CogBlogged Tagged ‘web good dog’

If I was tweeting this, I might make up a silly hash tag like #CoolNewTechnologyIJustFoundThatsBeenOutForEons I use Gmail extensively, got my CogDogness, as well as over the last few weeks, I have ditched the desktop email client and using the Gmail version of our NMC Google Apps email. By finding my oldest Gmail message, I’ve been using it since July 2005 (and have amassed pile that is 3% of the capacity)– yet a lesson of the web tech crazy pace is that there is always something new to learn. You never get to the end. Since I’ve been Gmailing so long I have pretty much ignored the ticker tape of “web clips” or news/ad-like things that sit atop the inbox. Until today. I noticed a link to “edit” the web clips, which is a tab inside the settings, and likely has been there a long time (learn more about Gmail [...]

Lots of new iPhone/iPod apps for accessing Flickr. Using now Exposure from connected flow (same folks that make iPhoto/aperature export plugin). Blogging from iPod for the fun of it!

Again I am embarrassingly late to embrace a trend. Moo cards have been around like since Web 1.6 – those slick half sized business cards that feature a different image on each card, and quite often images personally picked from flickr. Thanks to a friend who slipped me a promo code to get a discount on my first order, I tipped the cow… er scale, and ordered my first set of cards: The Moo tools are as easy as dipping Oreos- you give your flick credentials and you can then start selecting images from your photos, from your tags, sets, or just poking around. I rummaged around my hundreds of my photos flowers and dogs. You don’t have to select 100 pictures to make 100 cards (if you use less you get repeats). You can customize the info that appears on the back, including your flickr icon (yay) and either [...]

How about yet one more example of neat things that happen when you share your stuff? This is a photo I posted a month ago on flickr; it is a wooden drafting table my Dad had used back in the 1950s and after years of storage in an attic, I decided to re stain it: Nothing special about the photo (except it had the word “drafting table” in it), just one of several thousand sitting in my bin. I keep an RSS feed for my flickr comments so I know when someone writes something (so I can respond, or just so my ego can get a small stroke), and a day ago came this cryptic comment from a joe:allam: Expect your views of this picture to go up drastically in the next few days. Sure enough, when I went to check, it was up to 82, far above the normal [...]

You dont have to blog (or twitter) every 10 minutes… as long as when you do its meaningful. Greg Ritter posts maybe once or twice a month, and there was a time when the light at Ten Reasons Why was dark for like a year, but he shares some fabulous gems. Earlier this month he shared the link to the 50 Best Commercial Parodies which fed my nostalga as a teen growing up on SNL (in its first year, it was not even broadcast on Baltimore NBC’s station and I remember staying with the fuzzy signal from channel 4 in D.C.). And today, he shared what I think is one of the most brilliant creative ideas in a while; maybe it is a negative mashup? Check our garfield minus garfield in which the cat has been erased from the strips, revealing a disturbing personality of Jon: Who would have guessed [...]

A few weeks ago I came across a nifty new web embedded quiz tool on Steve Dembo’s site – his edublogger quiz was rather thorough, and is worth seeing how well you know your fellow bloggers. Steve made this quiz with MyStudiyo which who knows, may become the YouTube for multiple choice quizzes? It offers you templates and easy tools to build a quiz, and your questions and feedbacks can include images and video media. I think there is also a feature where people can contribute more questions to your quiz (not that I ever had a test where I did not get enough questions!) which may have some interesting applications- a quiziki? They are running a contest this month where if you create a quiz and embed it in your blog, you could win a top prize of one of those sexy little ASUS EEE computers as top prize [...]

This week I tried the free ServerMojo service which provides reports of uptime for your web servers (or databases) or pings you when they are down. The cool thing is you can get alerts the old fashioned grandma way (email) or as direct messages via twitter (which can then be pushed your phone). So ServerMojo periodically pings your servers and reports and whether the ping comes back. I had 2 twitter DMs today noting a 3 hours when CogDogBlog went belly up, one message when it went down and another when it returned: Maybe I am better off not knowing? Oh well. I have two servers set- one is CogDogBlog and the other is the NMC web site – I plan to do another for the NMC MySQL service because it did get overloaded twice in the last few months. You also get some basic uptime charts: So far its [...]

Visual Facilitation art by Nancy White Such a high was the 2008 Northern Voice Conference and how quickly it seems gone. By far, this surpasses by experience her two years ago, my first Moose ride. Its as much for the gathering of creative people that seem to be everywhere in Vancouver, the low overhead personal way a conference is organized (as opposed to the big conferences that leave one cold), but mainly for the camraderie of being with many of my favorite colleagues, so a shoutout to Brian Lamb (tireless organizer and generous party host) and of course Keira (letting us rampage their house); D’Arcy Norman (sheer genius with code and camera); Scott Leslie (amazing array of knowledge of tech, movies, literature, music); Jim Groom (unbridled energy for everything, and a damn fine blues singer); Chris Lott (tireless driver and the most amazing faciliator, and another with a range of [...]

Even with spam fighting plugins, on a daily basis, I am spending time I’d rather be doing sometime constructive, and deleting, moderating, click through the relentless barrage of blog comment spam. I am feeling like the dutch boy and I am getting weary of trying to hold back the dam. The killer was one that came in on an NMC site purporting to be from a “blog” with a url like education DOT blogslog DOT info that the only “education” seemed to be strange studies of less than main line video clips: I really dont think blacklists do much, but if you bother to hope otherise, ban this IP, source of this crap spewing site 74.86.186.66 Over the last three weeks, all of my blogs have been getting spam, from random or at least non repeating (spoofed?) IPs that all look like: <strong>How to Choose the Right Home Builder…</strong> How [...]

Yesterday I wrote of the power of using twitter as a “CallOut” to get help or participation or just say, “Hey, we’re hanging out over at this cool web place.” And late last night, another example twittered my way- getting a tweet from both Sue Waters and Al Upton. Al does these fantastic web blogging projects with 3rd grade (or properly Year 3) students at Glenelg School in Adelaid, Australia. For his second year of his miniLegends project (those would be his students, see what they did in 2007), Al is asking for edubloggers to become miniLegend Mentors for this year’s students more or less picking a young blogger and agreeing to reglular comment on their blog. If you’re an educational blogger of any kind (or visitor) and would like to ‘mentor a mini’ then please leave a comment on THIS page saying who you would like to be connected [...]