But what does it do?

It adds a function so that every hyperlink in a page can be a graphic preview to its destination. So when you mouse rollover a link, you can see, before you click, a small window version of that site, and it may convince you whether or not it is worth really following through with that click.

As a test, I “snapped” CogDogBlog today, so a previous post has a link to http://www.openaugment.org/. In the old web, you’d have to make some guesses based on the hyperlink’s text itself, the context in other content, and perhaps some guesses by seeing the URL in the browser status bar, to decided IF you really want to go there.

With snap, you also get a visual preview:

I’m playing with it to see if its worth keeping around and/or using elsewhere.

Obscure footnote: I vaguely remember that the snap.com URL was some front end for NMC — of which I found some relict proof in the Internet Archive. Did NBC drop the snap.com domain?

A linktribution to Quentin at Teaching Hacks.com for turning me on to this.

Beyond the usual steps of backing up directory files and databases, the process outlined is easy– I needed to log in as admin to the two Drupal 4.7 sites I have; then empty the drupal code directories, upload the new code, and then add back in my site settings. Then I had to run the update script for each. The first one went smooth, as it should, since all I had was a stock template waiting for the new code.

But when I went to update the second one, all kinds of MySQL errors were vomited out to my screen.

And then I realized, I had done something bone-headed… when I re-uploaded by two sites folders, I took them from my laptop, where I run sites under a local URL like www.nmc.loc, but I had forgotten to change the site folder names when uploading! The first site worked, since I had its database connections in my default settings file. But of course, the other site borked because it was not finding the right configuration files.

So I took a chance and played a little web server shell game.

(1) rename my new drupal directory to drupal5 (after fixing the 2 site subfolders to correct names)
(2) re-upload my old drupal content (yea, backups!) to a drupal directory
(3) log in as admin user to the site.
(4) Shell swapped directory names- rename drupal –> drupal-old and then renamed drupal5 –> drupal.
(5) Ran the update.
(6) Dump drupal-old directory

It worked! Whew!

Now I have to test the modules out to see if they work… Sorry, nothing here yet worth showing.

In my previous work at Maricopa, e.g. for our digital storytelling collection, I had settled on providing video as streaming Quicktime, .mov, (we had an X-serve server running QuickTime Streaming) and streaming Windows Media, /wmv, (one of our colleges provided us some streaming space on their Helix server). Late in the game, we added as an addition, iPod video versions (.m4v) as a podcast. Long, long ago I was also encoding video as Real Video, but that n was dropped with nary a complaint.

SO now on my new Second Life project for NMC and looking at our other NMC video content, i am trying to sort out the best strategy, finding it as clear as Mississippi mud. Most people have a preference based upon what they currently are using. I am in that camp, and would just as soon use QuickTime, since it does produce high quality video that runs on both platforms. Yes, Windows Media can play on Macs, though I still stumble across web pages with embedded WMVs that cry for a plugin that does not exist on a Mac. Others suggest MPEG-1 as the most widely available, or MPEG-4 (.mp4) as the future. Or is it really time to go down the Flash road, as most of the major web video sites play back content?

And my experiments with the QuickTime export to iPod formats result in movie files that are triple the size of my .mov. Initially, I was trying to set up my site so QuickTime and maybe WMVs were available as download links, while the m4v would be the file referenced in the podcast feed. But since iTunes and iPods can deal with .mov and .mp4, I am wondering why I would bother creating the .m4v files? Especially when they end up fatter and no better in quality.

When I was at Maricopa, I had a copy of(what is now) Autodesk Cleaner, a nifty package in its day for batch converting video across many formats. The bad news is a new copy will set you back $599, quite a chunk of change. For work that needed doing immediately, I have tried a copy of Popwire WMV-9 Component, which adds WMV playback and export capability to any app that uses QuickTime, so I have been able to convert some .dv and .mov video to .wmv (but now wondering am I hurting anyone’s playback by using WMV-9). It seems to work well, and works as a Universal app on my MacBookPro. And Popwire cost my only $49, quite a savings. With a bit of Automator effort, I can have it batch processing files. Sweet.

From things I read elsewhere, I am hearing that Popwire is not as versatile as Flip4Mac, which is still not ready for prime time on the Intel Macs. I’m ready to take a peak when it is out.

I am far from a video expert, and the nuances of co-decs, frame rates, and other obscure settings are beyond me now. I am curious as to what some more knowledgeable folks out there have to say. Is Flash video the best direction?

So many acronyms, so little time.

But noted by someone in an email who was asking about sorting, I now see by looking at the raw XML, that the items are dated not by the event date, but when the entry was last updated… and that sort of sorting is pretty useless for using RSS unless you just happen to edit your calendar in reverse chronological order. That is just squirrelly weird… the event dates are lumped into summary and item descriptions, which throws up all kinds of new coding challenges to parse and sort. I cannot find too much use for this kind of calendar feeding.

So in experiment mode, I am taking a quick look at:

• RSS Calendar – is pretty straight forward and does provide feeds in event date order. You can categorize events to create different feeds. Entry is old school web, form based, no slick Ajax editing. Another downside, no import of calendar events by iCal or other forms. it looks like individual events can be iCal exported.
• 30Boxes was recommended by Todd – it was a slicker editor (one field quick adds), more customization on display, better syndication options and export. It looks like it has the ability to import other content via RSS.

The thing lacking from both is they are geared towards individual calendar editor/creators; and the piece I did like about Google Calendar is I could give event addition rights to others. Of course, I could share a generic login to both services above, and I might end up doing so.

But bottom line- Google Calendar is neat, but the weirdness in the RSS feed format may rule it out for me, and as of yet, I have found no way I could link a calendar view Oops just found a method in the Calendar Publishing Guide.

It looks like to get the sort order correct, one might need to use some PHP and MagpieRSS to do some advanced parsing, which might take away my Ajax approach (which is hardly critical).

But I’ve known in the back of my mind, it does not need to be so, as shown by the feeds displayed at Feedburner, e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogbloglab– that is the URL you can use anywhere RSS is accepted, but viewed in the browser, well it looks like a nice pretty web page. Peek at the source, and you are back in code-ville. Howzit done?

Through the magic of XSLT, a means to transform XML with stylesheets into something easier on the eyes, By no means do I really understand it, and the more I looked, the more complex it grew– it is almost a logical language in itself, that is.can be used to transform data into human content.

Anyhow, I bruteforced my way through my first real example. For next week’s NMC Summer Conference, I wanted to set up a site to host some podcasts, getting hopefully digitized files from the main sessions, and doing some conference participant on the street interviews, etc. To make it simple, I am relying on some code and concepts I used before to generate iTunes Ready RSS from data I can manage in an Excel Spreadsheet, and run through a PHp script to update the XML file.

This is no different from any other RSS file, except it references in the second line an XML stylesheet:

<?xml-stylesheet title="XSL_formatting" type="text/xsl" href="podcast.xsl"?>

which pretty much contains the basic web structure of the other conference web pages, except it is littered with a few more xls statements and stuff to template-ize the content in the XML file. Again, this was brute forcing it, just keeping at it until Firefox stopped reporting errors. XML is a lot less forgiving than HTML, all tags need closers, you have to watch the &’s, etc. And then there was something just major goofy with Internet Explorer choking on some hidden character (finally tracked down with some help from BBEdit).

Anyhow, this URL is really just XML.RSS, but with a style sheet duded up to match the other conference pages (yes, I know al about the issues of the web design here, the tiny fonts, etc, that is all going into the factory over the summer for an overhaul):
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/podcast.xml

There is only one item there now for testing purposes, it will be filled in next Wednesday as the conference unfolds. I might add the little MP3 flash players. I did have to make some fun generating a testable MP3, laying down some tracks in Garageband….
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/media/alan-welcome.mp3

Yummy, tasty, XML. Please pass the whipped cream.

And it falls into my previously proven success at following the paths of others. I am not quite as ready as D’Arcy is to jump his blog from WordPress to Drupal (but my hat is off to him for doing so, and quickly). WordPress does all need for the blogging here.

But the ideas I have for the NMC site call for much more than just blog tools and wrangling WordPress to other forms, and Drupal sure seems like a natural fit (I’ve spent a lot of time looking at features of other Drupaly sites).

So for a first go around, I have managed to download it and get it running locally on my MacBookPro so I can safely experiment and do basic development before even hoisting on a server.

But wow- there is a lot to take in. Doing a basic Drupal is easy, but then the tinkering comes in- themes, blocks, snippets, nodes…. powerful platforms have a lot beneath them, and I am already feeling a bit pushed back knowing how much I need to ramp up, and quickly. It’s more of the same, going way back in making a switch from HyperCard to Director, in going form perl to PHP, in learning everything inside and out about MovableType, and later dumping that knowledge to begin all over with WordPress…. well the change never stops, so in I go, head first dive…

And back of of my mind, taking a cue from D’Arcy’s notion that Drupal could manage almost any content repository,if rather than someday maybe really ever getting around to publishing the Maricopa Learning eXchange as an open source software, if it perhaps could just be recast as a Drupal app? Not that I have any time to do it now, but once I get some Drupal-ese under my belt, maybe.

In the early days, these were hand spun HTML, lots of table tags, and pretty much static information. Around 200, when I picked up PHP, I came up with a series of scripts I could more or less copy/paste to do online event registration using static text files. These worked well for capturing registration, sending emails to participants, providing exports to our staff’s FileMaker databases, but there was continual minor changes on every iteration. Moreover, by being essentially separate little database, we had no way to do overall stats, and worse, for each event, a participant would keep having to re-enter their name, college, phone, department, etc.

So in August of this year, I rolled out a database managed system where once a person registers for one of our events, the next time, they just enter their email (we fetch their contact info from the database), and registration is just a once click deal. Plus they get email confirmations, with links they can use to self cancel their registration.

Still, the event details, agendas, sometimes extra resources, mean that beyond registration, every different web site had some to a huge amount of customization. For my own vanity sake, and maybe for an extra boost of Google points, I have listed the big pile below.

Among my personal favorites, though, are:

• American College Dance Festival Association’s Southwest Regional Festival 2004 where I really got to do a complete CSS, and a whole raft of backe end database, including forms for participants to select from an array of classes held during the conference
• Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival more or less a copy of above, with other sorts of database driven calendar features
• Ocotillo Retreat 2005 — was our most well attended of the events (was it really the iPod door prize?), we had 2 great speakers, the presentations, asssignments of demos, and the agenda where all database driven.
• Ocotillo Learning Spaces Day 2005 — toyed with del.icio.us powered sidebars and resources, but the big one was creating our own mini version of “flickr” (not really) so our colleges could upload, share, and comment on some 260 photos.
• Bringing Digital Storytelling to the Classroom LearnShop — mainly because I am in awe of the workshop my colleagues pull off and the powerful stories our participants create, plus we’ve been posting examples available for viewing by streaming video or iPod download/podcast formats.
• Southwest Regional Learning Communities Conference 2002 — an opportunity to break some new designs; there was something built for submissions but I cannot recall what it was
• Technology by the (Discipline) Slice Dialogue Day (2002) — I pushed the idea of creating a session where we could share technology by discipline area; we even took the metaphor far enough the next year that lunch was by the slide too (pizza). Built some crude PHP forms for posting/sharing examples.

But here is the big bad list that gave me an acute case of Eventicitis:

9 Faculty Convocations Convocations

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/fsd/afc.html

56 Dialogue Days

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/dd/

25 misc events

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/acespr98
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/afc99
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/caputi05
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/converse05
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/converse05fall
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/crla
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/diversity05
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/dsaaac04
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/dsaaac05
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/dsaaac05fall
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/dsaaac06
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/heart05
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/iie05
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/iee05b
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/lcc02
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/onebook
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/ssc
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/stronge0404
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/sustain06
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/sustain06b
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/tepc0202
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/tepc0301
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/tltr
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/vcn

14 Fine Arts Events

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/kcactf
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/acdf04
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/fa5
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/fa7
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/fa8
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/fa9
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/fa10
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/fa11
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/fall04
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/jazz01
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/music02
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/music03
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/musico4
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/promise05
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/promise06
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/arts/events/stratcon02

10 Ocotillo retreats

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/retreats.html

7 Ocotillo technology Visioning Forums

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/tv/

39 Ocotillo Online Learning Group meetings

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/olg/notes.php

28 Ocotillo Action Group Events

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/rsvp/

4 Other Large Ocotillo Events

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/orient04
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/tnt05
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/spaces05
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/summit06

4 Adjunct Faculty Professional Groth Events

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/afpg/conf2003
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/afpg/conf2005
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/afpg/conf2006
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/afpg/service05

4 Faculty Interns In Progress Showcases (each with custom slide show)

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/fipp/showcase02/
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/fipp/showcase03/
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/fipp/showcase04/
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/fipp/showcase05/

4 Honors Institutes

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/honors/institute02/
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/honors/institute03/
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/honors/institute04/
• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/honors/institute06/

48 Honors Lecture Forum events

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/honors/forum.php

8 MCLI LearnShops (offered multiple times)

• http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/learnshops/

Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style is on many a designer’s bookshelf and is considered to be a classic in the field…

In order to allay some of the myths surrounding typography on the web, I have structured this website to step through Bringhurst’s working principles, explaining how to accomplish each using techniques available in HTML and CSS. The future is considered with coverage of CSS3, and practicality is ever present with workarounds, alternatives and compromises for less able browsers.

It’s a work under progress, and as a nice touch, the author is providing an RSS feed for updates.

But it has an air or elegance, and a look of “this is not your typical web page”.

Now I am pretty far from a typographer (and today Janet in our office informed me in a page layout just what a “violator” is), but I find the explanations are really worthwhile, making the bridge when necessary from print to web design principles. You do need some modicum to substantial amount of CSS knowledge.

The one thing I am completely mystified is the use of Flash to create the front cover and the logo on every page. It does no animation or interactivity, and I can only guess the author wanted to protect the look, as it ought to be easy enough to render what is there in CSS.

Tip of the blog hat to elarningpost.

First up, you as the person who created a web site for yourself, for your organization, are the best at knowing what your site is about, its purpose. Everybody else is going to be guessing at first glance. I have seen more than a few web sites, where my Blink level experience does not give me a clue as to what a site is.

But even worse, when I am sharing a web site with others, and especially when I am tagging and adding sites to my del.icio.us collection, if I cannot locate a 1-2 sentence explanation of the site, it makes it pain down in the nether regions to do my social bookmarking. I am looking for chunk of mouse selectable text I can highlight (since del.icio.us can use that for a description) or can copy paste– I should not have to find it on another page, or be forced to type it since it is trapped in flash or an image.

And if I have to dig several layers deep to find out what a site is, my interest level drops even farther.

Take a Blink second look at the Open Source Media site — I found it in my feeds this morning. The descriptive title tag is “OSM”. That tells me a lot. It looks kind of blog like, and there are bright red ads up the stripe. I am already 30 seconds in and I lack a clue.

So I follow the About OSM link. Do I get the information.. no, it is another menu. I have to dig even deeper:

So what’s your guess? Which one of the coconut shell links reveals something that tells me what the site is about? Taking the first link plunge, From the Founders, I have to wade through more text just to find what this site is about. It’s not until the 6th paragraph down do I even get close:

OSM’s mission is to expand the influence of weblogs by finding and promoting the best of them, providing bloggers with a forum to meet and share resources, and the chance to join a for-profit network that will give them additional leverage to pursue knowledge wherever they may find it. From academics, professionals and decorated experts, to ordinary citizens sitting around the house opining in their pajamas, our community of bloggers are among the most widely read and influential citizen journalists out there, and our roster will be expanding daily. We also plan to provide a bridge between old media and new, bringing bloggers and mainstream journalists—more and more of whom have started to blog—together in a debate-friendly forum.

And even reading that, I have little sense what is here, this being something that could have been spawned from a Buzzword Statement Generator

That is way too much digging to give me a human readable statement of what a site is about. If I have to work that hard to find something that simple, how willing am I to wade through for something less defined?

Gripe number 2 is also related to my bookmarking habits- sites that do not put unique text descriptions for different web pages in the <title>...</title> parts of their pages. Maybe some web site consultant told them to brand every page with their organization name, or maybe they have not figured out how to set up the correct strings in their blog templates, but if I bookmark 8 different pages from the Wooly Mammoth Society, Inc site in my browser or in my social bookmark tool — which automatically extracts a page title as an identifier– how will I tell them apart if they are all labeled as “Wooly Mammoth Society, Inc”? How can I use my History or Back button on my browser to jump back from a set of viewed web pages on my site if they all show up with the same name?

Just as a few examples I have been collecting, all of these sites, some of them I visit regularly, are sadly set up to have the same eaxct string of text on every web page of their site. This makes me manually have to type in a title every time I bookmark, and those seismic tremors are me cussing at the manual effort required:

Bloggsavvy
http://blogsavvy.net/are-global-communities-
more-local-than-we-might-expect

e-Literate
http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/
im_giving_a_webinar_on_e_learning_usability/

Poynter Online
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=92267

Xplanazine
http://www.xplanazine.com/archives/2005/11/its_the_legs_th.php

Walter Mossberg
http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20050505.html

Now this may seem like petty griping to you, but for any blog generated site, it is bone simple to set templates up so every individual page posting has its blog entry title as the web page title. If you need branding, stick it in some parenthesis.

So here are Alan’s ways to make the web a tinier bit better:

(1) Make sure your home page has a selectable text, human language sentence that says what the site is about. This is a very Jakobian wise tactic. It can then link to a more detailed explanation. But for your visitors sake, finding this information should not be a treasure hunt through arcane menus. It’s bad enough when we have to deal with menu trees on the telephone, do not do that on your web site.

(2) Make sure every web page has a distinct title in its <title>...</title> tags (unless your is a one page web site with no other internal links). It is an identifier for each page, maybe even metadata if you will. There are better ways to brand your content that mis-identifying content.

There, I feel better. Got it out of my system.

In talking recently about our web sites, I realized in the last year, my development or addition of new project or event web sites is driven my a goal of creating fewer, not more web pages. This is largely achieved via some solid lessons and methods re-used in PHP, where an entire web site can have 1 template, an external library of functions and code bits, and sub directories of content files. I do some with database, but quite a bit is done with just arrays of data, or content plucked from text files.

This is one of the things weblogs quietly achieve for us, managing display via templates, keeping content and formatting apart, allowing massive visual design changes by swapping themes. It gets folks focusing on the conten they are creating, not the FONT tags, the color codes, or the image alignments.

For example, I never build navigation links in my sites. I have a single function, that reads an array of possible link URLs and targets, and builds the nav links on the fly, and it knows to mark the page in view in a different manner. This flexibility is key, as somewhere down the line, a program manager will wander in the office and say, “Can we add a new section to the web site on policies?” or “Can we move the link for the profiles further up the page?”.

If navigation links are hand coded across many pages, you face a lot of hand editing, or some clever search and replace. With my approach, I just need to re-order an array, or add a new array item, and I am done.

I have one master PHP include file that does the footers in hundreds of PHP pages, automatically entering the page name, the modification date, the correct URL.

I recently needed to make some updates and add new content to one of our program sites that’s been around since 1999. It was a collection of perhaps 70-80 static HTML files, not all the navigation links were the same on all pages, it was an ugly set of nested table content.. With PHP, I was able to get our Maricopa Institute for Learning site down to 6 PHP template pages, all with consistent design, move the main design out of tables into pure CSS, and toss in some more stylistic formats.

Yes, my new goal is to create fewer web pages.