand loyalty" or build "customer relationships"?

So scraping back the URL a bit to http://www.elearningmag.com/ you can guess what happend, this URL now bounces to LTIMagazine ("Learning and Training Innovations") where they proclaim:

LTImagazine.com regularly for 'breaking' news, real-world case studies, research reports, in-depth technology articles, and expert columns, and to connect with your peers. You can count on LTImagazine.com to provide the information you need for learning and training success

Doing a search on their site found the old article that had been available at:

http://www.elearningmag.com/elearning/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=5043

now living quite fine at:

http://www.ltimagazine.com/ltimagazine/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=5043

so you can pretty much guess that the magziane was bought, subsumed, and the web pages more or less moved in tact to a different web host. Nothing has really changed, yet at LTI magazine (remember what the "I" stands for?) despite their calim, you cannot count on for implementing the most brain dead solution- an HTTP redirect-- that would transparently send all requests from the old web URL to the new one.

If the server is Apache, it is one line that needs to be added to a simple text file, the magic of an htaccess redirect that is capable of sending requests of an entire old publish URL directory to a new one.

I use this quite often, especially as we "retire" some of our 10 year old web pages from our main MCLI web server to some secondary ones, yet we live no links hanging in the air. For example, most of our footer pages have a link to my rather dated "home page" listed as:

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/

where I first retired it to a secondary server by adding this line to my .htaccess file

Redirect 301 /alan http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan

meaning that any web request to anything inside the URL http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/ gets automatically sent to the corresponding page inside http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/ That means every single HTML, image, etc inside gets safely shuttled with one line of code.

The 301 tells search engines that the move is permanent so they can incorporate updates to their indexed files.

For example, this snippet of Lingo code from my NoJava Shop:

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/nojava/show/code/corr.html

automagically gets sent to its actual location:

http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/nojava/show/code/corr.html

This is bone head simple for any webmaster worth their glazed donuts. If they are unfortunate to not work on Apache, there are very likely other tools for setting up redirects, or symbolic links, or aliases.

But there is no, zero excuse, in this dog's book, for a corportate site, especially one that is in technology, to leaving old URLs hanging dead, swinging in the breeze.

The survey is open, and I have set this one up so the results are publicly viewable:
http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/phpq/stats.php?sid=3.

What was nice was that I could tweak it in midstream based on the early feedbacks that said the font was too small and they did not like all the items being mandatory. I could have in one stroke flipped the formatting by setting a different template too.

The results? Meaningless? Charming? 1/3 read the blog from the web site, and 2/3 read from RSS reader or Bloglines. Only one person knew the dog's real name (no it is not "Biff" or "Alan") but most folks knew my bike ride was about 10 miles.

The best ones were responses to question 6:

  If you were describing CogDogBlog to a colleague, how would you describe it?

Another inventive use of the internet , from the creative mind of MCLI's web wizard? Something else to distract me from writing tomorrow's lecture on digital cameras?

A really well trained dog who can teach you some lessons on learning philosophy and technology!

techie stuff that could be useful for education

interesting must have in your RSS-reader

A frisky sort of weblog, rather sarcastic, lots of typos.

I like that last one, it might be my new tagline ;-)

And someone asked:

If you had the survey tool project to do over again would you make the same decision and why?

Oh yes, it works great, has lots of flexibility, and I am going to be rolling out heaps of online surveys this year, adding likely pre-workshop expectations and post workshop evaluations online for one thing. Our first real use will be a public survey for one of our programs that supports adult learners.

I am in love with the software. Of course, I have only put it mildly through the paces, and need to look deeper at its expoert features.

But this year, the demand was growing for doing more of these, and each iteration of a new type of survey was a big pile of custom changes to our code. It looked like time to buy a package that we could use to deploy web surveys more quickly.

After some research, we purchased phpQuestionnaire from the humbly outfit named Chumpsoft. It pretty much matched our server environment, has a good set of question types, templates, saves data to mySQL as well as exports to other formats, for US$199.

I already created a first survey that will be used by one of our project sites to gather data that will help improve their services, and it took less than an hour, and that was fiddling with templates.

I also just quickly spun a silly survey tonight in about 15 minutes, so if you give it a spin, you can get a flavor for what we can now easily roll out. This one provides a link to the survey results (an option). It also has built in option to restrict repeat access by cookie tracking, by IP tracking, or the most restrictive, requiring an email address so that the system must send a message and get a return click to count a responder. All of those are options too.

So here it is, the Big CogDogBlog Important Survey:
http://zircon.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/phpq/fillsurvey.php?sid=3

Enjoy. Or not.

The HTML is, of course, execrable. The one possible way they could have gotten some approving buzz from tech bloggers was to use extremely clean (X)HTML, but given the apparent total lack of a corporate culture believing that code is poetry, at least when it comes to HTML, there was little hope of that. It might be possible to persuade Microsoft tools to produce valid HTML, but judging by what mostly comes out of them, they must think of HTML as a hot dog factory, where nobody in their right mind would ever look inside.

(my emphasis) Hah!

This rang a little closer to home as one of our colleges announced a preview of their new website proffered by Microsoft Content Management tools. It looks pretty, but under the hood (gack!) and I lost count watching how many things were being loaded, 70, 80, 90.... And the W3 HTML Validator blew a gasket.

I've sat on a fence (ouch) about whether pure validation is truly necessary, but one ought to at least be aiming towards it to be around for the long haul. Almost every time I visit a new site, I view the source, and there is a lot of crufty HTML out there (I have a pile of it myself, gulp).

What occurred to me is that there are lots of jobs in real life where you have two people collaboratively operating one machine or even one set of data on paper, but I can't think of a single pc-based application, outside of games, where two people are working on two computers on a real-time collaborative task. SubEthaEdit, I suppose, but that's a relatively simple case. I'm not talking about having a conversation; I'm thinking about some kind of serious data manipulation. More like a pilot/co-pilot relationship. Gunner and loader, that kind of thing. I'm not saying it is a problem, but it is kinda weird if you think about it.

I wanted to share something I worked on a few clicks back, but sadly, his blog lacks comments (?) so maybe someone who knows him can send this.

During my sabbatical in 2000, I spent two months at Northern Arizona University (in summer, Flagstaff is a heavenly escape from the Phoenix desert) working on some experimental multi-user web applications, using an early version of the Shockwave multi-user server (MUS). Maybe Tom would categorize these as "games", but it was nostalgic to think about them, and rewarding to see that code from 2000 still runs (despite that macromedia no longer even mentions MUS).

Basically, the MUS is a desktop application running on a computer plugged into the net, and is set up to "broker" small messages sent back and forth from remote users using a graphic interface authored in Macromedia Director. This functionality is pretty much totally eclipsed by the server communication layers available to Flash developers, but this was done in the pre-Flash era.

But to get to the good stuff, I created two prototype web applications designed for teaching basic chemistry, and they are environments where more than one person, from different places on the net, can share the same virtual environment.

In the Ideal Gas Law application, the goal is to adjust the temperature, number of gas molecules, and the volume of a chamber to try and achieve a specified pressure (hey, we all remember PV=nRT?). The idea is that in the multiuser environment, if I decide to decrease the volume by moving in the right wall of the chamber, the changes I make are seen in near real time by Tom on his computer. And if he changes the temperature, I see the effect-- because we are two people sharing the same interface:

Not being a server dude, I have no idea to the answer to this question, but I was just wondering what the web server logs indicate fora referrer when a link is generated from a desktop aggregator? (the web server log records every server request, and is able to record the URL a visitor was before they clicked a link to end of on your site).

I believe there is something recorded when a refer comes from a browser bookmark, but what does a click from an RSS aggregator report to the web server? If there is nothing recorded, what would it take to develop a "standard" that could share this tidbit? And then there is an unknown factor of referrers from web-based aggregators such as BlogLines, which would have have the standard web referrer recorded??

it is just a half baked thought that came while I am waiting here for my car to get fixed-- I am not fixated on gathering stats like those, but can see how it would be useful in, not just the business context, to know where your web audiences are coming from.

It's been a contention of mine that the majority of people who access and use web sites are largely invisible, they rarely enter form the "front door", and they use, ignore, disagree, share your content, and you never know they are there. The number of people who leave comments, or contact the webmaster email is likely tiny compared to the total users. It is a strange lesson to realize you are trying to design information for this unknown, silent audience... Analyzing your web server log reveals some surprising information on visitor page views, time spent on the site, what search terms brought them to your site, what their web browser and operating systems are (and the useless details like a majority of your visitors are from a town in Virginia)

If you are serious about your audience and designing content, you ought to be a student of your web server log (not to confused with weblog). There are great, free tools for webmasters to provide this, such as AWstats (we use it) and the venerable Analog (which I think I used back in 1995!).

This was a fun design project as I got to go full bore into using pure XHTML design, two sets of style sheets to mask out those pesky NetScape 4 users/abusees (plus a print style sheet), a one template PHP output template, random background images, use of fancy CSS for a navigation bar that looks like the kludgy JavaScript image swaps, but renders iin source as a good old, accessible friendly, <ul> list....

They did not give enough lead time to set up totally online registration, but we did take some weakly formatted materials, and have the attendees use MS Word protected "Form" documents to submit their registration details.

But the fun came this past 2 weeks in setting up a completely online system for the college representatives to sign their students up for the classes that are offered over 4 days. The first part was getting the class details (name, location, instructor, maximum registration). I had made an Excel spreadsheet with different sheets to match the database tables (especially as the class titles continue to change, student names were dropped, added) so that the conference folks could send me data, I could then import into the mySQL database. The fist tool was generating a schedule preview, with link to the instructor bios (also drawn from the database).

This was a messy pile of data to sort out- nearly 150 different classes, with different maximum numbers (room dependent), participants could select 1,2,3 class preferences for 14 time slots, and having to work around conflicting events such as rehearsals and adjudication (I have no idea what that is, but I had to type it a lot ;-). Oh, and there are these "Master Classes" where each college was allotted so many registration slots, AND, a person could take only one Master Class.

I was told that in years past, attendees had to stand in line at the conference registration to get their class requests, so if this work, it would take away that hassle, and provide the event planners more room to plan for the conference details.

The system has been open just a few days, and it appears that 26/31 colleges have already gotten their participants . registrations in. It is competitive as classes fill, so they were eager to log in and sign up. I cannot let you see, but have collected some screen shots.