Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog With the recent Verizon upgrade here to 4G it eas time to upgrade my Mifi unit; the old one (right) a Novatel 2020, was one of the originals. It's virtue was I had an unlimited data plan. But its connectivity here was quirky.. and my iPhone is getting sick speeds in 4G (I clocked 23 MB/s the first day). The new JetPack 4620 LE (left, marked "FAST:) is thicker because it has a beefier battery, and has much more display information than the old one's single colored light. The downside is I had to go for a metered data plan. I was able to combine the iPhone/Mifi to one shared data plan, with 16Gb per month, for only $10 more than my old plans. The downside again is I hit 16 GB only 21 days into the billing period. It's really not cut out to be my home primary network. And I am sure faster speeds will make me even hungrier for use. The upside is my first speedtest, was 14 MB/s down and 5 up speedtest.net/result/2409581545.png So I am signing up for my local cable company, which supposedly has improved their connectivity since I had it 2 years ago (and merged with a bigger company), and once in place, I can drop my Verizon plans down to a 2 or 4Gb a month plan. I cannot rave enough about Verizon for their network improvements here in Strawberry, AZ (and most places I traveled across the USA in the last 20 months). In three years with AT&T their service actually got worse here, from marginal Edge data to none at all. And I have had nothing but excellent and responsive service from Verizon customer support. I hesitate to gush about a service provider, as in general I believe in the long run they will all screw you over. The cost of being online! Its worth it. I've been working on a prototype web site I was asked to do for Tannis Morgan at JIBC. Beyond getting into some new code tricks, the best part of this was how she first approached me on it. With a metaphor. Meet a "Constellection" - my portmanteau for a collection of web resources arranged like a constellation. Just like I rarely start a blog post without an image to lead and set the tone, for the projects, web sites, even classes I teach, I work best when there is a metaphor or concept to tie the whole room together (did you see what I did there?). For Networked Narratives it was placing alchemy in a digital space. In Connected Courses DML workshops from 2017 and 2016, it was the wild wild west. In 2016-2017 I worked with Tannis and other colleagues on the project at the University of Guadalajara. At our first meeting with Sandra Cobain at UDG we heard about their interests for the professional development we were asked to bring to several hundred professors. They had done a great deal of research and thinking behind the project, written as a design document but at some point at the meeting, as the one tasked with making it come alive as a web site, I had to ask them for the metaphor. And it was Coco, one of the UDG faculty who helped shape the project who suggested The Agora, thus framing the whole project at http://udg.theagoraonline.net. Tannis now firmly buys into my "metaphor" approach. She contacted me again for a new project she and her TIBC team were doing a design development for. This one was with a large government agency needing a flexible way to share and distribute collections of mostly small bits of training resources (documents, videos, interactives, web sites, etc). And she had this idea that collections of them (which we call "stars") might be represented as constellations. I did kind of run wild with the idea, and before rambling too much more, I will remember my own Law of Getting to the Demo Early. Again, this is a prototype! Check out the constellations... (and yes the content is fluff and ipsum lorem style). The pile of code for this WordPress theme is at https://github.com/cogdog/constellection.Since I was looking at some other WordPress themes for a different portfolio project, I had seen the Rebalance theme which seemed to have the visual elements I would need, as well as the large featured image area to place the visualizations. Stars and Constellations The idea is that there are star items: My thought is these would be contributed via a SPLOT-like front-end submission form, there is a mock up (it does not submit anything, so click away all night). Constellations would more likely be created inside the WordPress dashboard, but maybe there is a reason some iteration of this concept would want a public form (so another demo that does nothing). Right now the constellations are built by inputting a comma separated list of the IDs for stars; in a more complete version, there would be some kind of interface for searching and using check boxes to collect them. The thing about these collections is that sequencing is not a factor. A constellation is a collection of 3-15? 20? resources that Mary might assemble to assign to Todd, and then maybe a slightly different set for the people in Customer Service. But the whole idea of the thing under the hood is that as a collection of stars, each has parameters that contribute to its relative size (number of views, ratings, how often it is used in constellations), and that an arrangement of stars in a constellation is a function of how similar they are (common categories, tags, overall content length, similar words?). Banging the D3js pipes In my scouting I came across this amazing visualizations of celestial and solar system maps all powered by the D3js visualization library. The examples of things people have done with d3js are staggering. The one that came closest in my mind was the Forced Directed Graph mapping the relationships of characters and their co-occurence in Les Misérables. I started with that example, and making them instead something like blog posts. I had to learn how to add text labels, and hyperlinks, and mess around with the parameters, finally getting that HTML demo version previewed above: I was flying by the seat of my Google search pants in trying to figure out how all this worked, and it was the first things I have done with dynamic SVG content. The demo version first had the data it read in via a referenced json file. I thought my WordPress instance would be pulling in json files the site would store. I was able to get around that. Making it work in WordPress called for creating Custom Post Types for the Stars and the constellations, and they each have their own taxonomies too. All of their parameters are kept in custom fields. The way I was able to get the interactive ones done was to generate json arrays of the two data parts (one array for the nodes or stars and another for their links). There's some duct taped functions that recalculate them when the constellation is saved: [caption id="attachment_66672" align="aligncenter" width="760"] A few custom fields for a constellation[/caption] I struggled a bit (or a lot) to get the SVG portion to scale to different window sizes, and also when the window was changed. There's a draw function which scales everything according to the size of the div that contains the SVG, and a JavaScript listener function to call the function again when the window was resized. The trick here was removing the stars and lines and redrawing them. And a lot of fudging to keep them from going to far afield. And then getting the CSS positioning right to have it sit inside the space the theme's featured image takes up. But here is a working version of one to play with: Now the constellation may be neat to play with, but it's not essential for getting the materials; so each WordPress template for a constellation also generates on the side and at its footer, links to all the star items within it. It counts and stores views, and collect public ratings (always brilliant WP-Post Ratings plugin). The code that generates the visualization is stored on a PHP template file, where when needed, the two json data arrays are read from their post meta data and fed into. I had dones this stuff way back in my early PHP work; I found a nice reminder of how to do this with Daggerhart's Simple PHP Templating function. Getting the star space into the page itself was my hope, but not quite sure I could pull it off. I was thinking it would maybe pop up in an external window or a lightbox overlay, but I surprised myself when it worked in the page. It took some CSS banging with a pipe wrench action to get it there (absolute positioning + some duct tape). The front page archive of constellations and any archive of them would not work efficiently or even need interactive d3js representations. I hope in the future to generate these images as needed automatically For now, they are manually created screenshots (because this is a prototype). Doing this required some more d3js manipulation to add a small button spot (a grey "+/-" in the bottom right): [caption id="attachment_66674" align="aligncenter" width="760"] A little button to toggle the labels on and off.[/caption] This enables me to hide the labels to take a screenshot. Wow, eh? [caption id="attachment_66675" align="aligncenter" width="760"] Labels hidden[/caption] Next Steps... From the start of this I was thinking of this as a possible future SPLOT, where site visitors can contribute star items that a site owner (or maybe other visits) can build constellations out of. The formula I used for weighting the stars and determining a "distance" between the two needs to be fleshed out more. I have built in factors to weigh each element; this could be settings entered in an admin screen. The visualization part too needs some refinement. In some cases labels overlap, and quite possibly might venture out of view. But you have to stop sometime and call it a prototype. It's in the stars now. Let me know if this is of any interest to work you are doing? Give me a good metaphor and I will run wild with it... Featured Image: Screenshot created with the Constellation Maker site http://areios.herokuapp.com/ To start with a complete random, isn't-the-internet-weird-and-wonderful story... I sought an image for this post by searching google images (settings for licensed for re-use) for dumb machine -- and a few scrolls down from images of old computers, images of asylums and pinball machines... one of my own photos jumped out. Why is my old dog Mickey, my namesake (being washed in that photo by my ex-wife) in this collection? What's wrong with you, Google? Actually nothing. Google does know what it's doing with images. I wonder if they can help Facebook. It was my own joke on myself. I was at the time setting up an old PC to test something on and made it's wallpaper desktop a screen capture of my Mac desktop, itself captured as a screen capture, a meta joke ha ha ha. A broken machine? Or just confused. Okay, I am a Mac-head, through and through. But tonight I was setting up a rather old Compaq laptop since I need a dumb machine to test how bad Internet Explorer ruins my web designs. So fishing through my flickr account for some photos to use as a desktop (the Windows XP green hill makes me want to barf), I found what I thought was my favorite dog picture, but was actually a desktop screen capture of my Mac deskop done for the sake of Oehlert's Desktop Contest Group. So I wondered... what would happen using a screenshot of a Mac desktop on Windows XP? Kind of recursive? dizzying? stupid? Okay, enough explaining the metaphor of the post I have not written. As a bit of an interlude to a Tuesday session on eportfolios and identity at the Open Up TRU events at Thompson Rivers University, I offered to share my recent escapades with my own photos used as catfishbait. To be clear, I want to say that I have not been catfished; it's my photos that are used in the luring process. I've been somewhat resigned to not let this boil me up again, because that last round ended up being a few days of mild rage and blogging and tracing my own photos that was really a distraction of the stuff I prefer doing. In prep of this session (meaning that morning I was quickly the images above into a little slide deck, I went back to Facebook (which now I guess I can say I am fortunate to have access to after 10 days of being in the cold room) to just see if "Roddick Henderson" a "person" (in the Facebook sense_ that previously had two different profiles with my photos in it, both of which my reports and others managed to get closed. https://www.facebook.com/roddick.henderson.568 https://www.facebook.com/roddick.henderson.94 I went to one of those profiles that was using my photos, and after changing my own profile to the same image, send a friend request. [caption id="attachment_49569" align="aligncenter" width="630"] I made my own Facebook profile image the one many catfishers use.[/caption] I thought it might be funny for them to get a request of someone with the same photo! Ha ha. Maybe they would get miffed that someone was using their image. Maybe it was my foolishness or over inflated sense of humor, but I am guessing Roddick 568 or Roddick 94 reported me. Anyhow, just for fun, I looked in Facebook for Roddick to see if he was still around. Not only was Roddick back, but he has back three times. [caption id="attachment_50463" align="aligncenter" width="630"] What are the odds there are three people on Facebook named Roddick Henderson that all look like me?[/caption] https://www.facebook.com/roddick.henderson.501 https://www.facebook.com/roddick.henderson.5688 https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100010608946438 Fascinating. (Note: As of today, only one looks active). Just for the record, let's visit them. First, let's meet Roddick Henderson Number 1 [caption id="attachment_50464" align="aligncenter" width="426"] Am I Roddick?[/caption] I can tell from my clothing and surrounding, that this is a photo someone took of me at Northern Voice 2009 in Vancouver. I can see the heads of D'Arcy Norman and Jim Groom int he background. I am not sure who's photo this is (Google Image search and Tin Eye failed), so if anyone knows the source, let me know. Good looking guy, right? How about visiting Roddick Henderson Number 1? He's holding a 3D printed image of his face? How do I know? Lucky guess. [caption id="attachment_50465" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Now, wait, I AM RODDICK.[/caption] Maybe it's because I took that photo in May 2012 at UMW. It's an uncanny resemblance to Roddick, a mere coincidence that Facebook's facial recognition technology is totally stumped by. But wait, there is one more Roddick to meet. He looks like a speaker type dude... and his account is still kicking today on Facebook (why are all my fakes in the oil industry?) [caption id="attachment_50466" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Roddick looks like an adventurous dude[/caption] I guess it is just the sheer vastness of the internet that the photo Roddick 501 uploaded as his profile on October 23, was a photo taken of me by Gardner Campbell on February 2009? [caption id="attachment_50467" align="aligncenter" width="630"] I had no idea in 2009 that there was a guy named Roddick who looked like me[/caption] Can there be any more a clear example of how incredibly broken Facebook's technology and facade of Community Standards are that they allow three accounts created on the same day, with the same name, with similar photos? Yes, my friends may offer their incredulity, and support. I continue to get emails from the real catfishing victims who experience true financial, and worst, trust losses. But the machine is broken and no one is making Facebook accountable for their dumb machine. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by mandyxclear under a Creative Commons ( BY-ND ) license[/caption] At least, thanks to Troy Welch, I have a soothing song to deal with this! https://twitter.com/TroyWelch1/status/669222925342343168 Top / Featured Image Credits: flickr photo by cogdogblog http://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/325617806 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Two more weeks to go for ds106; we are done with doing assignments for stars. This week and tonight’s session (detailed below) is: prepping for having your blog organized to showcase your work (see below) in[SPIRE] a participation effort to share the best of ds106 Between now and end of semester, add 4 examples of classmates work to http://inspire.ds106.us Pair/Share on final projects (in class activity) Find a partner. Each takes 7 minutes to describe their project and progress, and ask for feedback. Write a blog post with what you said / heard. Blog Prep and Course Syllabus Grade Requirements Review the Grade Breakdown for this class from the syllabus. Start working to make your blog is able to point to these areas as means to showcase your stuff. You will want to use WordPress Categories and/or Tag links, and add them either to custom menu (if your theme supports it) or create Links and use a widget to add to your sidebar (to be reviewed in class). Your assignment for the last class will be a reflection post on your ds106 experience, and should be able to point to your wok in the areas covered by the Syllabus. Your ability to have this organized so you can reference in a final blog post Participation (15% of Grade) Be able to provide examples of your class participation (create a blog category or tag), including, but not limited to: Comments on other blogs (not a complete list, but examples) Contributions to twitter (class list) – use twitter advanced search for your username and the #ds106 hash tag https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23ds106%20from%3Acogdog in[SPIRE] contributions (see below) Be creative and let people know other ways you have participated outside of class time Daily Create (15% of Grade) You should have or add a Category/Tag that points to your work. Add new Assignments (keep track) tag or categorize your “Best of” Daily Creates Digital Storytelling Assignments (30% of Grade) These should already be tagged as you have been doing them, verify all your work is tagged properly Predifined tags: VisualAssignments, DesignAssignments, AudioAssignments, VideoAssignments, RemixAssignments Pick at least 5 to organize as “Best of” by tag or category, e.g. BestAssignments Creating Assignments (10% of Grade) This is earned by creating 4 new assignments and blogging about each one. Submit an Assignment Define a tag/category for your assignment submissions. Creating Tutorials (10% of Grade) This is earned by creating 4 assignment tutorials and blogging about each one. Define a tag/category for your assignment tutorials. Final Project (20% of Grade) Define a tag/category to document your work on the final project. The ds106 assignment for what comes below is "Return to the Scene of the Crime": Take a photo from the past that you took in a particular location. Return to that stop, and take another picture, "framing" the original within the current view. The whole premise is to find an old photo, return to the location, and create a new one where you are holding the photo and lining it up with the scene. It is a nifty mixing of analog in the digital space. I'd done some toying with this same technique after discovering the flickr Look into the Past grpup, which does overlays of historic photos over current scenes- I had done a few around my home town of Strawberry and neighboring Pine, AZ. First of all, a wide angle lens is essential. It need not be a DSLR, but you need a wide angle to fit the whole photo in. I used my Canon 10-20mm zoon. But there is a whole lot more, as Giulia led me to in her iteration of the assignment, connecintg to the Dear Photograph site. The extra level here is doing the story part, of writing a memory of the photo as if you were talking to it. While at Mom's house doing the cleanup, I came across a number of photos of Mom, Dad, and even me around this house. So off I went... cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photograph, Could Dad have been much happier relaxing in his easy chair, having retired to Florida in 1990- afte dreaming of it for many years? But you left this world in 2001, and your chair was moved out of the photo. Mom got a new one... and now that one too shall disappear. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photograph, Was I really that skinny, young, and punk faced in the 1990s? Did I really sport a mullet? As my first visit to the place Mom and Dad retired to, it took some getting used to as they had left the house I had grown up in since the age of 2. This new place was... so nice, so new... so Florida. But they sure loved it and thats what counts the most. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photograph, A thing I share with both Mom and Dad is the joy of working in my yard. And this place in Fort Myers they sure made their own. I am pretty sure my Mom spotted some orchids at some other place, and she lifted a few to grow in the tree behind her. This would have been? 1997, so their Florida place had long been made their home. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Dear Photograph, I was a bit incredulous that my parents would slice the top off of a store bought pineapple, soak it a few days in a wate dish, and later plant it in the back yard of their place in Fort Myers. My disbelief was disbanded the day I tried the sweet pleasure of a fresh pineapple! Sometime later, strangers cam by and stole some of the pineapples, so I was pleasantly surprised to find one with a nice fruit hanging on it! cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog So go find some old photos of a place you can get into now, and do this assignment! The notion (and act) of shaping your technology1 rather than limiting yourself to what a tool provides still (or always) is resonating with me. I'm thinking about the width of the spectrum from complete control by code to almost no freedom except what a GUI provides, for me WordPress is my go to for many reasons, but also noting that it's spectrum is uber wide. One of the simplest and effective ways to do WordPress tech shaping is the simple act of changing what the front of your site does. In nearly most WordPress themes, showing its roots as a blog platform, is the reverse chronological view (often a grid) of posts. There is nothing wrong with this, but for many sites that are more informational than blog-ical, seeing a bunch of posts does not give a new visitor a sense of what the site does, or what it is about. For that matter there is no welcome mat laid out. Just all the dishes. Front Pages for SPLOTs I see this often in the ways people set up SPLOT themed sites meant as a place for your visitors (or students) to contribute content. See for example the default front views for: TRU Collector DemoTRU Writer DemoSPLOTbox Demo There's not any clue or info what the site is for, or any kind of welcome. It's just... stuff. And this is fine. But one of my core beliefs is pushing away from the defaults of what a platform provides. That's what a tech shaper does. I have taken, when called for, a simple approach of a WordPress setting to change the home page to a custom Page rather than the default Posts view. This changing of the WordPress front door works in any theme. Here's a few examples done in SPLOTs: MYfest 22 Reflections (TRU Writer, provides a welcome)Pandemic Whispers (TRU Writer, again opens with a welcome, not posts)Arganee Journal (TRU Writer, landing page is "issues" of a class journal over multiple years)Somni Porta (TRU Collector, offers a current assignment on the front plus tiled view of posts)Share a Mystery Item (TRU Collector, an experiment to hide what has been submitted to a SPLOT until a later reveal)Stories of the OpenETC in Action (SPLOTbox, opens with a welcome, an invitation) This is a key WordPress feature I almost never see used. It changes the site to one where you build your own front door rather than a pile of posts. In most cases I make use of the Display Posts plugin (one I use on many sites) to add a listing of either random items or most recent ones in the body of my custom page. For the Somni Porta example, I used the WP Tiles plugin that creates galleries of posts from featured images. I was spurned to write here when Maha Bali asked about using the TRU Writer SPLOT like was set up for MYFest for her own class as a means for students to post responses to her assignments (check it out!). She asked if there was a way to create a home page view more like her blog, a grid of posts, rather than the wide image posts display created by the TRU Writer's parent theme, Radcliffe. A custom page could do this and provide some context or instructions or an intro to the site. WPbeginner has a nice write up on doing this with the new Query Block built into WordPress or with plugins. I did a hasty demo trying the Query Block you can peek at on the TRU Writer demo site. https://splot.ca/writer/home-own I wanted to try the Query Block approach, and cussed my way through it. I could not get it to size the thumbnails evenly- if I was doing for a real site, I might go the plugin route (Display Posts has some methods to do a grid layout). The main point is you are never limited to a wall of posts view for the main entry of your WordPress site. You can have a blue door and comfy chairs. 1 Tom Woodward deserves the credit for framing tech shaping and thus earns a rare CogDogBlog footnote. Featured Image: Blue Haven Motor Court Cabin, view 2, Route 1, Saco, Maine by John Margolies public domain image from the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/resource/mrg.00224 A colleague mentioned the other day that they saw this blog on the front of the web site for the Center for Teaching & Learning at Mesa Community College, the biggest of the 10 Maricopa colleges. So surely I had to drop the work I was doing and check it out (egos need feeding, right?): Sure enough, they are syndicating CogDogBlog in the upper right! (I am not sure why ;-) so let's give a big hello to the guys and gals at the Mesa CTL... and while you are there check out all the features they have rolled into a relatively new web site with a nice comprehensive design to it. The CTL has been a long time Maricopa fixture for doing great multimedia, faculty development, and technology work at their college (and not just because they are putting my blabbering on their home page). It's encouraging to see some uses of RSS spreading in our system... it's just getting started as more people start to "get" what RSS is all about. This blog post has no mention of a certain length of time since a certain kind of writing was..... er.... blogged. One can always try to blog like NOBODY. But that's not the point either. On my travels, I've been reading bits of Armageddon in Retrospect, the collection of Kurt Vonnegut's post---, um..... stuff written after he died. It was not Kurt's words that lept from the page, but those in the intro written by his son Mark (trying to imagine growing up with Kurt Vonnegut as a father). Reading and writing are themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to people when they read Kurt is that things are much up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that. Substitute for "book" blog, video, story, etc, anything we create-- and share, then it strikes at the heart of things that we find others feel the way we do, and things turn out to be much more up for grabs than we even suspect. Take this as a subtle foreshadowing of some things I am scheming down the line. After a copy of a letter he wrote to his parents after his WWII experience, the book jumps to Kurt Vonnegut's speech at Clowes Hall in his home town of Indianapolis, April 27, 2007 (hey that's my birthday) in Indianapolis-- his last speech, and woven together a thread of those thoughts that his son describes above. His parting words, looking at what feels like dark times: And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don't have one already. See why he speaks to me? "Don't be serious, get a dog!" He then moves on to a silly joke: I myself just got a dog, and it's a new crossbreed. It's half French poodle and half Chinese shih tzu. It's a shit-poo. And I thank you for your attention, and I'm out of here. Those were Vonnegut's last public words. A beautiful exit. "I'm out of here." So let me re-iterate-- our words, all of us, ours ways of expression, not just books and written form, can be positively subversive. More to come.... flickr foto Brother and Sisteravailable on flickr Today is Cadu's birthday! She (black lab on the left) and Mickey (right) were from the same litter, though differed in just about every other form factor. Cadu will be 5 today; Mickey is forever frozen at 2 and a half. Doggie party tonight! I was trolling the olde blog settings for the WordPress Jetpack plugin and spotted something that confirmed I had aleady learned-- the nuking of Twitter's API meant the Social module could no longer tweet new posts. Old news. But what I did see was a new option to connect my WordPress blog to publish new posts to Mastodon. In like 10 second I connected to my instance and connected my account to this here blog. Thus, this post is mostly a test of the connection (for which I spent more than too much time in Photoshop on the fetured image). This might end up double tooting, since I have been using an IFTTT applet to share to mastodon whenever there is a new post in my RSS feed. Ok, let's see how this elephant flies with a new Jetpack! Dead bird dead bird. I'm no super billionaire businessman, but to cut off the world's largest web publishing platform from adding content to your product is--- dumb ass to the nth degree. Toot, toot, someone sweep the dead bird off the road. UPDATE (June 13, 2023) I have two mastodon post tooters in operation now... for comparison: On the left is the post made by my IFTTT applet, on the right is the one made by the JetPack Social The difference is minor- the Jetpack on includes an excerpt of the post. I like in IFTTT I can customize it with extra text like before the title "Just CogDogBlogged" and adding an extra hashtag. I could include the excerpt in IFTTT but am not sure it matters. Also, IFTTT is a bit delayed, the JetPack one is instant. As if I am that important that I don't want to keep my fan waiting. I don't think it means a hill of beans to anyone except me. I like IFTTT more, but I can use JetPack if the former ever poops out. Featured Image: My own photoppery (OMG the crap DALL-E gave me for “An elephant wearing a jetpack hovers in the air over a dead bird laying on the road, cartoon style”) based on p1210759 flickr photo by generalising shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license and Dead bird flickr photo by indoloony shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license Yup, flickr is the land of maybe more than the land of 10,000 memes, maybe it is the long tail for photographic odd-topics. Today, I got an invite to join the "spread that love" flickr group (which explains why I had to fish it out of the junk mail folder!). So here is the meme for this group: Take your favourite sandwich or toast spread on an excursion outdoors for a day or so. Show the world how much you love it, and take some interesting photos of it as you go, (compile them into a small set of say 5 to 10 images), by which I mean "on location" outside your house, we want to see whacky and weird places you can get away with photographing your favourite spread. This started with some photos of Marmite and "Reggie" the Vegemite on their excursions. Is this silly? It is in the eye of the beholder, but witness that at least 30 other people have joined. This could not have happened ever before in history without the net, without flickr, and without a bunch of people who love their spreads. I was wondering what I did to deserve the honor? Ah, it's my own fault. But an important lesson emerges from this silliness (or not so silly if you are a professional photographer of yeast food extracts).... flickr as a technology enables and facilitates a social space, online community if you will, but not by itself. People and shared purpose are what make an online community thrive or die. So do not expect any technology to do the job alone. Wordpress is a long running machine, and in most of my 11 year experience using it, have found it rather forgiving with old code and themes. With the 4.7 Wordpress update, I have been seeing a problem with the Feed Wordpress plugin, and despite a fix I found that cleared the error, tonight I found the fix broke other related plugins. Sadly the developer of this plugin much of my syndicated blogging work has revolved around is a bit absent on issues with his code. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/807397466178015239 That has to wait for another day. I ran into another problem with a plugin, it's one that presents code I put into my blog post into a more readable format. Syntax Highlighter Plus has worked without problem on my site for several years, but tonight, it's borking. The problem has to do with some new way Wordpress has coded global filters. I could not untangle the code enough to find a remedy. The first recourse is disabling the plugin. The problem this presents is that the way it worked is I wrapped all my code with a pair of shortcodes like: [sourcecode lang="javascript"] [/sourcecode] Nearly all my stuff has an attribute for lang= of php or javascript. This is the hitch of using shortcodes; when I disable the plugin, my posts are going to be littered with bits of [sourcecode lang="php"] ... mumbo jumbo .... [/sourcecode]. My strategy was to find another syntax formatting plugin (there are quite a few), and Crayon looked like a good pick. It's recent, has a fair number of installs and reviews. I installed the plugin and tested it. Yup, it formats code. The thing is that uses a different (and better IMHO) construct than shortcodes; it wraps code in ... tags with a class attribute that defines the display language, e.g.... I started thinking about a function I could add to hook into the_content to do a search and replace on the shortcodes. I even got as far as getting a grep search to work. The I thought of an easier plan. I just need to do a one time search and replace on all posts that used these tags. And I remembered you can do this on the database in phpMyAdmin. I fired up mine via my lovely Reclaim Hosting cpanel. I fund the wp_posts table in my blog, that's where all the content for blog posts live and breathe. Actually I first duplicated the table in case I messed up. I clicked the SQL tab so I could run direct queries (not for the feint of heart), and ran this one to replace all the closing [/sourcecode] shortcodes with ones: Bam! I got like an update to 38 posts. I checked one. Sure enough the search and replace worked. I then ran a few more like: or in phpMyAdmin: Note: I spent way too much time getting tags to work within tags! It does feel powerful. I tested the new plugin and it worked great, like for this post from just 2 a few months ago. The Crayon plugin has all kinds of crazy options, one is you can set a default style theme for how code is presented. I thought I was done. But to make sure, I searched in the dashboard my posts for [sourcecode and found another 20+ posts. That's because I also had code with the lang= setting for html, xml, css not to mention PHP, Javascript, and JavaScript (remember kids that search is case sensitive), not to mention a handful of posts where I had used language= rather than lang=. It just meant another spate of mySQL replace queries. Which are damn useful to know how to do if you need to back mod a bunch of old posts (yes a more brute force way would be to do an entire export of my database, an run search and replaces locally on the file, and re-populate the database; but my old big blog is a big creaky ship, about 75 Mb of database) (and running mySQL queries feels more geeky cool). There's a lot more to the Crayon plugin to figure out, it hooks right into the dashboard post editor, so it will make adding code chunks a bit less manual tag typing like I did before. And now my blog is again (until the next mishap) is a fine tuned machine [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by alanosaur under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license[/caption] UPDATE Dec 12 I have been fiddling with this way too much. The problem is the Crayon plugin affects all instances of the ... tags, so I set it's default to use the Plain White theme and to never show the toolbar for those boxes where I did not want code formatting. THEN I ran my mySQL updates to modify the ones where code was used, to replace with tags that include a darker Crayon theme and to show the toolbar. I better stop now.... Top / Featured Image: flickr photo by waferboard https://flickr.com/photos/waferboard/30182796173 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by sharyn morrow Will the open connected web as we once knew it be some quaint artifact we will only peer at as we swipe through apps on our mobile devices? Probably not. But still... I was enamored by a nifty technology from Wibbitz that took the content of an RSS feed and rendered it as a video, and it was dynamic- check it out (while it still works). In the inbox today... they are casting off this technology to package it as an iPhone app: Hi there! First of all we wanted to thank you for using Wibbitz and for all the great feedback that you've sent us over the past few months. We took it all into consideration and worked hard on improving our technology. After reaching over 17M videos viewed per month and over 50K sites that are using the Wibbitz technology we understood that people most like to watch video summaries while their on-the-go. As you know reading long articles on your mobile device is a difficult task, that's why we'll soon be releasing the Wibbitz iPhone app to allow anyone to watch all the news they want with a single tap. As a result we will soon be pulling the plug on our previous service in the next couple of days and will notify you as soon as the app is available on the app store. We invite you to stay up-to-date on the latest news and become a partner publisher for our new and exciting mobile offering. Follow us @wibbitz to stay tuned for more! Cheers, The Wibbitz Team "We will soon be pulling the plug on our previous service" seems to be more the norm. A few years ago a start up tech's hopes might be to be bought by Google, now it is to get a toe hold, yank the content, and wrap it in an app. The irony is they like will still be using the web open standard of RSS to package web content inside a shiny closed box. Nicely done. Each time this happens Tim Berners-Lee's cat cries out in pain, stop hurting the cat. What is a web when we weave things and then remove them? A ragged tattered fabric. What happens when we say yes to wanting "to watch video summaries while their on-the-go" (Wibbitz, I shall ignore your grammar faux pas, I have more typos then you). I did a screen capture of the Wibbitz functionality, cause they are going to pull the plug on it. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by lesley middlemass The web is unraveling in front of your eyes, can you not see it? I'll just end up that lonely old guy in the park, muttering to himself about that open web thing which society knows no more. Are you even listening? I'll I see is your face planted in your phone. It was March 27 ordered and on its way March 30 and due to arrive April 4. From China to Scottsdale in 6 days. I knew the thing was fast, but zowie! cc licensed flickr photo shared by michael.heiss Given the rising tide/trend of electronic books, for a number of months I've been pondering how to make our NMC publications available in an ebook format. With the push of an iThing it looked like ePub was the format to aim for. It is after all, a standard (or is it a guideline). My experience suggests it is a muddy place, much depends on the devices that access the content (oi the browser wars of the 1990s), but this is a stream of what I've figured out so far. I will pre-amble that I have almost no expertise in this- its just what I figured out by head-banging attempts to produce an ePub. I'll foreshadow the hint that I am excited about the just released Anthologize tool for generating electronic texts but it's too early to tell on that one. First, I tried a number of the various tools that offered to convert a PDF to an ePub -e.g. ePubBud. I can say that you get "something" you can view at the end, but its really not optimal on format, layout- you don't get much in the options to customize, so its a crapshot whether it does a decent job. That is because under the hood- what an ePub file really is is not a file at all, but a container of files, many of them XML, and all the "content" portions of your ePub are structured HTML, or XHTML. So anything that attempts to "convert" your PDF must make guesses as to what are headers, where are breaks, etc, and who knows what it does with things like lists and links. I learned the most from the excellent tutorial "How to Create an ePub By Hand" which clearly illustrates many of the moving parts in an ePub, and provides a template to start with. Harrison Ainsworth's Epub Format Guide is another great reference (and is also available as an ePub). So what you end up doing is a lot of hand coding of XML and XHTML files, package it up with a few other key files in a zip, and than just change the file extension from ".zip" to ".epub" If you are leaping ahead like I did and think you can take that DRM sprinkled ePub, swap its file extension to .zip, and pry open to peek at the structure-- good luck. You get a *.cpgz file which when you uncompress-- gives you another version of the original zip, endless circle (well not exactly true, I just found the unix command line "ditto -xk source.zip " which seemed to pop it open, but thats just a detail- have not tried it yet with a dl-ed epub). While embarking down this manual path, I also asked our publication designer, who does use inDesign to generate our documents, to experiment with its ability to export ePub. I've not hear much, but he was unable to even get a simple test file going, and as is, this would require recasting of his templates and styles to get something ePub-able. I also got connected (thanks Phil Long) with someone who does this as a business - and found out on that end, they doe a ton of work doing it the manual way to get a template that works, and then get to the point of more automation in generating the content. I thought this would be pretty easy to do for our NMC Horizon Reports since I already re-publish them in WordPress format (see http://wp.nmc.org/) so I already have the content in HTML. It took a little bit of tidying to get clean XHTML- changing extensions to .xhtml, closing some tags properly, adjusting local links, changing the HTML headers to: The tricky part was packaging the files up. The instructions indicate that the special mimetype file should not be compressed, and must be the "first added to the zip". I had no luck getting this to work on a Mac, and even on a PC using WinZip, with everything as stated, I could not get the file to validate using the ThreePress validator-- it kept saying the first file in the zip was not 8 characters long (meaning it was not finding "mimetype" first. Crap. I was in a corner. I looked at other apps- Calibre is very handt for converting between eBook formats, and allows some modifications of the various settings (setting a cover image, editing the metadata) but what I really sought was something that was more of a full fledged ePub editor. And than I found maybe not the Holy Grail, but for me, what turned out to be pretty Grail-ish - eCub by Julian Smart. It is cross platform and free! eCub is a cross-platform tool for creating EPUB and MobiPocket books. EPUB is become a popular e-book standard and is open and free for all to implement. EPUB files can be read by MobiPocket, Adobe Digital Editions, FBReader, Stanza, the Sony Reader, and many other readers and applications. MobiPocket books can be read on desktop platforms, mobile platforms and the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. eCub offers a convenient way to import text and XHTML files and create all the necessary components of an EPUB file. It makes it easy to view and edit files, and check the generated EPUB, using external tools. It can also generate audio files from your book content using eSpeak and other text-to-speech software. A wizard allows you to create a new project in seconds, with options for generating a table of contents, a cover page, and a title page. You can create a simple cover design image using templates and a simple design tool. Then you can compile, check and try out the EPUB at the click of a button. With eCub, I simply made a new project, and was able to import my directory of xhtml files. The file tool allows me to change the order, and even to edit them if needed: There are a number of settings panels that pretty much take care of the grunt work of generating the content.opf and other XML files the ePub needs, plus it adds the meta data. It has templates you can use to generate a cover, but I just went for the simple of the same cover image from our publications. I went a few rounds of edits (mostly tweaking the XHTML for some formatting errors) with the ThreePress ePub validator to get all but one error cleared there (it seems to be saying the format for my publication date is invalid, but I cannot see any issue there). So here is 2010-Horizon-Report.epub (236k) a test version of an ePub equivalent of the 2010 NMC Horizon Report (web version) This is a draft version, yadda yadda, small type legal mumbo jumbo, batteries not included, your mileage will vary... But the test was in seeing how it worked. The desktop version of Stanza was sad, as it seemed to ignore all formatting, and produced a river of text. I have to say the iBooks app in the iPad looks and acts the best so far. I like how my own publication sits in the shelf The downside is of course, the jump rope of having to get stuff there via iTunes sync. Also, mysteriosuly enough, with ePub files sent my mail or even when accessed in DropBox, iBooks is never offered as a helper app for opening ePub files. But in iBooks, this version works in a lovely manner- it displays using the simple styles I made for headers, the hyperlinks to internal and external URLs all work, the table of contents and other bits work great. Stanza too displayed the content reasonably (though it ignored my own style sheet), but did all of the lists, bold, italics as it should: However, the hyperlinks in the generated Table of Contents as well as internal ones went nowhere. In some searching (I cannot locate the exact location now, but thought it was here)... I found out to get Stanza hyperlinks to work, you actually have to press and hold the link at least 2 seconds. I think that is "the fix is in progress" statement here. So I have an ePub proof done, and tested it small scale. I don't have access to other readers, and assume I might have to run it through Calibre to generate versions that will work with other eReaders (which has my scratching my head over the concept of "standard"). With eCub and my content already in formatted HTML I should eb able to convert a number of our other documents more easily. In the end, creating an ePub is far from easy. I would think there is a ton of room for someone to create a better kind of application to generate ePub files and more than the quick and slap conversions, but a full fledged editor. And most ideally, I am hopeful the just off the code press Anthologize will be a viable option, which might be the best since our content already exists in WordPress. It does require a little bit of server sized tweaking (re-compiling PHP to include the ZIP extension). This is really an early stage for ePub-- there are some interesting possibilities of JavaScript ePub readers perhaps making it possible to embed/integrate ePub with other web content. Then there is the headier stuff, since ePub can allow for scripts and object tags, for Interactivity in ePub. Definitely the folks at ThreePress are doing a lot with this leading edge -- see http://blog.threepress.org/. And that's all I know for now! I've not read much on Skype until I noticed via Joi Ito that a Mac version was out. Heck, I did not even know what it did! It appears to be a simple way to have audio conversations via the net, and even 3,4 way conversations. The trouble is I don't have anyone to Skype with! If you have Skyped, let me know your handle, or Skype me at cogdogblog. Aren't new verbs fun? It's about time it went out on its own. Now serving random flickr images as pecha as it can -- http://pechaflickr.net. Have no fears, the old domain http://pechaflickr.cogdogblog.com/ should send you there too. The summer online version of ds106 that Martha Burtis and I are teaching is off like a rocket- but there is no reason why you cannot jump on board; just head over to Camp Magic Macguffin and follow the right side link to sign up. There is no worry about coming in later, although our bunk house groups are coalescing and currently bonding, kum bah ya-ing. As a point of notice (or to help me sort out my own blog personality disorder), I will be doing any assignment work right from here, the home blog, under the ds106 tag. However, as part of the storytelling of the storytelling course, I decided to play with a video blog, hosted under tumblr, but mounted here under the subdomain, macguffin.cogdogblog.com: I have noticed, and came across a few references to it elsewhere in the google-verse, that tumblr blogs are rather long cached, and feeds may not update for like 12 hours. I cannot locate any official statement on that, but I have noticed a lag between the posts and the feed. I am primarily doing it as a video blog for my reports from camp. If you followed ds106 last year, you know there was a lot of weird shit that went down, with revolutions, kidnappings, banishment, chainsaws.... weird. The whole premise of this year is to bring a sense of calmness and safety to a fun camp experience, all about artistic creativity and self-actualization. Rainbows and unicorns are our mascot, even if there is a counselor running around with a hatchet, and apparently Uncle Hector is loose in the woods. @mikeberta FYI a large crate addressed to you on camp loading dock from Cryogenics Inc. Its busted open, Uncle Hector IS LOOSE IN THE WOODS— Alan Levine (@cogdog) June 1, 2012 SO far, I have had to fly to Canada for my orientation with the camp holding company, CVI, and met our operations manager, Mr E (odd dude). The made me do some sort of survival things in the woods, which I guess I passed, and then I was dropped back in camp last night with some mystery package I am instructed to give to Marco, the facilities guy. My curiosity got the better of me, and I peeked inside the package, and have been suffering intense headaches since then. But our campers are right on target, our UMW students are up and blogging, we have had some great campfire discussions (especially the last one with Bryan Alexander) that have worked out well with the live broadcasting and auto archiving of Google Hangouts. We've handed out some camp badges, yes BADGES, BADGES, we got bad ass badges! See the bottom of the week 2 newsletter for our campers of the week, and Martha has even gone and made a flickr group so anyone can make and give out badges. We know that Counselor Doodlebug has been sending some out as well, like: cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe I think things are going well, there are a few anonymous notes whining "where is Jim Groom?" - and Jim and I have chatted much of the time- he really wants to be a camper and work on hos bead necklaces and sand paintings. It's time for a new change of ds106, don;t you want to be part of the merriness? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xrqm2Q5NtM And remember, ds106 is the place to come this summer as a break from those silly old MOOCs! And remember, NOTHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN THIS SUMMER, NOTHING! Wow, I need some rest, tomorrow is another busy days, chasing campers and keeping tabs on the counselors. We hear there might be some ruckus between bunks four and five. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Leeky-Boy It is going to be hard to top this headline... but that is the goal of today's ds106 Daily Create, a writing challenge: Write a tabloid headline for ds106 and the opening sensational paragraph Tabloids, oh yeah. My all time favorite headline was "Female Bigfoot Tried to Love Me" -- but that's another story. Today's 'loids are bringing astonishing news Pearson to Acquire Digital Storytelling Course for $106 Million July 15, 2013 "“ Pearson, the world's leading learning company, is today announcing the acquisition of Digital Storytelling aka ds106 from University of Mary Washington or $1o6 million in cash or equivalent in calculus textbooks. Created in 2011, ds106 is now the world's leading example of open education in a form that is not the same old lecture and quiz format of competitors. It has enabled 3500 students, teachers, and other internet weirdos (including talking dolls and dead mountain men) to create, publish, and distribute, from a digital space they own, more than 30,000 blog posts, videos, animated GIFs on the open web and benefit from several powerful growth trends including user-generated content, social media and internet syndication technologies. As with many things, I start with an example, by googling Pearson Acquisition News and landing on Pearson to acquire Author Solutions, Inc for $116m -- and just riffing from there. More quotes from this story: New Pearson VP of Animated GiFs James Groom is quoted as saying, "This is the most logical extension of our hard work that it can only be truly world animated at a scale beyond our dreams"¦. Has anyone seen my Lear Jet? I am due on the set"¦" with photographic coverage of the deal being made: [caption id="attachment_23562" align="alignnone" width="500"] Jim Groom closes the $106 Million deal...[/caption] This photo was the work of a little editing of a flickr cc licensed image by thinkpanama with my own photo of the new VP If you want to get on board with the Daily Create, and avoid being made a butt end of my future work, step right into the fray of the ds106 Daily Create Challenge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubHn4xEnRP8 Just see how my UMW student from Fall 2012, Melinda is in the mix: https://twitter.com/melindakumi/status/356668427517169664 I'm releasing a day early the collection of Amazing Stories of Openness I will show tomorrow at the opening of the ETUG Spring Workshop in Nelson, BC. These are just the videos, for the session, I have a few surprises up my sleeve, and may even gamble on doing a chunk of this w/o any visuals. So, yeah, bryan Alexander, go ahead and tweet it- your video with the axe was the first one I recorded and is a gem. The stories are up now at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/etug11/ -- the FLVs are bigger than I usually do, as I am running the site locally tomorrow, and want crisp videos. This is doing the CoolIris shtick for the wall of media. The bulks of these I recorded on my iPhone hitting up people on my travels over the last few weeks. I do want to give a nod to Scott Leslie and Karen Fasimpaur for being the only folks that actually sent one on their own. I gotta take some lessons from Alec Courosa and Dean Shareski on doing better at getting other people to do my presentations. Anyhow, I'm winging my way to Castlegar, BC and from there onto a merry trip. I likve a conference that opens with a beer party and hockey. Well, I admire the hockey, I dig the beer. Readers of the CogDog may know we are not that gentle towards bad service from big corporate entities. My recent experience with AT&T Universal and Phone Company (and whatever the other percentage of the universe they own) has earned them the all time Pile of Stinky Poop Award for doing just that with their service. Bear with this tragic tale... The December statement on my AT&T Universal MasterCard showed a November 11 phone call charge to my AT&T Universal Calling Card from a pay phone in Vermont to some number I did not recognize in Wilmington Delaware. The minor problems with this was that I was in Auckland New Zealand on that date, and since no one else has access to my card, well it ought to be addressed. Now the irony of all this is that the call was billed $1.05 and by the time all the charges are slapped on top, it came to $3.19- an amount normally not even worth bothering with. But I was concerned that some bad person out there (is that you, Mr Phentermine Spammer? It smells like... ) had access to my codes. So I called AT&T on Dec 20, and tried to explain it to the young woman on the customer service line, but she misunderstood when I expressed my concern over the account, and next thing I knew is that she had cancelled my entire MasterCard account completely to issue a new card. And apparently, at the big AT&T in the sky, there is no big UnDo button. "Well, okay" I said, "I am done shopping and do not need the card right away." "All you have to do is call us when you get your new card, and when you activate it over the phone, you can file a dispute about the charge," instructed Ms Chipper Customer Support Specialist. Okay, fast forward to today, when I get back into town. The new card is here, and I call the 1-800 number to activate it. The dude with the slightly twisted British accent (it sounded almost like it was a synthetic generated voice??) took care of that efficiently, but when I asked about taking care of the charge, he provided another 1-800 number. "Well, mate. You have to contact AT&T Calling Card people to address this." Okay, so it is off to another 800 number. This one greeted with the automated response, welcoming me to AT&T, and asking me to enter the phone number my call was in reference to. Now this had me puzzled, since I do not use AT&T for local or long distance calling at all, but I figured, what the heck, and punched in my home phone, the one hopefully associated with my AT&T MasterCard accounts. Now I entered phone purgatory. A woman with an Indian accent dryly noted. "All operators are busy. Your call is important. Please wait for the next available operator." This was repeated every 90 seconds, which equates to sheer torture for the 18 minutes I waited. I would sure like to strap and AT&T executive in a hard wooden chair and force them to listen to this water torture equivalent. Okay, finally a human answered. I hate to say things like this, and cannot assume this was an over seas call center, but his accent was so thick I could only make partial guesses at what he was asking me. "Walkomm to ATT. Pliss till me your fone number", he greeted. Didn't I punch that in during the opening phase of this session? What the ____ is that for if I need to recite it again? Is this a test? I provided it again. "What ees yur passwood?" Okay, for the 1000th time I get to utter my mom's maiden name. "Pliss confirm yur home ahhdreeess." he mumbled. I complied. I said it slowly, as he was softly echoing my words, as I picture his finger slowly crossing the read out on his monitor screen. Does he also see past records that indicate I am a crank? a nuisance? "An who ess your lokal und lung distance fone currier?" he inquired. Now this teed me off- I was just trying to clear up a measly $3.19 charge, why the bleeding cheesecake would he need to know my phone carriers? "I do not see how this is relevant, why do you need to ask" "Mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo policy mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo AT&T mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo mumbo jumbo." is what I heard. I actually was not listening and certainly was not going to tell him (Okay, it is MCI pfffffffffttt, but he never heard it). After all this, I tried to explain why I was wasting his time for a $3.19 issue, when he let me know that the 1-800 number I called inadvertently was transferred to his area, and that I really needed to call another 1-800 branch of Planet AT&T to get someone on AT&T Calling Card service. Now it gets even more fun. This next number lands me into some automated customer service that asks me to state the nature of my call. I say slowly and clearly for voice identification purpose, "Dispute Charges". It then asks me for a number of options that do not apply, leaving me the last choice, "Other". Here is the response: "The office that can handle this issue is now closed. You are welcome to use our online request form on our web site at Double You Double You Double You DOT A T T DOT COM SLASH service. Do you want me to repeat that address?" asked Ms. Smooth AI Voice. "NO- I WANT TO SPEAK TO A F______ING HUMAN". "Thank you, Goodbye". At this point 45 minutes into the zaniness, I admit defeat. The Customer Service machine has trampled me completely. I surrender and accept my $3.19 is toast. I log onto my online account... Oops that does not work since they canceled my old card. I have to create a new profile for the new card number. I get in there, print and mail a dispute form, and then try to explain this circus via their online email form. This has an interesting feature. It provides a text entry box about 200 pixels wide, and lets me know I can write 20 lines of text. Thinking the box is sized appropriately, I mince details, leave out my cussing, and try to describe all the above events into that freakin' form box. It bounces back at me and says, "Please make your message 20 lines or less." Now how the sniffing corn cob am I supposed to know how long these 20 lines are? Are they 10 characters, 40, 72, 1028? Once again, AT&T is a huge corporate battleship with more programmers than I can even imagine, but they put up these inhumane web forms that like their phone systems, are psychologically rigged to knock you down again and again, Why the Sam Hill can I now fully write to them a detailed complaint? They are more than welcome to skim or ignore, but to cut me down at the knees at the point of entry is just the poorest of crappy design. At this point I am bouncing feverishly off the walls of my padded cell, where the red cushions bear the AT&T logo. They win. I am subdued and medicated. AT&T can know proudly claim their prize as the top of The CogSogBlog All Time Customer Service Hall of Shame. No one can win against them. cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days on the road: 98 Miles Driven: 9661 Number of States/Provinces driven in: 17 Number of US/Canadian Border Crossings: 2 Money spent on gas: $2604 Amount of time required to drive 47 miles from Falls Church VA to Baltimore DC: 2.5 hours (frustration: infinite) Photos posted: 2056 (that is an average of 20.0 per day) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of days missed due to colds: 3 (thanks to my sister for letting me crash at her house in Baltimore) Best home-made chicken soup: Harriet's! Number of books read: 11 (Most recent: Cloud Atlas) Number of nights in hotels/B&B: 9 Number of nights camping: 16 Number of Nights of Bavastock Craziness: 1 (4 to go!) cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of wears of Jim Groom's Favorite T-Shirt: 1 (I saved it for him) Number of re-visits to key places in my past: 4 (old neighborhood on Campfield Road; DeerPark Tavern and Geology Department at University of Delaware; Location where Dominoe Disappeared; Camp Glyndon) Number of new forms of transportation: 4 (paddleboard, Jet Ski, 4 wheel Quad, tractor) Best Beach Walk: Batchawana Bay Provincial Park cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Number of Old Fashioned Scrabble Games with my sister: 3 (e.g. not on our iPhones) Friend/Relatives Homes Visited/Mooched Upon: 26 Best Bike Ride: Canmore to Banff and back with D'Arcy Norman. Best Town Name: Fracking, Pennsylvania Laundry Stops: 12 Number of former Camp Glyndon Friends Met: 1 (thanks Terri!) Alas, my pile of things to blog about the UdG Agora project is more like the pile of stones than the finished end piece. Here I will describe what went into the main project web site http://udg.theagoraonline.net/ -- and as all my web sites go, they are never quite done; some organization needs to happen. [caption id="attachment_45424" align="aligncenter" width="246"] The main web site (click for full size image)[/caption] This is the typical kind of rolly scrolly web site that seems to be the norm these days- a jQuery powered slideshow of images at the top, and roll down sections of icons and things as links, and a three column footer. Wordpress Theme shopping these days is often more chore than pleasure, as themes get to be more like theme operating systems, its hard to know how the innards work, and what from the slick demo you can easily change and what needs code tweaking under the hood. Here is the way it looks on the iPad, in portrait orientation the slide title gets clipped a little, I can live with it: [caption id="attachment_45436" align="aligncenter" width="480"] UdG Agoa Site on iPad[/caption] And on the iPhone small screen it's pretty good too. [caption id="attachment_45437" align="aligncenter" width="360"] UdG agora on iPhone[/caption] The Theme I feel lucky with the choice here- this is the Wall Street Business Theme from Graph Paper Press. That's the thing about themes, just because it is billed as "a responsive WordPress business theme for savvy entrepreneurs and startups" does not mean the functionality can be used for a project. You have to look at theme demos are structural parts of the house, not the paint and trim. I've had an account with Graph Paper Press for a while; first using them for the MIDEA site I built while at NMC (still running, good). Their themes are HTML5 enabled, responsive, and mostly what I like, more geared to display of media (i use another one of theirs on my Photography site). The top slideshow is easily set up, and you can use options to provide link buttons, so I use it to point to four main sections of the site. The text on top of images looks great (in demos); in practice you need to choose images for say mostly dark tones if the text is light. And with responsive design, you are never quite sure where the text will sit. For the left side "UDG Agora" text (we did not have a logo, and the name looks good there) I added some custom CSS To give the default black text a bit of a white halo. On multisite Wordpress I almost always Network activate the Simple Custom CSS plugin as themes do not always consistently provide this in their interface. I have found I can do a fair bit of customization by hiding or changing CSS easier than changing theme templates. For this text effect, I added the white with a text-shadow and bumped the size and weight: h1.site-title a { text-shadow: -1px -1px 0 #FFFDFD, 1px -1px 0 #FFFDFD, -1px 1px 0 #FFFDFD, 1px 1px 0 #FFFDFD; color: #222; font-size: 1.4em; font-weight: 900; } Home Page Sections The sections on the front page, are configured in the Theme Settings. I like that the theme avoids custom post types, all of these content types are controlled by post categories, using featured images in the posts for the different ways they are displayed. I just have to keep track that the section for "Work" (on a business site used to describe projects, etc) is really the part where I list the Studios. Ones that read "Chose Category" are thus de-activated. And you can drag them to change the order. [caption id="attachment_45426" align="aligncenter" width="549"] Editing the Front Page Sections[/caption] The different sections have either 3 or 4 or 5 icons across, and differ a bit on if they display an excerpt or not. I ended up manual editing some of the template files to make them do what I wanted. I broke my usual role of Child Theming this site (I was in a rush to get it ready for July), but see little reason I'd ever update the core theme (those might be words to be eaten later). When themes have parts spewed about in all kinds of content and part files in various sub directories, I find child theming gets to be a headache. I organized studies in a category, and created sub-categories for different groups used on the menus [caption id="attachment_45427" align="aligncenter" width="630"] Studio Categories[/caption] Ordering them in reverse chronological order serves no purpose, and leads to changing the published dates to manually force the sort you want, so I wrote a custom function (in functions.php) to make the studio categories picked from the database in alpha order. The best way to do this (according to the Codex) is to run a query mod before it gets done with pre_get_posts /* custom code for UDG Agora by @cogdog */ function agora_studio_alpha( $query ) { // mod the main query sort Studio Category by title if ( is_category( array('studios', 'foundational', 'espanol', 'selected' ) ) ) { $query->set( 'orderby', 'title' ); $query->set( 'order', 'ASC' ); return; } } add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'agora_studio_alpha', 1 ); The one cheat I do is to put a "*" in front of the title of the three Foundational studios so they will be first listed when listed among the others. As much of the content- studios, the people profiles -- are organized as posts but the date is not really important, I made some mods to override the display of a post date, which is not all that relevant. In digging around the theme code, I find that a lot of the content is referenced in places like archive.php (the template the displays the category archives, etc) is written as get_template_part( 'content', get_post_format() ); This is the construct most modern themes use, the format comest from a content.php template. I've seen some themes that require about 4 jumps through various templates, includes to actually find what is being output. But here is pretty simple, in the main content.php template, how stuff is displayed on most archives, I find that the post meta data (the date and author that appears under the title) is done by an external function. This means I have to rummage around the inc directory to find this function inside another file template-tags.php (this is a case where BB Edit's multifile search really handy). function wallstreet_posted_on() { $time_string = '%2$s'; if ( get_the_time( 'U' ) !== get_the_modified_time( 'U' ) ) { $time_string .= '%4$s'; } $time_string = sprintf( $time_string, esc_attr( get_the_date( 'c' ) ), esc_html( get_the_date() ), esc_attr( get_the_modified_date( 'c' ) ), esc_html( get_the_modified_date() ) ); printf( __( '%1$s by %2$s', 'wall street' ), sprintf( '%2$s', esc_url( get_permalink() ), $time_string ), sprintf( '%2$s', esc_url( get_author_posts_url( get_the_author_meta( 'ID' ) ) ), esc_html( get_the_author() ) ) ); } Geez what a pile of mumbo jumbo- it's doing some work to assemble a time stamp, and also uses some functions ot generate the link for the post author. My strategy is to modify this function, so I can say "sometimes I want you to print the post date (e.g. for news stories) and sometimes not." I make this happen by creating a new variable the function expects, and assign a default value that makes it work the current way the function does- so if somewhere the theme calls wallstreet_posted_on(); it still works the same way. I call this $showtime and if it is not defined, it's assume to be true, meaning "show the time"! I then put a conditional around the part of the function that builds the time stamp, so it only does this is $showtime is true; if I use elsewhere in a template wallstreet_posted_on(false); then the timestamp should not be displayed. Here is my modified function function wallstreet_posted_on( $showtime=true ) { // added param to allow hiding of time by @cogdog if ($showtime) { $time_string = '%2$s'; if ( get_the_time( 'U' ) !== get_the_modified_time( 'U' ) ) { $time_string .= '%4$s'; } $time_string = sprintf( $time_string, esc_attr( get_the_date( 'c' ) ), esc_html( get_the_date() ), esc_attr( get_the_modified_date( 'c' ) ), esc_html( get_the_modified_date() ) ); } printf( __( '%1$s by %2$s', 'wall street' ), sprintf( '%2$s', esc_url( get_permalink() ), $time_string ), sprintf( '%2$s', esc_url( get_author_posts_url( get_the_author_meta( 'ID' ) ) ), esc_html( get_the_author() ) ) ); } So when $showtime is false, $time_string is null, and the first sprintf has nothing to print. Is anyone left reading this? This means that the news listings do show date and author: And the Studio Categories, say for Learner Selected Studios, show only the author: And the ones for our people profiles... WAIT A MINUTE THERE IS NOTHING THERE! I am tricky. The listings for people do not need a date or an author displayed (each of us wrote our own profile on the site). I did some CSS to just hide this content, adding in my custom CSS editor .category-people .entry-meta { display: none;} Page Structuring I set up a structure for static information, what I called "How To Participate" which is really a guidebook, as a page structure, where I use subpages and subpages of subpages to create outlines. This is a thing I have done on the DS106 Handbook and for the You Show and other sites. I let the page structure define the relationships, and use the Page List plugin to display them as indices / table of contents. It's a super flexible plugin with a heap of options. But the idea is that these are generated dynamically, so adding or removing a page from the site affects anywhere the shortcode is used. For the How to participate Guide, it is all generated by this shortcode [pagelist_ext child_of="current" parent="86" sort_column="menu_order" image_width="140" limit_content="200"] The options are to display children of the current page (it's id is 86, the parent option is required to keep it from doing the while sub page structure). Pages are sorted by the Menu Order option on each page, so I can control the display by giving pages higher on the list a low number. And the image options tell it to use the featured image. You can use these shortcodes in widgets too; and for entire page structure, you simple put something like this in a page: [pagelist] For a complete hierarchal listing of all pages on the site (this is in fact used on a page where I have a Map of all links -- everything in the list starting with Welcome to the Agora is done with this plugin. But Wait, There's More! And I did not even talk about the footers and its widgets (I modded the footer template to include sponsor logos and a Creative Commons statement. The "back door" is actually the admin login/logout link. My colleagues kept asking for the login link and did not like it when I said "just slap /admin on the end of the site URL I also have some tricks for using custom fields to hold a URL so that a load of the page links elsewhere, it was a way to set up the Challenge Icons listing on the front page- the posts are used to display the titles and featured image, but the URL when clicked is defined by the contents of a custom post field. There are a few more tricks in the site, but I've babbled on a bit much. I have a lot to write up, next (I think) a bit on the Daily Try site and some insight into what my Studio sessions included. But I am super pleased with the style and feel of this site, there might be some things to tweak still for the sidebars. Top /Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons creative commons licensed image https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dry_stone_wall_building.JPG (cross posted from 106tricks.net just because I am so excited about tonight's ds106 in class activity) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOaP2myiWPs This is the result of tonight's in class ds106 challenge. As we are starting audio, I did a little explanation of the role of the foley artist in film and radio. Students formed 5 groups, and each group was charged with creating sound effects for a specified 30 second segment of Charlie Chaplin's In the Lion's Cage. They could use any props in the room or their own body. I played the video back with the sound muted, and asked the groups to perform the effects live. The video above was edited to overlay the audio I recorded. They did pretty damn good for only have 15 minutes to plan their sounds. My only small disappointment was a lack of a Willhelm Scream. My thanks for Scott Lockman with whom a skype conversation the other night generated the idea for this activity. Don't ask about the yeast. Ok, I would ask about it. I was awake at 5:30am today to turn on the lights for the Google Hangout session with folks at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Cairo held at the American University Cairo (AUC). In the warm up time before the hangout goes live, the virtual buddies who log on early to check connections etc, end up having a bit of fun chit chat. Michael Berman was apologizing for some poor wifi connectivity at a hotel in Davis, California, and was sharing about his visit, making a reference to the winery program. Michael was going on about what he learned about yeast... and I joked that yeast might come up in the middle of our session, and we would be the only ones to laugh. Well in the chat, Michael got there first: A. Michael Berman 6:49 AM: fermenting ideas in the middle yeast Enough yeast! Besides Michael, our virtual buddies included Autumm Caines (from Columbus), George Station (first time George and I were synchronous), Mark Johnstone (from Doha), and Susan Adams (from Portland, and new to VConnecting she is on fire in her excitement). As you can see a screen capture, there was an even larger group in Cairo. For some reason the camera was really blurry, but the audio was really clear (thanks for using a wireless mic). I might miss some folks, but if I recall, from left to right, that is Jose (originally from Mozambique, now at ?? AUC??), Nadine Aboulmagd (our onsite buddy from AUC), in the back is Dimitris Tzouris (from Greece, who I've known online back to the ds106 era but never talked to live), Sean Michael Morris (facilitator/participant from Hybrid Pedagogy), David Wrisley (from Beirut I think), Maha Bali (head turned, everyone knows her), ??? in the back I forget her name (Sorry), and Maha Abdelmoneim (AUC and frequent VConnector). This post won't be much of a summary, but I will try to write some highlights. Besides we have the full archive https://youtu.be/nqJZmY4zQ3I As host, I try to always toss in a surprise question for the round of intros; for today's session I asked the virtual buddies to tell us who they are, from where, what they do, and... the closest they have been to Egypt (as it turns out George wins; while in the Navy he visited Alexandria). For the folks in Cairo, I asked them to do the same but tell us the closes they have been to one of the places the Virtual buddies are from. Today was actually a one day post-Institute unconference, so we got some updates on how the format worked and things that stood out for people. They used an open Google Doc to propose the sessions and apparently each session recorded some outcomes/notes from their sessions, so there is a pretty good record of went on. Sean noted it was valuable to have the unconference at the end, as there was much discussion and idea sharing in the institute, and this was a good way to put some of them into practice (or is it praxis?) before people left. Susan put out a great question: Bonnie spoke about how being networked has "changed her mind". I am curious if anyone had that experience - that in fact they changed their mind about something? And we heard a lot of affirmation for mind changes. George (who amused me with an Arnold Horshack reference) asked about how to carry the collaboration forward- with some discussion following about networking, and how things happen across modes and spaces. More than one person in Cairo described their surprise that Autumm was actually in the US during the Institute, because they said her presence was so strong that they felt like she was in Cairo (Susan too, as I think she was in all VConnecting sessions). Okay those are notes I have from the chat... I'm fuzzy on the rest. The group in Cairo had to go, but I was glad that George, Mark, and Susan wanted to stay on and keep the conversation going. Susan wanted some tips to help her address the conservative approach to teach at her institution. I enjoyed seeing the photo that Dimitris tweeted, as it was a view from the room different from our perspective looking in (ignore the laughing goober on the screen) https://twitter.com/DimitrisTzouris/status/712638536793595904 And a subsequent tweet Maha asked how long he and I knew each other https://twitter.com/Bali_Maha/status/712650285815054337 That's the thing, with people I have a long experience being connected to, virtually and sometimes eventually in person, that moment we met each other blurs into the distance horizon. https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/712651033588027393 And this leads me to another thought- it seems like in our field there is this desire to go big, to scale, to teach hundreds of thousands, to affect an entire sector. Scale at the dimension is really only achieved by a process of mass duplication where the level of heart-felt connectivity is probably low. But here, in the span of less than an hour, we had a rich personal connection among many people. I met for the first time Jose, Nadine, David, Susan, Mark -- I reinforced past (asynchronous) connections with George and Dimitris, Sean who I met briefly at MLA, and then I amplify the ones with people I have connected before- Autumm, Michael, both Mahas. Not massive in numbers, but massively effective in growing strong(er) personal/professional/blurred connections. I'll take the latter every time. It keeps rising. Like yeast. See? Yeast. Top / Featured Image: A screen capture I got in the middle of today's Virtual Connecting hangout, from the full archive video on YouTube. from original by cogdogblog After a long break, I've started running again (that's another yet blogged bit, but not the point today), and am doing so listening on the iPOd to Chris Anderson's book Free on audiobook (the one I packaged from his free mp3 recordings) So there's a section where he's talking about Moore's Law and how computing power has become almost free (the part of figuring a transistor costs $0000000.something was powerful). In the 1960s access to the CPU was guarded by sys admins so thus the use of CPU cycles was designed to be sparse. A few pioneers wondered what it would take to move beyond this, what Chris as "wasting" CPUs essentially using more of it than just for tasks, and some envisioned even then that it would be a computer in the home. Yet no one could figure out what anyone would do with a computer, so the very first home computer.... was designed to organize recipes-- the Honeywell H316 -- which was a dismal flop. Here's the gap I did not hear as Anderson described what it took- he leaps right to Alan Kay's concept in 1968 of a Dyanbook which used CPU power on user interface, icons, mouse action, etc. Anderson completely ignores that already in December 1968 Doug Engelbart and his team at SRI had already built and demonstrated by this time -- Anderson somehow ignores the Mother of All Demos http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html probably the most amazing demonstration of modern computing interface and network principles in an era when computing was done on a mainframe with punch cards. Doug Engelbart must be the most un-credited and overlooked pioneer in any field. And that is a shame. Free is a great listen/read so far, but this gap to me really jumps out. Maybe someone more learned can tell me that I am over reacting, but till then, I'm out there pounding the pavement with my iPod on. We just got the notification for our presentation on our Ocotillo projects at the League For Innovation's "Innovations 2005" conference to be held March in New Yoirk City. The conference is tagged as: Join the most innovative community college professionals as they come together to improve student and organizational learning through innovation, experimentation, and institutional transformation. Yet, in 2005, when the World Wide Web is almost 15 years old, and completely interweaves just about all aspects of an educational organization, the notification includes: PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING: Session rooms DO NOT come equipped with an Internet connection. The cost of the Internet connection will be the financial responsibility of the presenter. The current rate for the connection through the Marriott Marquis is $750. If you would like to order an Internet connection, please email me at XXXXXX@league.org and I will forward you the appropriate information. I can accept that the limitation is the conference site facilities (yet dis-regarding the fact that many conferences these days manage to bring in an efficent wireless capability), but hardly the the irony of "Innovations" coming at a net access cost of $750 clams. It is not a tremendous work around, heck, I think a PowerPoint with lots of bullets will do (that was sarcasm). I am prepared to bring our web sites and run them as local internet apps from my Powerbook, no big deal, but it does mean that I am unable to surf during dull sessions or able to blog live. It is seems rather bizarre. It's almost been two weeks since I brought home Felix, a two year old Australian Shepherd / Catahoula mix, from the Payson, AZ Human Society. My routines now are adjusted to walks, feeding, and giving attention. None of this is any kind of problem, this dog is so sweet and playful. I love him dearly. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] One of the beneficial routine changes is a lot more walking / leading into hiking (since I am practically in the middle of National Forest land). This is already benefiting in me shedding a few pounds. I've been measuring pretty regularly, and have been using an old but favorite service, Your Flowing Data, something I remember playing around with back in 2008 or so. It's pretty clever, because you submit data by sending a direct message via twitter (thus it's date stamped), but also because you create your own data vocabulary. It was Nathan Yau's project when he was a grad student at UCLA: We make tiny choices every day. Those choices become habits, and those habits develop into behaviors. your.flowingdata helps you record these choices. Use your.flowingdata (YFD) to collect data about yourself and your surroundings via Twitter. Record what you eat, when you go to sleep, how much television you watch, or whatever else you want. What you track is completely up to you. I dabbled previously with recording my blood sugar levels, when i was running, or biking. All you need to do is use a consistent word like "ran 3.5" for running 3.5 miles or running 3.5 hours. It can generate charts, graphs, and interesting representations. So I started last month DM-ing my morning weights. But it looks like the graphing features are broken; I emailed Nathan, and he replied that while it was an old project, he was working on it. I'm still sending data there for now. And I can see that in the time I have gotten Felix, the 4 or 5 pound range my weight fluctuates has dropped about 5 pounds lower. Then I remembered that one of the Dreaded iPhone Apps You Are Not Allowed to Delete is a Health app. Checking it out, I saw that, though manual entry, I could enter my weight data here. And then I saw something odd. I was not aware that the Health app had been tracking my walking distances (as well as step values). What the creep was this? Is it spying? But then, what it's doing is cool! Here is my before/after Felix life chart: Between 2 shorter works and a much longer one, we did almost 5 miles a day, and my average has gone from 1 or less miles per day walking to almost 3. How does it do this? Since the iPhone 5, and now with my newer iPhone 6s, the device has carried a special motion sensor (first the M7, mine is an M9) that does this outside of the main CPU, in a lower mode, and is doin so without GPS, more with accelerometers. That's what I read. So it can tell the difference in my motion between walking, biking, and driving? That's pretty wild... and?? If we think darkly, where does that data go? Will me insurance company maybe know if I am physically active or not? It seems wildly possible, if a bit improbable. The thing I have not figured out is (and I only searched for a bit), where does this data go? How much is stored? What can access it? It looks like if it detects I am in motion, it is saving data every 5 minutes. But again, is it store only on the phone? In a C|net article on the Health App it states: This is just the beginning for Health, and it's clear that the app has a long way to go. Most disappointing is the fact that users can not export their data. For Health to be truly useful, users should be able to save their data into spreadsheets or export it into other apps. Maybe I should be worried about the dark conspiracy, but I am more bothered by the fact that the device is recording my data, but not letting be get at my data. I cannot see any geolocation data with the it, but does that mean it's not recorded? Thus it is not my data? And thus, I am perplexed- because what it is doing for me is handy; just by carrying the phone on my walks, I am charting my activity. Creepy or cool? Not sure. What I am sure is that I love this dog. And he's getting me more active. [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license[/caption] Top / Featured Image: From today's 3 mile walk with Felix... flickr photo https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/26536016795 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I was born in Dixie in a boomer's shack Just a little shanty by the railroad track Freight train was it taught me how to cry The holler of the driver was my lullaby I snapped a series of photos of this freight train going by out on the Santa Fe tracks behind La Posada (a true western gem and proof that there is much more in Winslow than a tacky corner). The quick series was in hope of doing an animated GIF, as I fiddled in Photoshop, I wondered about applying filter effects on each frame, maybe trying to make it flash like an old movie. Well that did not happen, but a combination of the black and white adjustments and some edge filters gave it a surreal effect. No real message here, just making a GIF. And in a few weeks I will be headed in this direction from a train I will catch in Flagstaff for a kong journey... It has been more than three years since I did the first iteration of 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story (that was October 15, 2007 in Hobart, Tasmania). It's been on my mind for months to recast the site into a new version. Much of the information needs updates, some of the tools have fallen off the vine-- it was time for a fresh coat of paint. I got the perfect driving inspiration when a colleague asked me to do a version of the workshop for the 2010 Museum Computer Network Conference a week ago, in Austin. I had nailed down a new wikispaces site and got most of the structure set up in time for the conference, and the new home is at http://www.mcn.edu/mcn-2010-austin. It has the three parts of the story making process (Outline a story Idea, Find Media, and Pick a Tool). I have my 50+ Dominoe Stories. There are New Tools to be added and the Island of Lost Tools. What remains are the updates on all the tools, which feels like its going to take 50 days or weeks or... The question surely one would ask, "Well you do have this in a wiki, why not let others write it for you?" I do have an answer-- wikis are great for collecting raw info, brainstorming, but I've found for a structured web site-- well people will kind of crap all over the wiki. They do not intend to, but I have a clear design in mind, so the entire first version of the site was only editable by me. I have a way around this using a seldom known feature of wikis I first got into with MediaWiki, but is also present in Wikispaces. It is the concept of includes. So I can have pages in my wiki that are only editable by me, but I can designate a place in the wiki to insert the content of another wikipage-- and since that one I can make editable, it means I can allow people to edit the content for select portions of the page. There are other ways to use such includes- common sidebar navigations, page footers. The beauty is you can use these on multiple pages, and if you change the original, all the changes are seen on pages that include the original. It is extremely powerful. In the Wikispaces editor, this is one of the widgets- and from the list of options, choose Contents of a Wiki Page So I just need to make these stub content pages for the content I want to leave open and editable, and on the main page, just provide a way for people to get to the stubs (anyone wishing to do this must join the wiki). The other problem was that giant long tools page, it listed them all, the examples, and more. It had over 750 hyperlinks hanging off of it (I ran a link check on it and watched the progress). I know people got value out of the full list, but I had an inkling to do a bit more. So the new structure, of which there are only a handful built out completely, will be each tool has its own page. This allows me to do some other tricks to automatically generate the List of Tools pages, and even other pages tat will list, say all the Slideshow tools. The trick is to tag each tool page with a tag of say 50tools and I will have a complete A-Z index page by using one of the other widgets to List all Pages with a tag; a list for each kind of tool (see Slideshow Tools), and the main Story Tools index will have the tools grouped by type (multiple widgets hanging in a table there) -- these is only a partial example now because most of the individual tools pages are not created, but by using tags, these lists automatically update them selves since they are based on tags: I have new features on the new individual tools pages. Each will include a tool type (linked to the tools type pages so you can see other timeline tools, for example). There will be a screen shot of the tool and the editing screen. I am adding a listing of the types of media you can import and the other media that is available from a library. The example of the Dominoe story created for each will be linked, but the embedded version will be right there on the page. The new editable sections will include: tool description- these change so I'd welcome help in filling out and correction the descriptions. Examples If you create something with any of the tools, you can add your own link, and like all of the editable content areas, I ask people to add the code for a wiki signature (~~~~) which when published converts to a time stamp and link to the user that edited the page. Impressions This is a place to say more about how well the tool worked or did not work for you, as useful information for others when they are reviewing the tools. Below is an example showing where these new features are on the Tool page for Slide: The other pages that are open to edit is the one for new tools and the part of the Story Media page that lists sources of media. I have set up a new page that describes the ways you can contribute to the new site. And because I do not have all of the places ready to add examples, I have a Google form embedded there so you can get me information about your examples. I'm feeling really good about this new design, and actually it wont take 50 years or months, or maybe not even 50 days to round out the site. I am really happy with the features the Wikispaces offer, and there are even more things under the hood I've yet to tap into. So join the wiki if you think you'd like to help, and keep tuned for the new tool pages as the sprout up. Th new 50+ Ways site again is at http://50ways.wikispaces.com/. You just slip out the back, Jack Make a new plan, Stan You don't need to be coy, Roy Just get yourself free Hop on the bus, Gus You don't need to discuss much Just drop off the key, Lee And get yourself free. I was so glad I tuned into a Virtually Connecting session this week from the Digital Pedagogy Institute at UMW on Inclusive Globally Networked Learning (all materials including the video link are there). This session was led by three educators from three different (non US) countries - Maha Bali from Egypt, Kate Bowles from Australia, and Paul Prinsloo from South Africa (Maha and Kate were really virtual, Paul was really on site at UMW). I'd urge you to read Kate's deeply thoughtful follow-up post US/not us. I ended up yet again down another looking back / looking forward moment from one of their activities. I almost want to write a post at how effectively they created a session that was so participatory, but will focus on the one where they asked participants to add to an open Google Doc a response to the question "What kinds of images, names, people, issues come quickly to mind about the places we’re from?". Even many years after my first live document sharing experience (before Google acquired what was then known as Writely) - it is still electrifying to be writing in the same document at the same time as multiple people in other places. I must admit my first thoughts for Egypt are terribly stereotypical. Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments. Pyramids and Pharaohs. The Suez Canal. Arab Spring. Sometime tonight, maybe while washing dishes or dog walking, my brain totally remembered an experience with Egypt I had forgotten about. In the mid 1990s, I was working as an instructional technologist at the central office of the Maricopa Community Colleges in Phoenix, then fiddling with a crude early web, Hypercard, and Macromedia Director. I remembered a project we did when Jon Lea Fimbres, a counseling faculty at Paradise Valley Community College, left the system to join her husband who was appointed superintendent of the Cairo American College. Jon Lea left with ideas of projects she would do there. I think it was our center's director, Naomi Story, who came up with the idea of asking Jon Lea to write some articles for our publication about her experience living and working in Egypt. It may have been my idea to do a web site about her experiences too but publishing a series of her emails back to us. Hence was born this vintage 1996 web site, with it's HTML tables, font tags crude layout that still renders quite fine 10 years later -- it was originally published at http://mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mobius/egypt/ but as all my old web sites were mothballed, I reclaimed it and made it available at http://mcli.cogdogblog.com/mobius/egypt/. Okay, the Sphinx head graphic is so cliché -- but it's an original. At the time a student named Tony worked in out office, and he would use some Mac software I forget its name (it came in a real paint can) to create graphics for our projects. I think he picked the image. I enjoyed reading through some her messages, yes again, this is an American's perspective in Egypt, but as a seasoned international educator, Jon Lea wrote insightfully of her experience. From her first message, September 26, 1996: This is a special moment! You are my first e-mail American contact! The internet is a fabulous security blanket. I am only a key-stroke away. ... Thankfully we bought our computer. We settled on a Performa ( simple but effective and within our budget). As it turns out our school is installing fiber-optics and networking and up-grading.....therefore few computers are running at full capacity at this time. Having a home computer gives me a great deal of freedom and in a land of "different roles for women", it is nice to have choices. ... "Living" in Egypt has many advantages. We have been able to discover parts of Egypt that aren't on most tourist stops. People are generous, kind and patient with foreigners. Egyptians seem to get a lot of entertainment out of watching and helping all of us adjust. They have dealt with intruders for thousands of years. I want to share this side of Egypt with you. It's not a huge number of messages, about 11 from 1996 to 1999, plus 9 short articles she wrote for our journal. [caption id="attachment_60394" align="aligncenter" width="560"] A "post" from Jon Lea in our MCLIU Forum publication, 1997[/caption] In February 1998, she wrote "Never Felt Safer" following a terrorist (before we called them that?) attack on tourists at the Luxor pyramid. The media was very quick to report the shootings and deaths of visitors to a temple in Luxor. That was important and tragic news. BUT what the media did not do is follow-up on the reactions and precautions of the Egyptian people after the tragedy. Within a day there was a national sense of mourning and grief. Throughout Egypt there was a personal, as well as, collective display of sadness and loss. There were many peaceful gatherings of Egyptians to show their concern for the families of the Luxor visitors and by gathering together peacefully, the Egyptian people were making an effort to remind us all that the terrible behaviors of 5 or 6 does not reflect the nature of millions. Shopkeepers were publicly apologizing, banners and signs were posted denouncing the violence and roses were gently given to visitors to show the compassion and understanding of suffering that the Egyptian people seem to naturally share with others. When an Egyptian greets you with a friendly, "Welcome to Egypt" it is a very genuine invitation to share in the pride and history of their amazing country. ... Because of this strong sense of family and religious values and a legal system that has very strict, rapid consequences, I feel safer in Cairo living alone while my husband travels than I did in Phoenix. I know that everyone in the neighborhood is looking out for anything unusual and will take action against anything strange they see going on. There is not a strong sense of materialism yet, so most people are not coveting designer products and all of the gadgets of the West. ... As I travelled home for the holidays, I was amazed at the concern of Americans about this region, while we as Americans seem to be increasingly numb to the regular acts of violence in our own country. While I was flying home I was reading a U.S. newspaper describing the tragic high school shooting in a prayer group, the holding hostage of 60 kindergarten students and the trial of the Oklahoma bombing suspects. It seemed ironic that my seat-mate was asking me, "How I could live in such an unsafe place like Egypt?" Has 2016 really advanced much from 1996? Jon Lea's message from August 1999 brought up the importance of listening that was spoken much at UMW this week-- I think I mentioned it in my message to her (which I did not think to include in the site, it was meant to be her publication space. But she did respond with sharing a listening poem "When Someone Deeply Listens to You" by John Fox When someone deeply listens to you it is like holding out a dented cup you've had since childhood and watching it fill up with cold, fresh water. When it balances on top of the brim, you are understood. When it overflows and touches your skin, you are loved. When someone deeply listens to you, the room where you stay starts a new life and the place where you wrote your first poem begins to glow in your mind's eye. It is as if gold has been discovered! When someone deeply listens to you, your bare feet are on the earth and a beloved land that seemed distant is now at home within you. There was another work Jon Lea shared called "Welcome to Egypt" by an artist named ginda simpson Allah has willed that you live temporarily in Egypt. Submit. Like sunshine, Egypt will help you grow if you don€t pull down the blinds. Be discreet. Be friendly. Be sensitive. Hear the call to prayer. And pray. Laugh often. Drink Stella only when necessary. Never ask directions if you want to find your destination...When you drive, honk your horn. Remember that goats always have the right of way. Be a child. You are living in the world's largest sandbox. Dust often or don't dust at all. Discover freedom on a felucca. Remember that the mosque is a house of God. Be gentle to the donkeys and the children. Their lives are harsh. Fast at least one day during Ramadan. Then break the fast with a Moslem friend. There is still magic and mystery in this ancient land. Savor the moments. Again, I cannot assert that this is an accurate depiction of Egypt, as it is, via the words of a Westerner there. But as I read Jon Lea's words, I feel she was rather proactive in exploring Kate's "not us"-ness. And even if not a full picture of Egypt, it is much more than my meager set of movie/cliché Egypt associations. Last year I did connect with Jon Lea by email, she is retired in Tucson, and I owe her a visit. I might ask her to comment and reflect on her time there now some 10 years later. Top / Featured Image: A graphic form a web site I built in 1996, previously published (now gone) at http://mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mobius/egypt/ but reclaimed and available at http://mcli.cogdogblog.com/mobius/egypt/. The image, a bit stereotypical, was created by a student worked named Tony Zeka using a Mac software I cannot remember except that it literally came in a paint can. I keep recording the audio "skyperview" and "iRiverView" interviews I am doing for the upcoming article I am not yet writing, and have 21 now in the collection: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/podcast.html Most of these were colleagues I cornered with my mp3 recorder, as well as a few more audio devices So added to the list: * Eric Feinblatt and Michael Feldstein-- from the SUNY system, we were having a Skype conversation so I just tagged on the interview http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/eric_and_michael.mp3 * Shelley Rodrigo-- English faculty at Mesa Community College (one of the 10 Maricopas) when she dropped by my office to chat about her work with our Ocotillo Hybrid Structures action group. She's one energetic teacher! http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/shelley_rodrigo.mp3 * Cheryl Colan-- wears many hats as a part time Media Technician at Phoenix College (another Maricopa), part time web designer for me at MCLI, as well as a talented digital video editor and digital storytelling expert. She had an iPod borrowed from another faculty member along with the Belkin attachment mmicrophone... we got audio, but I'm not impressed with the sound quality. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/cheryl_colan.mp3 * Roger Yohe-- Faculty Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, Estrella Mountain Community College (yes, another Maricopa site). This was interesting. We were using his school's Wimba server for an online audio meeting that had Roger on the west side of town, myself in Tempe, Jim Patterson in North Phoenix, and John Arle from central Phoenix. I would have recorded it directly into my WireTapPro, but Wimba hung by Mac browser, and I had to shift to the Dell laptop. So this audio was transmitted via Wimba but recorded with my little trusty iRiver mp3 recorder. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/roger_yohe.mp3 * Maureen Zimmerman -- Nutrition faculty at Mesa Community College, but on loan to our office as Director Iand my boss). Recorded with the iRiver in her office. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/maureen_zimmerman.mp3 In anticipation for Saturday’s presentation of the Certificates project at the Creative Commons Global Summit this is yet another round at explaining the architecture (still developing), as likely a lot of details will not be covered. My idea/goal/dream has been not to pick or designate a single platform for the certificate (at least for the content part) but design it in a way that could flow into many platforms. This means a source content constructed in Markdown the lightweight plaintext markup language. Here are the presentation slides... It Starts in GitHub The ultimate source for the Certificates content will be GitHub repositories, one for the “core” content that is part of all certifications (Copyright, the Commons, Licenses, Sociocultural issues, Legal issues, and Using CC tools) plus specialty repos for the Librarian Certificate, Educator Certificate, and Government Certificate. Everybody but programmers will likely shirk when the see those places. They are not the expected point of entry expected for people who wish to make their own versions of the content. And when you see the way it looks, you might say “Hmmm that is pretty plain.” Github view of Commons Module Unit “Digital vs Physical Commons” As it is, because Markdown includes only content and structure, not presentation. And now I take a break for a metaphorical intermission… knowing full well the risk of metaphors. A Construction Metaphor I share with you a photo of a humble 900 square foot home mine. My House flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I know it was built in 1977, because my former neighbor, Jack, who owned the brown house you can see just to the right, built his house in 1975 and knew the people that build mine. This is what Jack’s house looks like: From the Same Kit flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) His house is a different color, he added a back solarium and a garage, the room layouts inside are different– but they are at their core, the same house. He told me how he got his house as a “kit” called “O’Malley’s Easy Do” which came as a delivery of pre-coconstructed trusses, load bearing walls, support beams, that he and his family assembled into their home. My house was built from the same kit but looks quite different. It’s not uncommon for new home developments to offer buyers a range of customization options from a common set, but back in the 1970s people not only got the options, they put it together themselves. My case for the metaphor is that the Markdown content, it’s outline structure, are like the major support features of a home- beams, trusses, wall units, but as people who might want to assemble ones, you can put on top of that many other options to change the appearance, to re-arrange the interior walls, and to build it in a variety of locations. Building a Certificate House in WordPress The Markdown content of the certificates can certainly be accessed, used, even copied easily in the GitHub format, but that is not where we are suggesting people work. The work I have been doing is to make that Markdown flow into a few other platforms to show a variety of ways the content could be published/customized. Our primary (ont not only) effort has been WordPress for many reasons, not only the fact that it is the platform that W3Tech suggests run almost 27% of all web sites. Via the Jetpack plugin (or a few other plugins), Markdown content can be directly entered into the editor, and publishes as standard HTML, so it can flow directly into WordPress. The same unit above, publishes on our primary site: [note: link no longer available] but is not tied to a specific theme or template; here is the same content in a different theme: [note: link no longer available] The presentation part is one thing, but WordPress offers some other special features I am taking advantage of. The content is all based on a common outline structure for all representations of the certificate: [note: links no longer available] Top Level Page (overview, delivery format, contents outline) Module introduction (example, The Commons) Unit (example, the Digital vs Physical Commons) Use the Page Attributes to define the Parent page (in this case a module) and the order of display within other unts This means we can use the WordPress Pages content type to create this outline, the parent/child relationships, and the menu order feature for each to control the order of display of modules and units. We then make use of the Page-List plugin to dynamically create the top navigation for all top level pages, as well as the right side index of modules and units. The nice thing about this is that the Pagelist plugin generates these dynamically, allowing a copy of the Certificate to have it’s contents re-ordered or even to remove a non-relevant section, and potentially to add a new one if desired. On the GitHub Markdown site, we have no internal navigation means, and any change in the order of a module or unit requires manual editing of the main table of contents and the module introduction page — in WordPress this is all dynamic based on the author decided ordering of Pages. If that is too much technobabble, the outline format is more flexible in WordPress. We can do other things as well, like automatically embedding media URLs (e.g. YouTube and vimeo videos). As they used to say on late night TV, but wait… there’s more. All the above is done with some codes in a small plugin that will be needed to run a copy of the certificate (along with the Page-List one that is all that will be required). But I have added some more editing options that will be part of any certificate content page. Certification editing options The top two radio buttons define which certification this is a part of and the type of page level in our outlne (this is needed to display the appropriate navigation links). The third field provides a place to enter attribution info for the footer; for example, the WordPress Featured image a site owner may use is outside of the certification content. Dynamically generated footer information; top box is optional attribution credit, bottom includes content versioning info The next field contains the URL for the source content on GitHub; if the box is checked, when saved, the content will be completely updated by the content at that URL, and thus notified in saving the page: Confirmation of update from GitHub (or an error message of something went wrong) The bottom data is fetched at the same time the plugin gets info from GitHub, we can read the current release version and date. What this means is that for the public versions we are doing no content editing in WordPress… all edits are done in GitHub and then pulled into WordPress. As a note, in a final plugin, these fields will not be editable except for an admin, the only one authors can modify will be the attribution (the plugin will also have options to authenticate to Github, for development this is hardwired to a single key). While technically GitHub is a point at which “forks” or copies of the certification could be made, it will be more useful if done at the WordPress level for those that want a WordPress version, where they would be editing more familiar WordPress content, not Markdown. One way this is done by creating an XML export of the WordPress content (whicy at that point is standard HTML), which could be installed in any other WordPress install. We have set up the public versions of the certificates in a WordPress Multisite, so the software, the themes and plugins are shared. While each of the ones we have set up so far look similar Core, Librarian, Educator, and Government — they are all separate sites. Also can instantly make more copies using the NS Cloner plugin so there re possible use cases we might host copies for other groups. The content is not limited to the theme we are using, it ought to work in many other themes (with possible need for custom CSS), see a demo version made by cloning A copy of the Core certification displayed in the Twenty Sixteen theme Building a Certificate House as Static HTML As a first proof of concept, we have made a demo version of the core certificate in a different platform, but using the same Markdown content from the source. This was created with Hugo a static web site generator using the Hugo Learn documentation theme. Hugo processes the Markdown content, with extra header information that, like WordPress, indicates if it is an index page and a parameter to indicate the page order, and generates a stand alone HTML web site with all internal navigation built in. The entire system needed to make a copy and publish in Hugo can be forked from the GitHub repository for this demo site — this is a better point to be making copies of the Certificates content then the Markdown Source. A Yet to Be Built Third House As another proof of concept we are planning to move a copy of the Markdown content into the Gitbook publishing platform — this too will provide a clean web friendly version of the content, plus PDF and ePub versions that could potentially be used in places of poor or no internet connectivity. Does the Kit Home Metaphor Fit? That’s what we hope to see in the presentation… Featured Image: “Construction update: four walls, a roof” by Staff Sgt. Sarah Hanson US Government Public Domain photo. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Sorry I missed your birthday yesterday, Dad. I did get my calendar reminder, and woah, you'd be 87. Twenty years ago you were in Phoenix to climb Camelback Mountain for a special day. And the last one we celebrated together for your 75th is bittersweet with sadness and foreboding. Our birthdays less than a week apart, we shared our Taurus signs, for all the foofah that is astrology. but we shared that. I find myself relishing the time working in my yard, landscaping and nurturing the land, just like that guy i remember dutifully cutting the grass and trimming those monstrous forsythia bushes. And trying to get that dogwood tree to thrive. It feels familiar. I remember noticing at social events you tended more to listen than talk. It feels familiar. With much fondness I remember how much you enjoyed devouring those steamed crabs during our summers at Ocean City. You would have enjoyed that tasty Black Pepper crab I ate in Singapore. Those folks were kind of lightweights at this! You are supposed to go at it for hours. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog It feels familiar. Then again, I am not regular about washing my truck- you did your car weekly! I am at a frequency measured in months or years. But like your little notebook of numbers, I find myself keeping track (spreadsheet) of maintenance even keeping track of miles per gallon (though in an app on my phone). It feels familiar. I'm thinking of that road trip we did in 1988 when you came out to visit me in Arizona. It was that switch from the old days when you planned our summer vacations. cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I'm heading to the Grand Canyon in june to do a hike rim to rim, not anything we did together, but I'm thinking how much you'd enjoy reading about it and seeing the photos. It should feel familiar. It gets hard to fathom you've been gone for 12 years. I want to hold all that is familiar in my heart. Thinking of you "Old Man" (and the reply would have been, "And I am thinking of you, Junior") It took twitter quite some time to add a search bar so you can find fellow tweeters, so its no surprise that TwitDir arose as an outside tool serving as a Twitter Directory, claiming to allow you to search among 715,235 twitterers. And since this the season of contagious listmaking, TwitDir offers the answers to the idle curiosity question of who are the top 100 people followed, the top 100 updaters, etc. The top people followed are not all that surprising... maybe. At the top of the heap, with 6934 followers, is Twitterific, makers of the uber twitter app for MacOS. There is some sort of Mac/PC irony waiting there, buy I skip. In second, at zero surprise level is Scoble, pulling off the mazing dual marks of having 6887 followers (that's a lot of breathing down the neck, eh) and Scoble follows 6054 others. He must get the friends prize for returning the favor in kind. IN third is Brian Shaler, a flash developer from, of all places, Phoenix- with 6709 followers, and he, like Scoble, must need sleep as Brian follows 7317 tweeters. More odd are the top updaters: At the top of this list is omankoxxx, who has made 253031 updates, and I have no idea what Oman is up to since its all in Chinese. Also hard to figure out is somacowmedia, having done 120217 updates that are cryptic to say the least: [monituid:416] http://syndown.com loaded in 0.91327 seconds [monituid:414] http://sayanythingradio.com loaded in 1.079626 seconds [monituid:415] http://muchedumbre.com loaded in 0.426668 seconds which looks very little like typical twittering about cats or lunch; this looks more like a continuous monitoring flow for checking web sites I guess SomaCowCIO gets these updates on his mobile phone? More telling is that these accounts with incredible updating activity have relatively no followers or following activity. They are too busy updating?? And who can resist doing some ego surfing here- put in your own handle to see if you are "on the list": Woo hoo, I am in the top 1000 for followers. Look out Scoble! Yeah right. I feel like a gleeful, wet by the ears, just discovered blog software newbie. On one hand I hate starting over, giving up a system I knew insanely well, into a place where I am operating with 12 thumbs. Last night I jumped too quickly into the Theme land, so as WordPress is so easy to swap, I rolled back to the default, looks like everyone elses blog of Kubrick theme. But I could not resist, and rolled in my own custom header. I have a bit more learnin' to do with the style sheet structure. Yes, I will add some static/fixed pages- I love that feature. Next on the priority list is to learn how to create shorter URL slugs- WP seems to only offer to create URLs out of the full titlew string, and there must be a way to tell it to use say the first 20 characters. It seems to do okay on new posts by accepting the "post slug" (lovely term) value for creating URLs. I might have to write something to comb the database and back create slugs for old posts. And also I want to create an abstract listing for category archives, rather ten full dumps of entire posts, as some of the archives have hundreds of entries. I saw that piece in the WordPress Codex. Stay tuned. I really need to be doing work, but this is too damn fun A good jukebox can always stand a few more kinds of music put into the rotation, right? I've just made some updates to the SPLOTbox media collector in response to a request from Dave Quinn. https://twitter.com/EduQuinn/status/1055779799187243008 I've actually never even used Adobe Spark before, but if it can be embedded, and the embed code can be sussed out from the link URL for a piece of content, it's possible. That's how I last added support for Internet Archive content requested by Daniel Villar. I was able to get this going in about 90 minutes yesterday. The first thing I learned was that only the author of a Spark can access the share link and embed code. I asked Dave to share a link and embed code for something he made, which was an Adobe Spark Page. This is a Spark page he made: https://spark.adobe.com/page/zumgqWq8sahQE/ and the embed code he sent was: so you can see the part of the URL zumgqWq8sahQE that gets used in the embed code. I'm not sure what the buster=1540568725131 parameter means. I was worried it was something to prevent hotlinks, but the image seemed to load fine from https://spark.adobe.com/page/zumgqWq8sahQE/embed.jpg. Since Spark also let's you build video-like content, I decided to create an account and quickly toss one together... about what else? My favorite topic- these are published as links like https://spark.adobe.com/video/xhsbz6oI52HHh/ with easier embed codes like: Into the code rabbit hole I dove. I had code in there which attempted to add oembed extra filters, and they all failed. Then I realized that before I had gone about it before in a different way by just building the embed codes by parsing the URLs. But I should just show first, eh? I set up for Dave to see on the SPLOTbox demo site: The first item is Dave's Adobe Spark Page - clicking the Read More... link launches it in a full screen overlay. The second is the Adobe Spark video I created. Clicking the play button plays it like an embedded video. Ka-ching! It's working. The code that builds the players does some matching on URLs for the media to figure out what kind it is (these are for the cases where they are natively able to embed directly in WordPress, e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCLoud), then parse the link URL for an ID number, and returning the proper code for an embedded player. function splotbox_get_videoplayer( $url ) { // output the video player if ( is_in_url( 'archive.org', $url ) ) { $archiveorg_url = str_replace ( 'details' , 'embed' , $url ); $videoplayer = ''; } elseif ( is_in_url( 'spark.adobe.com/video/', $url ) ) { // get string position right before ID $pos = strpos( $url, 'video/'); $spark_id = substr($url, $pos + 6) ; $spark_id = rtrim( $spark_id, '/'); // spark video iframe code $videoplayer = ''; } elseif ( is_in_url( 'spark.adobe.com/page/', $url ) ) { // get string position right before ID $pos = strpos( $url, 'page/'); $spark_id = substr($url, $pos + 5) ; $spark_id = rtrim( $spark_id, '/'); // spark page embed code $videoplayer = ''; } else { $videoplayer = ' ' . "\n"; } return ($videoplayer); } It could be more elegant and less readable, but it's working. While inside the code, I made a few more updates: Added Theme Options if you don't need users to add categories or tags to their submissions (like I did for TRU Writer and TRU Collector) Cleaned up wording on the sharing form, also modified the way the URL link testing button works. Fixed some issues in the way the child theme was not loading the google fonts and icon fonts the parent Garfunkel theme works (moving a copy of genericons to the child theme and added some more enque statements). This means cute little icons for the meta data on an item: The other thing I'd like to add to SPLOTbox and as well to TRU Collector is a way to preview an entry before submitting. The TRUWriter has some logic built into it to do a full preview, which always made sense for longer written content, but it's a bit of a code spaghetti pile. I am thinking of trying what I built into the DS106 Assignment Bank theme where I can generate a preview as a lightbox overlay. It means setting up a bit of jQuery to pull stuff form the form, but seems doable. Anyhow, if you have Adobe Spark page or video content, I have a new SPLOTbox ready for you. Give it a try at http://splot.ca/box/. And I sure hope people who have existing sites do a theme update from https://github.com/cogdog/splotbox. Hoping too we can get this set up for Reclaim Hosting people as a cpanel install option. Hope it works well for you, Dave! Featured Image: Pixabay image by PublicDomainPictures shared into the public domain using Creative Commons CC0 Woah! I found out today my old Shockwave projects can breathe again! I cut my multimedia teeth in the 1990s on Macromedia Director. I was happy in the early part of that decade pounding around HyperCard and then came along a project (something to do with Study Skills) that required a lot of animation and there was this software box on the shelf that sounded promising. I never produced or created as much in those Director days. It was the first time I fell into a full blown online social space, the Direct-L listserv (hey it still exists!). I still have some scarred flesh somewhere from some guy named G Gordon III at Virginia Tech who flamed my seriously. It took 3 months from that scorching before I felt okay to post. But around that same time, 1994, I was excited at the hypertext potential of the early early barebones web. So after seeing my buddy Marvyn H create a public Director FTP site (the "shared cast" at Houston Community Colleges), I decided to open a public web site, the Director Web at Maricopa. (actually, when it started it was the Director Page). At the time, Macromedia did not even have a corporate web site. (more…) Wednesday was my first appearance teaching a section of ds106 for a class at the University of Mary Washington- the one hitch is that I am still in Strawberry, Arizona (here is an extra riddle for my students- what is the most obscure fact you can find and tell me about this town?). Below are some notes and resource, but key todos for students are: Register your domain and set up webhosting via the information in Assignment 1. You must email me your blog url to get credit for this assignment. Be sure to add it to your user profile on the ds106 site. This must be done before class on Wednesday, Jan 25. Join the class group on the ds106 site. Spring 2012, Section 2 Write an introductory blog post sharing your interests in the course or storytelling. Or write about your dog/fish/cat- just get in the practice of writing. This is the start of your participation. Do at least one Daily Create before Monday. This was my view of class… cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Despite his bravado of insulting his students (see the first in a series of documentary videos series that Lee and Alan) are doing, Jim Groom has been bending over in triplicate to enable me to teach a class at UMW. Until I can arrive on campus (hopefully February 1), Jim is facilitating the session and bringing me in via Skype, as well as broadcasting the class out via DTLT Today - we have an archive of yesterday’s session. As a first technical note for students, in WordPress, embedding media from sites such as YouTube, flickr, vimeo and more is easier than copy/pasting a pile of code- using its features for Embeds all I had to do was to put the URL for the vimeo page that holds the video on a separate line, and WordPress does all the work from there. So it was a bit challenging as the connectivity was not optimal, but we got through. I appreciate the students being willing to walk up to the camera and say hello and talk about why they took the course. Nearly half had said that one of their friends/room-mates had highly recommended it. In the beginning of the course, it is Jim’s (and now my) strategy to front load the experience witha  warning of how intense the class can be- we do not want students later to be overwhelmed later. Jim fires more ammunition, but I will not mince either- if you are not ready to put a lot into the class, or be ready to struggle, or am not comfortable doing a lot of answer seeking online, there is a graceful exit through the Drop Class shop. Another problem reared its head in that the first day of class was also the day of the internet protest of the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation. In support of this, many major sites like WikiPedia (and ds106) implemented public displays of support and either with-holding (or requiring a click through) of that sites information. So our materials for class were not quite available. But this was a great opportunity to raise attention to the important critical role to ds106 that the open internet its creators designed - in every sense, for this class, the internet is your textbook- and it is not just something for you to read and highlight, but students in ds106 are authors. You do have a stake in this, and it is far from over. But back to class- to get started ASAP on the first assignment, setting up your domain and webhosting it is likely going to be cumbersome and confusing, but will giver you a sense of what you are in for. Just so I have the same experience, I have done this assignment to set up this blog. Register your domain. First you need to think about what name you will use to identify yourself, this is not a small decision as it is your online presence. I was driving to an appointment this morning and knew I wanted to include “106″ in mine, and had  flash back to Trix cereal‘s tagline “Trix are for kids” and I felt “106tricks” would eb good. I went to hover.com and saw the options, I could have had .com , .org. us, and many others but felt that .net worked well. I already had an account on hover, bur if you are new you have to make one. This cost me $15 and I managed to do this on my iPhone while shopping at Safeway. The domain is simply the reference lookup for your future internet self- on its own, if you went to the site, yuo would end up at Hover.com Set up Webhosting account. I set up my site with Cast Iron Coding but like the assignment says, the web hosting can be any that support what WordPress requires (PHP and mySQL databases). You will want one that provides cpanel or some form of one click installs (unles you like ftp-ing code and doing ti yourself). One student asked about http://asmallorange.com/ – I had never seen that one, but it does offer what is needed. Point your domain to your webhost. Once your account is set up, you should get a bunch of information, how to log in to the admin site for your account, how to get to the cpanel or place you can install wordpress. The key thing you need is the addresses for the web hosting Domain Servers, in my case it was ns1.castironcoding,com and ns2.castironcoding,com Copy these down or know where you can copy/paste them. Go back to where you registered your domain (in my case Hover.com) and you will have to log into an account you set up there- find the entry for your domain, and look for the place to edit/enter your new Nameserver addresses (they will be set by default to the registrar).  Do not include any http:// Once you do this… you have to wait. It may take a few to hours to a day or 2 (it took mine only 3) for the internet to spread your new domain everywhere so people’s computers can get there. If you need help, we can take time in class to address your issues, but you will be better off if you can take care of this before Monday- and free yourself to get in practice of doing Daily Create activities (today is an easy one- recite a tongue twister on video and upload to YouTube). If you need help with getting started on WordPress let us know- see the basic set up instructions at UMW Blogs but note that it is not required to set up a subdomain. I installed wordpress in my main web directory, so my blog is my site. Some other things you can do to get ahead of the game- set up your social media accounts if you do not have them already. For each one, you should make sure to customize your profile, e.g. add an avatar, link to your blog, explore how to personalize the site. Create an account on Twitter. Start following classmates, myself, Jim Groom, the Daily Create. When you share something related to class, include the #ds106 hashtag which makes it easy to find and connect (see https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23ds106. You might want to expore mobile twitter clients and desktop ones like TweetDeck Create an account on flickr. Make sure your defaults are set for creative commons licensing (open sharing). You will want to quickly upload at least 5 photos to establish your account- your photos will not appear on the Daily Create site until you have done this. Create an account on SoundCloud. Create an account on YouTube. Are you ready? Strap on your helmets, even if you feel like a nutcase… cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Tom & Katrien Keep me posted on your progress, and get ready for a new Assignment that will be out before Monday’s class. I dare you. I double dog penguin dare you to contribute a story for my True Stories of Openness (formerly known as Amazing) aka Magic Acts of Web Serendipity... First conjured up long long ago (2009) at a conference far far away (Open Ed in Vancouver "Crossing the Chasm" was the theme), deploying not light sabers, but the CoolIris plugin: Photo shared by D'Arcy Norman hopefully licensed CC-BY or close to that but enough nostalgia, it is 2022 and I am cranking up the machine again in a push to collect new stories for a presentation next week at OER22, "The Tonic of Serendipity: A New Call for True Stories of Open Sharing" Here is my pitch, plea, shameless begging https://stories.cogdogblog.com/share-oer22/ When I put out the call, I get plenty of likes, retweets, soft pats on the back, but it usually takes more direct prodding to shake some stories loose. I can only guess why, there are well over 100 examples of great variety, and they can be shared in not just video, but audio, or old fashioned text. What am I asking for? Why there in About Page that says what it is about! In this site I want to celebrate the True Stories of what happens to people when they share something openly on the web. I asked colleagues to share their own stories of something unexpected, valuable, powerful, or just plain inspiring as a result of sharing that piece of media, document, video, blog post, even a single tweet that became valuable to someone they did not know before.https://stories.cogdogblog.com/about/ I saw one recently in twitter, the person kindly submitted... the tweet. I do appreciate that, but what I mean by a story, is a human narrative, the kind of thing that you would bust into your friend's house and say, "THE MOST AMAZING THING HAPPENED ON THE INTERNET! and then re-tell it like "I was just doing my regular thing and this happened" and "because of that this happened" and "next thing you know I was doing this!" and "I never thought that THAT would happen. Well maybe not like that, but I always crave more, more than just a link or a piece of media. I crave the back story. The emotion. The joy. The crazy sense of adventure. Has the creepiness of the net just snuffed that out of people? Not that it's an incentive, but this newest (3rd) version of my site is powered by my SPLOTbox theme, meaning you an add/upload media to go with your story (note the with, the media is never the full story). If you really want to figure out what this SPLOT stuff is about, here is your chance! Click. The. Link. and make me and a penguin happy. We double, triple, quadruple penguin dare ya. OER22 Art work by the amazing Bryan Mathers / Visual Thinkery, who I hope/expect is sharing these via CC BY-something C'mon! Here is your last nudge... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKrfLdY9IQg Please? Share? Featured Image: More artwork by Bryan Mathers, a custom CogDog logo he made for me plus the GO-GN/OER22 Penguin, recast into a propaganda style poster. Against my better judgement (oh it was against the judgment of the web site owner) I am setting up the old school FeedWordPress syndication bus for the crew painting the Confabulating/Combobulating site for the upcoming Reclaim Open conference. I have discovered finally a Chat AI thing I can live with and love, TomGPT which yes, lives only in my feeble imagination. But it does kind of work like this. It so fits for the spirit of DS106 as the mothership site is still syndicating after all these years. The syndicated flow page's pagination is broken but if you have been banging around the wordpress pipes you know there is usually another way (all syndicated posts are tossed into a Category). Well the flow page does have the counter going at 94940 syndicated posts brought in here going back to December 2010. I had to review my own Feed WordPress 101 notes but also checked in on back end of ds106.us. The FeedWordPress plugin still works in the PHP8/Blocky era, though not updated in 11 years, confirmed in it's GitHub repo. It actually was not too much to get it set up, but alas alkways a vexing problem with FWP sites is that it knoweth not of featured images. This makes sense, because it aggregates RSS, and Featured Images is a WordPress construct. What used to work in the past was findind a plugin that created a feature image from the first image it found in a post. I used in the p,ast the adoringly named FWP-SIC-em plugin by the author of FWP-- oh last updated 9 years ago. I remember that it chewed memory on DS106 and besides, on a quick test on one of my old sites, it crashed badly in PHP 8. I thought that Auto Featured Image (Auto Post Thumbnail) worked, but it struck out in my tests. I did find one I guess Mark installed on the site, Featured Image from URL (FIFU) which has a gazillion settings, but I did find ones that both generated one if it was lacking, and also would add a default one just in case. It also allowed me to specify that I wanted it to just process WordPress Posts, not Pages. FIFU settings for default and creating featured images. And BOOM, it worked. Case sort of solved. But then El Presidenté of Programmistan, Tom Woodward chimed in (via an old school blog comment, aren't those dead?) that he had whipped up a plugin to do this feat for FeedWordPress syndicated images. I gotta try, right? I like this approach because its a single putpose plugin, not something wrapped up in a bunch of other code I do not need. I almos felt like putting a wish out there was kind of like a magical TomGPT that we can all ask for little tools, and it spits them out, perfectly working. Hence the image I am guessing need to put up at the top of the post so it is grabbed as I think my cover / featured images are done via CSS. I really should test. Thus this post. Which did require that I conjure up my own Non AI generated image. Now that this post is tagged wildDS106 when the syndication bus stops by it should appear, hopefully with a featured image, at https://combobulating.net/. Wild! DS106! Featured Image: Applying the Browser Inspector (here is how) to recast chatgpt.com into a better brand, TomGPT plus a little background from Tom's bionic blog. This could be pick your own license day, how about CC-BY? Gimme some attribution, will ya? My, how virtual worlds have tarnished. From all the high expectations of 2006, people calling for the coming of the "3D web", and its been a year since the crows on the wire started sqwaking the "Second Life is Dead" as the big corporations who responded to the flash of light packed up their virtual buildings and left. Or, now it is relegated as a niche or that it is only good for 50 people. Here is a code phrase to look out for- any statement that X is dead is suspect unless X is that skunk you ran over on the highway and has been flattened. Always question such assertions; ask to see the corpse. I'm just coming off of a two day utterly engaging experience in what we do at the NMC as online conferences- these are not your webinar slideshow brigades- for 3 and a half years, we have run two to four conferences per year in a virtual world space, ones where people pay money to attend, and I can say first hand that the ones we have run are a completely different, and from what I have seen, more participatory experience from your typical web-based conference. This is going to be a monster long post, maybe the longest I have ever lobbed on my server...But before I make a case about this, which I am setting up for the rock throwers, I'd like first to rave about the NMC 2010 Symposium on New Media & Learning -- from behind the curtain, it is an utterly exhausting affar, and usually by the time it is over, I have decompressed, and lack the energy to really capture the experience. But this one, may have been the best one we have every done, for the range and quality of the sessions and the discussions we saw bubbling around it. (more…) cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I was down today at a friend's antique store in Pine, and decided to grab this old Viewmaster, which I remember fondly as a kid, clicking my way through the seven wonders of the world, seeing the Grand Canyon in its tinted technicolor. Now I need to find some discs. Take that, Toy Boy Jim Groom, you have no monopoly on love of toys! Perhaps this was one my early interests in multimedia. Hey, I just finished my 2006 summer project! When I joined NMC, I projected having a public version of a new web site ready by September. I lied. Or grossly underestimated. Or lied. But this morning we flipped the switch and lit up the tree. I could blog about all details of this process (and should have) but that might take me another year. And I'd rather get some work done. But in a snapshot, and some more bits to be written up in subsequent days/weeks/months/whenever... The project was taking a pure static, 1999 vintage site, with is clear gif spacers, tables, but basic style sheets to something "2.0"ish. The old site was quite consistent in design, a credit to the non web developer staff who carried out the design for the last 5 years by replication. But it suffered from the pigeon holes of its fixed navigation set, had text a bit squint worthy in size, and did not take advantage of the full screen real estate. And it was a pile of hand coded html. A big pile. So the new site is powered by drupal. Now as I know folks are already reaching for the comment buttons with, "Why did you choose that and not XXXX?", or "Yuck, I hate drupal", I'll give a simple reason, a rule that has never failed me in the last 5 years. I copied D'Arcy. That was a joke, Sort of. No, I did not conduct exhaustive research of every CMS out there, be it Joomla, Expression Engine, Smooch (I made that one up), etc. But form my reading of D'Arcy, looking at the rabid developer community of drupal, looking at some possible comparable sites like Academic Commons, and knowing we needed something that would be open-source, flexible, user centered, and highly extensible, I felt fairly confident drupal could do the job. It's not to say another tool might have done it was well, or better, but at some point, you just need to reach in the box, grab a tool, and get to work. Otherwise, you just are hanging around the hardware store debating drill press torque. Oh, and one more reason -- IBM was pretty positive on drupal as well. But over the summer, as we gathered some requirement, just trying to conceptualize the site, structure, and trying to get my head wrapped around the drupal way, I was facing this immense mountain -- how long would it take me to learn drupal from the ground up? I feel very confident in my skills to make WordPress do whatever it takes, but this was a whole new enchilada. A big, sprawling one. And finally, someone wiser than me suggested (and funded) a better idea... hire someone who can do the back end programming and module juggling, so I could focus on content, form, and function. Thanks to a referral from Mike Roy, we hired the folks at the Longsight Group, who have been fantastic, especially was we wavered in a few false starts on design and organization, and ended up adding to the site in an accretion mode. So in the end, I have not learned drupal inside out; I have found my way to wrangle taxonomies, to do a lot with views and blocks, to do some custom tweaking to small bits of code.. .but I still just do not understand the full drupal mindset. There are just so many ways to do things, and it just does not compartmentalize anything. And it is a completely different way to organize and structure information. So that was a whole pile of pre-amble, and I did not even follow my own law of "Start with the %#^#ing Demo!" (more…) This has nothing to do with new year resolves to live more organized (if that were the case I might be making lists and crossing things off), but I've been pleased to de-clutterize my home office, and, at the same time, make it easier to hook more gizmos to my laptop. First was getting a new USB/Firewire combo-hub and getting alot of the cable snakes tucked away behind the desk. The new is almost full, but makes it easier to work with the single Firewire and 2 USB ports on my MacBookPro... I was already running into issues digitizing video needing the firewire ports on the camera and my external drive. But since I seem to have a working solution to running Windows on the Intel mac, I no longer need the really old Compaq laptop I had been using to test web sites. This was actually my wife's old computer, and we were hoping to donate it to the thrift store, but not without being sure the drive was really clean of old data. I had some fun doing th wipe-our routine using Darik's Boot and Nuke, a download that the installs an app and a start-up OS on a floppy disk. Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction. DBAN is a means of ensuring due diligence in computer recycling, a way of preventing identity theft if you want to sell a computer, and a good way to totally clean a Microsoft Windows installation of viruses and spyware. DBAN prevents or thoroughly hinders all known techniques of hard disk forensic analysis. It was easy to set up and run, and the thing that took me the longest time was finding a floppy disk! (I did come across some old Zip 100 MB disks, now those are useful). So that is one less computer on the desktop... and I'm thinking getting a slightly bigger internal drive for the MacBookPro ('m at about 55% of the 80 Gb internal, but I like to keep a lot of room), and I might be able to part with my 2003 iBook. Trying to be simpler, less cluttered. For now. Ah, my poor RSS Reader, not nearly given the devoted attention once reserved for it. Maybe a year, maybe two ago, I'd focus on at least scanning all my sources and marking them read by end of the day, even if it was in one fell keyboard stroke. That was BT (Before Twitter), BSL (Before Second Life), Bd (Before drupal), BR5WPS (Before Running 5+ WordPress Sites). That's not to say IO dont regularly mine the feed pile, but there are heaps of unread, unseen items down the list. I have noticed my Feed Readin' pattern has shifted, some to the features of Google Reader. Before, I would organize my subscriptions into folder categories, but still pretty much process one feed's (one blog, one news source) titles at the same time. I was reading DOWN the feeds. Nothing wrong with that, but it is in some ways a legacy of the old bin structure of organization, where you put things in fixed categories. These days, in Google Reader, I have similar folders ("education technology", "visual design", "techie news") but I generally scan them as these larger groups, facilitated by the quick keyboard shortcuts in G-Reader. It makes for an interesting march as you read across different voices. This really has no major significance, just an observation (actually I am running some maintenance scripts on my main laptop and am waiting for it to be done. And it is.... Said pedal has no effect on time (me writing the obvious). I am among many many colleagues and friends who have been fortunate to have known, collaborated with, presented with, learned from, played music with or just have had a meaningful conversation with Irwin Devries. His last guitar chord hopefully still rings on in some far reaches of the solar system. I knew this year was a hard one on his health. So I was joyed after I reached out in late December by email to catch up, maybe finish a not so great song I had worked with him on in 2015 when we hung out in Kamloops, he suggested trying in January. My path crossing with Irwin goes back to November 2014 - March 2015 when I was set up with a full time Open Learning Fellowship at Thompson Rivers University engineered by Brian Lamb. This was enabled by the support and signing off of by Brian's boss, then Associate VP of Open Learning at TRU, Irwin Devries. I'd be hard pressed to detail all the things that came from that experience (the portfolio tells much). We ran a faculty development flavor of DS106 called The You Show (one episode with Tannis Morgan played out later being invited to be part of the UDG Agora), we started a TRU hosted blogging service Trubox that is no only still going, but mammothly massive, it was the birth of SPLOTs. An almost accidental foray into the Wikimedia Wiki Shoot Me tool led me to discover tour the campus CFBX radio station (Irwin may have joined me) and even get a training session on the sound board. Those are things that used to happen when leaders like Irwin gave support to people and ideas, but stepped back to let them run with it. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/15937979283 Featured in the First Issue of TRU Learning flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license All of this pales against the people there who welcomed to Western Canada a straggler from Arizona, that the experience was more than tech and work. I've had good aka cordial relationships with colleagues and directors in other contexts, but it's even more "true" (or TRU) when they become friends. I'd known through Brian that his boss Irwin was also a very accomplished musician, a fantastic guitar player. For one of our YouShow episodes, on request for some loud electric guitar Irwin recorded what he titled Green Screen of Death. I'm not sure there are many work situations where you can ask (and get) that request of your unit organizational leader. Now I forgot how it started, but we began a weekly hangout at Irwin's basement suite, talking and playing songs, riffs on our acoustic guitars. I was, and still am, not nearly in the same league as Irwin. That is what's special about many musicians that they do not look down on people with lesser skills but welcome and encourage hacks like me. One of Irwin's many inspirational characteristics was that technically he commuted to Kamloops during the week, driving back home to Vancouver on weekends to be with his wife. This effort is elevated much much more once I heard his stories of that route on the 'Coq' or 'Coquihalla highway' which as I learned, in the winter is considered one of the most dangerous roads (or worse), the inspiration for a TV show called Highway to Hell. I drove it on my way to Kamloops in late October, and it was a white knuckle ride; Irwin went back and forth through the winter. All of this to say is Irwin had coached me to try song writing (I'm more than happy doing my takes of rewriting lyrica as cover songs). So over a few sessions I wrote one not based on his drives on the Coq, but that idea of a truck driver driving west and being "Halfway to Burnaby". I rummaged to find the (not so good) lyrics as a Google Doc and my rough recording, perhaps recorded in his apartment (the file date reads February 19, 2015) I will cringe here. This is the roundabout way to say that when I reached out to Irwin in late December, I suggested that we perhaps do some remote recording to "finish" the song. I know there's lots of collaboration tools out there, and had just heard on a podcast about BandLab (I had good intentions, it's newly added on my phone). We had a few back and forth emails in late December agreeing to try after the holidays. What a treat it was to get this email from Irwin on January 16: Hiya! My son Justin was over and we turned the song loose in the studio and this is what we came up with. Hoping it doesn't suck too bad! Can always change, add, subtract, replace any tracks. All the best, pardner email from Irwin Devries, 4:42PM January 16, 2024 Woah. Justin is a professional drummer who I remember joined one of our "Sanctuary" jams in Vancouver. I'm humbled to have this gift from Irwin and Justin that layers harmonica, electric guitar and organ atop my crude song. But this cringe is even bigger. I did not get around to replying, thinking I had time. Then Tuesday, the 23rd, I got word that Irwin had passed away. That he dies a week after he sent me that song. I delayed a reply. Here is the other layer of my story. The summer after my time at TRU, while traveling to Los Angeles, I asked my friend MIkhail who lived there to take me to a good music store. I came home with a new Fender Telecaster, and most likely shared photos in social media. Without any mentioning of it, Irwin ordered and mailed to my home, an out of the blue gift of a Donner Yellow Fall Delay effect pedal (on the left side in this photo). https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/31209735656 Thanks to a Friend, My Growing Noise Chain flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) There was more exchange than just guitars, we talked much of our work, research, teaching technology, we had crossed paths a few times in the last years at online conferences. I'm just honored to have known such a generous and caring person who operated a the management water levels of this field. Ahhh, bear with me for one more rabbit hole tale. On hearing the news of Irwin's passing, I dove into my timelining habit of flickr. That one photo of Irwin used on the left side my featured image was a day we went for a walk and talk along the river east of town. As a playful act that was him photobombing my attempt of a panoramic photo. He was mischievous fun (more evidence). Amongst the other photos I found searching my flickr past was of some lyrics on a laptop and glasses of the Irish Whiskey we sipped on. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/16473453526 Do Not Even Ask flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Again, to the effort of writing even a cryptic caption, I have a clue: An evening playing music and enjoying beverages with Irwin D-- we wrote maybe the worst song in the universe. On purpose. https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/16473453526/ That is vaguely familiar, we had some fun the week before the recording of Halfway There to Burnaby, trying to write a song with the most sappy, cliche lyrics possible. But I have no more information, I can't find any relevant of docs on my laptop, blog posts, and my twitter archive has nothing. On a whim I zoom on the lyrics in the photo above and see the line "stuck on a tractor beam". I then take a wild stab and search on "tractor beam" in my gmail. Bingo! I find an email from Irwin with a link to our terrible lyrics for "just a Day" and as well, a recording of it on SoundCloud (featuring said photo). https://soundcloud.com/gs551e/just-a-day It's still shreds of experiences and memories, but it kindles a bit more of a connection to these times. And on the web, the side rabbit holes open up. That deliberately bad song is on Irwin's SoundCloud account with more of his music, including ones as recent as a year ago-- Otessa Country as a fun foot stomping promo for the Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association. And hah, he deployed the same riffs for the Royal Roads University LRNT 526 course he taught a year ago. Well, I have taken this post much farther than even intended, as the writing happens and my brain cracks open. I'm crushed that I did not reply to Irwin's last email to me, but that takes nothing from the experiences of time with him. My heart goes out to his family and likely the countless number of other people Irwin influenced. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/23190502985 The Band! That Band! flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license A few photos of Irwin Devries in my flickr stream, all CC0 licensed Working through these memories as I end up doing here is in the vein of an old lesson, that our human body's end on this earth is not the end of our lived life, and the more we retell the stories of people we knew, the longer the live in us. I now have to dust off that Telecaster, plug in in the yellow pedal, and stomp on the delay effect to make my own sounds of humble appreciation. Thanks for all, Irwin. Post Blog Notes I did get confirmation that the date Irwin left us was last Tuesday, January 23, 2024, indeed, 7 days after the last email he sent me. Also, and more importantly, Thompson Rivers University has set up a donation channel for a TRU scholarship fund under Irwin's name. They have a goal to raise $25,000. Help them out by using the general TRU Donation page at https://www.tru.ca/giving/give-now.html. It m,ay not be clear at first, but find the fund under Direct Donation at the bottom, click Specific Fund, and type in Irwin DeVries, which should autocomplete: And continue from there (I just did this). https://social.ds106.us/@nomadwarmachine/111841784100406759 And you can find more collections of music from Irwin's Bandcamp site one album as recent as July, 2023. More keeps building to add here, why not keep the good thoughts rolling. Please, please, please the heartfelt pos, for many more photos, recordings, but mostly that insight into Irwin writing only in the way Brian Lamb does uniquely. Come for the memories and stay for the long comment thread. https://abject.ca/irwin As serendipity goes, on a drive to an appointment today I dipped into the latest episode of This American Life, number 822 "The Words to Say It". The prologue just spoke to this kind of memory of a last message not sent to someone dying who did not want others to dwell on it. Sometimes we don’t want to say what’s going on because putting it into words would make it real. At other times, words don’t seem to capture the weight of what we want to say. Susanna Fogel talks about her friend Margaret Riley, who died earlier this week "I think what's interesting is when I think about what I would have said in a final text message to her, I probably would have said, I don't even have words. I don't think I would have been able to compose a text message that felt like it covered the depth of my love for her. Or the words would have failed, or they wouldn't have been enough or something." TAL Episode 822 Prologue Featured Image: A composite of two of my photos, I'm Photobombing Yer Panorama flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and a new one od the pedal Irwin gave me, not yet on flickr, but soon will be as CC0. For a long time I have continually raved about what I think is a severely under-used Cool Flickr Feature- the ability to add notes, or hypertext regions to images. For many long, winter nights, I have wondered.. Why Dont Teachers Jump All Over Such a Thing?, but alas, gave up on hearing an answer from the mountain. Just on a whim today- my colleague Joe Lamber asked if I knew of a web tool that allowed one to annotate any image with a push pin and a note like Google does for the maps, that I came across a holy grail I never knew existed- Fotonotes - code that provides any web site the ability to add this feature to image content: FotonotesTM is an [sic] standard, specification, and collection of scripts for annotating images. And towards the bottom, it is credited as the inspiration for the early flickr-ites to create their own feature. Too outline it in pictures: A photo is dedined with the rollover hotspots. And upon rollover, you get a pop up note. Yep. Just like flickr. So you can also edit a note, in this case, I am adding one for the tree. And voila! It is there. I have no idea yet what it takes to tun this code, and I don't have an immediate use for it, but its one of those things I hope to tag and file away for that one day when such a need is going to jump up and bite me. Is there something I am missing in all my excitement? Tom keeps pumping out his creations of the Illustrating Odd Autocompletes assignment he spun out this gem featuring my pals Gardner Campbell and MC Hammer (!) cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Woodward and so… turn about is fair play. I went to The Google to find what Tom Woodward Likes, and found… I actually went firs for a google search on Intelligent design and settled on the comic that was included in a blog post “Intelligent Design” Vs “Darwinism” (okay I am stomping on rights to use this image, it comes from a Ning url, and a reverse image search turns up hundreds of places it appears online; it is a cartoon by Rex Babin, deceased comic artist from the Sacramento Bee. Fight for the RemixRight!) I then searched my own flickr photos for pictures of Tom, maybe I would put his head in the cartoon, but I just loved this one of him and Jim Groom cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine I thought about trying to erase the background from the comic to see uf I could put Tom and Jim behind it, but it was impossible to cleanly remove the background white. Then I hit the brilliant idea that I might be able to place it on Jim’s chest like a t-shirt design. With a little bit of rotation, distort, it had the right orientation but still looked like a cheap ;paste job. Playing with the layer modes, the COlor Burn option turned out to be the winner to make the image look more like it is a design Jim is wearing. So Tom likes intelligent design,,, what other possible thing could explain the existence of Jim Groom? Boom! Written up here just to tag another example for the assignment.