CogBlogged under ‘Wordpress’

I was not happy with the way my site was working out to present the new collection of True Stories of Open Sharing. I found my categories were forcing me into artificial classification. And the nifty gizmo I had used previously, CoolIris, for the “wall of media”, works, but is annoyingly tedious to update (manually editing of a Media RSS file). I also thought I could embed videos directly from YouTube, but no. The answer? Of course, a new WordPress site – http://stories.cogdogblog.com/ I was hoping for a theme that was kind of like a video carousel, where I could load stuff in a lightbox overlay off the front page, maybe from a post excerpt. Most themes I found were ones that had nice front ends, but pointed to videos on a post. And heck, I already had one working well for my photo gallery with customizations done to randomize [...]

Ir’s been fun to do some redesign and alignment of the ds106 web sites. I’ve long had an interest in trying to make the ds106 Assignments site into more of a template that could be used to create similar sites, and that just got a little bit closer to possibility. The entire 106 fleet is a WordPress multisite, the main site and the Daily Create site both use the Parallelus Salutation theme, so they were easier to coordinate; the one change was using incorporating the stressed 106 logo as part of the TDC. They both use menus at the top, and I’ve set up the rightmost ones to be “ds106″ navigation ones.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by epc In my last post, I quickly overviewed the wordpress customizations I did to set up the ETMOOC Blog Hub. Using the Feedwordpress plugin for a few feeds is easy to do, and it does a rather slick job of finding feeds from a blog URL. The messy part is dealing with a lot of blog feeds. Getting this part right is more than just tossing URLs into a magic box, you have to have a good grasp of how RSS feeds work in different blogs. It’s messy. Because of those pesky humans. Over at ds106 we have a rather elegant blog registration system that Martha Burtis designed, that actually does a web registration and automatically enters someone’s new blog into Feedwordpress. The thing is there is a bit of variability to deal with when allowing people to bring [...]

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by agiledogs I’m really getting the hang of setting up these FeedWordPress powered syndication sites- I wrote a few days ago about using this approach to create a twitter archive site for the ETMOOC site. At the same time, and more over the last few days, I have been tweaking the edges and putting into motion what should be a core of the site, the aggregation site for participants in the MOOC which starts next week. Alec Couros has that draw power! I heard well over 1000 people signed up; the ETMOOC Google+ Community is brimming with intros of educators from all levels and corners of the world. As a little bit of architecture, the main ETMOOC site (http://etmooc.org/) is running WordPress multisite, using URLs for subsites, and I have rolled out the two extra sites, the Twitter Archive (http://etmooc.org/tweets/) and the [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk The “syndication bus” is the Groomian term for the use of RSS aggregation technology that allows a class/community to run as both a hub and a decentralized network of blogs- individuals publish in their own space. The class or central site exists to subscribe to RSS feeds from those blogs to republish them in aggregate form. This is carried out at big scales in ds106 using WordPress and the Feedwordpress plugin. I’m working with Alec Couros to put FeedWordpress into play as both a blog hub and a twitter archiver for his ETMOOC which starts next week. Conceptually, what we have done with WordPress is the same that is done for many of the Connectivist MOOCs powered by Stephen Downse’s gRSSHopper. But it comes into play at smaller scales as well -many classes on UMW Blogs are run [...]

UPDATE June 19, 2013 Since twitter has killed their version 1 API, there is no longer a public RSS feed provided for twitter activity. Expect new solutions to emerge, one that is usable now is this method from labnol to convert the new JSON feeds to RSS using a Google Script. This method works in FeedWordpress. 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 [...]

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk We are big on hubs here at the hub of CogDogBlog. In fact, well, let’s say I am writing something profound about networks and syndication, mainly because I am setting up and testing some blog syndication for Alec Couros’s ETMOOC due to blast off in mid January. Like the work ds106, I am implementing FeedWordPress on the ETMOOC site. This will be running as its own blog on the multisite install, along with another separate one intended solely to archive tweets.

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by The Rocketeer This may be a niche case but I am just making note for myself. If you ever feel the urge to change the Permalinks setting on your WordPress site, keep in mind you will break any old external links that point to it.. meaning if for years you have publish posts as: http://www.myradbutlongwindedblog.org/2008/02/14//told-siemens-about-a-thing-called-moocs Changing to the more compact form enabled in recent updates, you can get away with a change that will make the sam post link: http://www.myradbutlongwindedblog.org/told-siemens-about-a-thing-called-moocs Meaning we can clean up a few characters by removing the date/time cruft in the URL. This is fine for our blog, but anyone who has ever linked to that old post will now get some friendly 404 Not Found screen. There is a fix, and I recently helped Giulia fix this on her blog. Some of her old [...]

I got a chance to spread the ds106 mojo at Wordcamp Vancouver today, with my session on Building an Open Course/Community with WordPress, Syndication, and Duct Tape: ds106 is an open course in Digital Storytelling that leverages platforms of open source tools, syndication, and social media in a way that makes it more community than course. At ds106.us is a wordpress powered hub that aggregates and recombines input from 500+ external blogs plus a user contributed assignment bank, daily creative challenges, even a radio station. Built by a team of educator tinkerers, not coders, ds106 is as a model of a community network that is not limited to just courses. This was on the heels of a cross-Canada flight with a 1:30am arrival to our quarters in Vancouver, a little bit more late bight slide fiddling of slides, a trailing cold, and lot of coffee. Hence, GNA’s description feels apt: [...]

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 [...]