CogBlogged Tagged ‘wordpress’

I’m growing more and more and more and more (more?) interested in building out more syndication architectures like we have done in ds106, at a range of scales from te 600 feeds we crunch for ds106 to the 40 or so we did for the Project Community Class down to the 2 I do for my own self syndication. Leaning towards the bigger end, I have been working to set this up for the ETMOOC thing Alec Couros (and about 90 other people it seems) are launching soon. It’s been a great chance to stretch some WordPress chops with FeedWordPress in place for the syndication engine. Below I outline how I created the site that is archiving the #etmooc tweets – http://etmooc.org/tweets

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by t3hWIT Confused? Don’t know where to put a comment on a #ds106 student blog as part of the Magnificent Seven Blog Comment Challenge? I have the link for you. With some rubbing together of magic dust and a dab of elbow grease, I have a new feature for the various “sections” of ds106- these are classes we know of who’s student blogs we are syndicating into ds106; all of these posts that come in carry an extra tag we can use to slice, dice, and make fries out of. After a few variatoions of setting up a random picker in the Assignments Collection, I saw it would be easy to do something for the posts we bring in. The exception here is that we want recent stuff, so these scripts only look for posts published to ds106 n the last [...]

and covering up our questionable practices… It’s been a few days since I fanned the flames of how a big time edu consultant was republishing from other bloggers as their own. Its so easy to sweep your shit crap poop Numero 2 under the rug. It just smells a bit, but most people just walk around and pretend it is not there. Thats old news already. They dismantled their industry news where this occurred and in the best of slick covers, have completely skipped being open about this. I am betting they canned their wordpress developers (?)/ The word I got in a comment was: “We have asked the company that manages our website to remove the (Feed WordPress) syndication technology that was updating the news channel. The feed has been turned off as it pertains to several blog sites due to technological errors in attribution when the plugin was [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by hermitsmoores This is a last little bit of code I wanted to bang out today (for more on this statement, see my next blog post). We have over 3800 examples that people have shared for the ds106 Assignment Bank. The way these get here are that people set up their accounts on ds106.us, and once we get their blog feed URL, as long as they use the proper assignment tags, we are able to syndicate the examples in automagically. IN a few cases, people may just do a single ds106 assignment as part of a class or a workshop (e.g. as Dean Shareski’s students have done), but without getting their work on blogs we can syndicate, these one off pieces of work cannot be part of the collection. Or in some cases they use weird platforms (I am looking [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by psd It’s sweetly ironic that despite the almost consistent reprisal of “RSS being dead” maybe that’s in terms of outward perception. Down at the bowels of the systems of internet flow, and I see plenty of it in highly functional action via my own small corner of it. Since really far back in ? 2002 ? when I first came across this notion of Really Simple Syndication (which to me says much more than “RDF Site Summary”, it remains to me, that most magical glue of the web after the hyperlink. And as Martin Hawksey eloquently summarizes it one can say the aggregation/syndication layer is what may, at not only a technical, but a design/philosophical level, distinguish the (ahem here come scare quotes) “tsunami” of interest (I called it hysteria) of the Ginormously Massive 100K Online (and we can punch the [...]

Last January, Tim Owens did a masterful job of assembling the Daily Create site out of a premium theme (Salutation), a mix of plugins (including Awesome Flickr Gallery, Tubepress, and Gravity Forms), etc– and no custom code. When I arrived at UMW in February, I offered to take over the creation of the challenges. It is a mix of ones submitted by our site users, borrowed ones from the Daily Shoot, b3ta Challenges, the Vancouver Draw Down, and the 30 Day Drawing Challenge, plus about a good 30% we just dreamed up. Creating them turned out to be a bit tedious as there was at least 7 different things to set on the interface. We had to have them, scheduled in advance, each to be published at 10:00 am EST. (1) The title would be present if it was submitted via a form; for one from scratch it is entered/pasted. [...]

FeedWordPress is the magic elixer, the glue that binds ds106 and its satellite sites together- we are currently syndicating in over 500 blogs to the main ds106 site. By the use of extra tags we add to each feed (e.g. one to designate open online participants, one to designate the different groups that use the course like York College and Scott Lockman’s classes in Japan), we are able to not only split out content in the main site, but because of wordpress making feeds off of tags, content can be re-syndicated to other sites, which is how content is funneled to the summer 2012 iteration of ds106 as well as the assignment bank. We are syndicating what we are syndicating! Last week we had a great Skype brainstorm with the developer of the plugin, who is going to take on some suggestions we have for improving a few things, notably [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by freshwater2006 Tonight we unleashed a new piece of the ds106 fleet of sites- the Assignment Remix Generator. This is an idea that was spawned by Tom Woodward way back in December 2010 as a way of instigating remixes of creative work by the playing of a “card” on someone else’s work. Keep in mind, this was a month before the launch of the open version of ds106, and 6 months before the development of the assignment bank. The students would get a variety of cards at the beginning of the course and to use them they’d tag the origin post and link to the person they want to be the recipient of the action. So, maybe I want to take CogDog’s #ds106 aura photography challenge and assign it to someone else to remix as a drawing project. I’d play my [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by .m for matthijs I’m hoping to carve out some time soon to get back to the garage and return to tinkering with WordPress. To that end, I spent some time categorizing new and old posts, so I have a collection now of things blogged about using WordPress at http://cogdogblog.com/wp. Here at CogDogBlog, I’ve had some challenges with what I think is memory issues- lots of 404/not found on admin pages, and worse, strongs of deadly 500 Internal Server errors for visitors. Not good. No, not good. My web server error logs are full of the not very helpful “premature end of script headers” for index.php. You could spend years combing through the google results for this. What follows is not a definitive answer to this situation, just some guesses and results of my attempts to make it stop. To [...]

Woah, it is ending? ds106 is almost over? Sigh. Well, sincr i have blog posts dribbled over the last few months, I thought about organizing it a bit better here in the doghouse- it’s not quite archiving, but it does feel like the suitcase needs help to get closed. cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by demandaj What I talk about below in likely un-reproducible code is what I did to generate http://cogdogblog.com/tag/ds106 Doing this has been part of some other WordPress tinkering around here. The current template here has 2 widgetized sidebars, and I shifted the rightmost one to be the “standard” one that appears on all pages. The left side one, by default, will have blog related things, but I also now use it on a few templates to create more relevant bits. To allow for a new widget, I edited my functions,php template [...]