CogBlogged Tagged ‘blogging’

Let me join the Jim Groom Kum-Ba-Ya I Love WordPress Chorus. In this least year, I’ve rolled out 3 NMC web sites that are published via WordPress, with each one going deeper into the bowels of the templates and just more jazzed how I can bend them to my will, casting CSS, PHP, plugins, MySQL to do my bidding. This is unlike drupal, where after a year I am still trying to figure out just how the heck it works and manages information. Its still a grey murky, opaque blue gumdrop box. I am trying to summon the drupal love, and it aint happening. But WordPress, you make me sing. In this blog post that portends to be a monster one of length, I am going to dissect a new site I worked in gory technical detail. On each of these sites, I have started with a standard template and [...]

This is the third year I am doing my roughly annual tradition of taking a week with the blog posting on this site put on “mute” (or muzzle) as I will take all my writing to blog via the comment space of other sites. This is the notion of “comment blogging” I found long ago, and something I hope helps to underscore the power and benefit of putting your energy into participating in the blogs of others, of making it an active social process. If all we did was post on our own, we’d just all be the screaming fanatics on the corner. So I first did this in 2006 and it served, among many things, to be a good spring board for going to my first Norther Voice Conference in ’06 Last year in February I hoisted my week of blog abstinence and I always feel energized at the [...]

I’m woefully, no utterly, no massively badly behind on any sense of conference blogging at EDUCAUSE ELI Conference, but am eager for some plan time tomorrow to support back posting from the plane

A long, long, long time ago (maybe not in a galaxy far, far away, it is about 90 miles from where I sit), maybe 2003, 2004, while in my role at Maricopa, I was doing workshops and trying to promote the potential of blogging (how novel, eh?). I created an online set of resources I called “BlogShop” …. = Blog + Workshop. It was hosted in MovableType on a server I ran at Maricopa at jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/blogshop : And that server has been 404 for over 2 years since I left my job there- praise the powers that be.. or rather Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive’s WayBack machine, I can access versions of all the content from Apr 2004-June 2006 or say enter the content (and link around) from one of the snapshots. I am still very far from the point of this post, but I always need to underscore, [...]

I am writing to you from a hill top view of Marion Bay in Tasmania Australia (no dingo jokes shall be made)… this is a few days into my 3 week Circuit Tour of Australia and my blogging for this time will be completely through http://cogdogroo.wordpress.com — for the duration, I am using my own code (admittedly took me more time than I would have liked to install it on my own server, I am code rusty there) to embed the RSS feed from that blog just to the CogDogBlog home page. Presentations, audio, pictures, all the usual debris shall be blogged there and most of the materials are on the buddy wiki at http:/cogdogroo.wikspaces.com/ (am I branded or what?). (Will I stop asking questions in parentheses?) (no). There are many things I shall be slacking on – I have about 5 short recorded conversations with colleagues Gardner Campbell, George [...]

Is anywhere in the world is it August 31? I have come up for air a day later.. Let’s see if I can come up with my five unusual, unheralded blogs. First is this tiny one originating from Monkton… just kidding. The Generator Blog collects all those sites that allow you to generate an image or something customized to your own “brand”, like putting your name on a rocket, Computer Keyboard Generator, or cereal box generator. Fun. Sue Waters is doing some awesome blogging (and twittering, and mobile tech stuff) from Western Australia. She’s being outspoken, and sharing a lot about her use of new technologies with her aquaculture students. Hope we get to meet when I am in Perth! Also on the Australian front, here’s a pitch for Al Upton, doing some nifty web 2.0 stuff with his year 3 students in Adelaide, where recently they have been telling [...]

I had completely forgotten that I’ve had the bits installed on this blog to capture data in Google Analytics, which for the paranoid means your browsing habits are feeding the big G machine (not the purpose of today’s meanderings). In fact, I doubt I had looked at the reports at all, but they do contain an incredible amount of data, if that is your quantitative type of fun (I’d rather roll in the mud, myself). Fortunately, they have a lot of visuals ;-) So for the past month, my readership seems to be going out of phase with the stock market: So from June 21 to July 21, 2007, some 2790 people actually ventured here, or as my use of division suggests, about 104 per day. Wow, who are you? Analytics provides all kinds of breakdowns, by country (my readers are from 85 countries, mostly US, Canada, U.K. Australia, Germany, [...]

At one time I bemoaned a future of having multiple blogs to spread my self around. That was so 1.0. I have two personal ones (one just for running or complaining about it), three ones at NMC for various projects, plus our main drupal site which has blog like writing duties, plus others I am losing track of… But its a problem of my own making. And now a new one. I am multiple twittering. Is the “great sucking sounds” any remnant of time? like that I ought to be eating lunch right now or trying to clean the green from my swimming pool or …? So I have my own twittering at http://twitter.com/cogdog. For the 2007 NMC Summer Conference, I got jazzed to create a NMC specific twitter space, to play with displays like TwitterCamp, to aggregate stuff in places like Tumblr and pageflakes. But I see some more [...]

flickr creative commons photo Raising the Flag by selyfriday This has nothing to do with McDonalds, but I loved the flickr image so much, I’m making a metaphorical stretch. No, this is a clarion call to Remember the Blog! As we get more distributed in where our e-attention goes, be it various social networks, virtual worlds, and more recently twitter, I’m wondering, as are others, about a decline in blogging. Steve Rubel pondered, posed the question (on twitter). Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Will people spend less time writing or reading blogs and more time Twittering? I posed this question on Twitter and got a resounding no. I am not so sure. The Guardian reported a summary of the Gartner report suggesting blogging is on the decline New research by Gartner, the US technology analyst, suggests the number of new blogs peaked in October and that an estimated 200m [...]

Leigh is…. but I am not… blocked in China. The Great Firewall of China is a site to test URLs if they are ones being censored by the Chinese government. I guess I am not being subversive enough. [The Aim] of this website is to be a watchdog and keep track of which and how many or how many times sites are censored. Help to keep the censorship transparent. Each blocked website will automatically be added to the great firewall on the homepage.