Profile Picture for CogDog The Blog

CogDog The Blog

An early 90s builder of web stuff and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person. And he is 100% into the Fediverse (or tells himself so) Tooting as @cogdog@cosocial.ca

Blog Pile

Tufte Tour

Edward Tufte‘s short course “Presenting Data and Information” is coming to town in late January… can anyone who has attended one of these or knows a friend who has (or a second cousin of their mother-in-law’s dentist) let me know if it is worth it? Or should I just buy the t-shirt?

Uncategorized

I Spent All Afternoon Writing One E-Mail Message

No, I did not have writers block or a novel to compose. Actually the email question was not even mine, but written to be sent under someone else’s name. Could this be Alan’s Secret Neutron Bomb that would eviscerate spammers? Nahhhh, ya must be dreamin’. Now, these are some messages that get generated from our […]

Blog Pile

Arizona… Believe It Or Not

flickr foto Arizona… Believe It Or Notavailable on my flickr December 4, 2004 and it is snowing up at our cabin in Strawberry, Arizona. Yes, believe it or not, Arizona is not just shifting sands of Arabian desert, certainly not here at 5600 elevation. Just returned from a delightful extended weekend at our cabin, and […]

Uncategorized

(Meaningful) Feedback Makes the Heart Grow Warmer

I’ve written before about the sheer joy of getting feedback on a now 11 year old online Writing HTML tutorial…. see [1] [2] [3], but still get a warm feeling with emails like this one that arrived yesterday: I have read this material for one month (Writting HTML). I think that this material is very […]

Uncategorized

The Final Finish Line for the Last Great MLX Package Race

After 3 or 4 extensions, December 8 is the final deadline I have set in the sand for our 4th and final Great Maricopa Learning eXchange Package Race. As outlined in previous presentations, we set up an incentive program to entice people in our system to contribute their learning activities, teaching materials, project summaries to […]

Uncategorized

Title Tag Silliness

Unanswered Nitpicky Technical Wonderment Number 894: Why do people put HTML tags inside content within a web page’s <TITLE>….</TITLE> tags? Why would one want line breaks in a title bar string, and what is used in browser history and even RSS Feeds? Why http://audiences.blogspot.com/? Why http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1735546,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532 (well, if the ASP error ever is fixed, you […]

Blog Pile

The Day Blackboard Died

Ouch, can you feel the pain, of faculty, students, tired techies… The servers hosting the Blackboard Enterprise system 6 of our colleges share had some sort of “cataclysmic” failure of the SAN- the data storage. It has been down and out about 2 weeks before finals. Ouch. I am not directly involved with Blackboard in […]