But then again, no one else remembered… does that make it right?
I had a good enough clue this week when Tom Woodward tweeted:
That ancient tweet? Well something pivotal for me happened October 28, 2014:
Five years later, I am playing with the hated acronym. If you want the scoop, see the quasi-official origin story.
The best thing about SPLOTs, is like that the acronym not firmly defined (it can be anything) nor does anyone even claim a definition of what they are.
Just this week, I broke through a needed feature for one of the first and maybe well-used SPLOTs- TRU Writer. I’ve yet to blog it, but it’s now way simpler (no special accounts need created), but I was able to create a means while editing to upload images and insert them in the middle of writing (this took some bends and turns of modifying the tiny-mce editor and getting an ajax uploader to work– HEY WAIT A MINUTE THIS IS ANOTHER POST).
This post is just to celebrate that SPLOTs are more than five years old. They are all still completely free, and the none of them require any add on plugins that cost anything. But more than that, they are simply WordPress themes anyone with a self-hosted domain can install, and use for all kinds of purposes, many of them never imagined by me.
I have a list in the back of my brains of some new ideas – look soon for some new features in SPLOTbox and the TRU Writer as a plugin needs some TLC.
Almost forgotten and left unfinished is an idea of non-WordPress SPLOTs (that is not a necessity to me, though it’s been how I have done all SPLOTs so far). I was playing a while ago with one that would be run out of GitHub. The Permutator was meant to produce that same animation effect that sits atop the SPLOT main site.
Maybe it’s not a Giant Tool to Change Education, but I can make a thing where you could make you own acronym remixer (it’s just some JavaScript). I think the way to do it is to send via a URL parameter a link to a json URL that would contain all the data needed (an array of possible words for each letter).
See the test version at https://cogdog.github.io/permutator/
Well that’s not quite done, though I was just wondering today about maybe making a version in glitch.com so anyone could fork and modify their own copy. That would be fairly easy.
Okay, it is easy https://cogdog-permutator.glitch.me
Anhow, I may have forgotten to celebrate the fifth birthday of SPLOT, but I keep making them.
Happy belated birthday, kid.
Featured Image: Overlaid the SPLOT logo on 5th birthday cake flickr photo by AndrewEick shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license:
Crazy to think they are 5 years old now. They are aging well, and I remain a big fan
Jim, Tom and I will celebrate it orderly at this years OEGlobal conference in Milan, where Tom and I will hold a workshop on SPLOTs: https://sched.co/ULVT
The workshop is on Thursday, 28 November, that is exactly 5 years and 1 month! Neat!