Everything that does not have a home, just a big old stinking pile of posts.
Headed for China 1.0 by cogdogblog posted 14 Sep ’08, 10.36am MDT PST on flickr Chinatown in San Francisco is always a fun place to "visit" but in a few hours I am headed for the real deal or China 1.0, boarding a plane at SFO that will teleport me directly (well 12 hours directly) […]
Well, “anything” is loosely termed. I run about 6 different MediaWiki sites for the NMC, and I have to remind myself alot that the software is a huge black box (it works super) and I am pretty sure the things I have done tap maybe 8% of what it is capable of doing.
One of the limits is the kind of content you can put in the editing pane. Sure you can add additional tags you want to allow, but even a security lazy bum like me is not interesting in allowing any person to add <script> tags in there. Danger, Danger, MediaWiki Robinson!
So in prepping some new things for the wiki that we have reset for the 2009 NMC Horizon Project— we don’t delete the old stuff or hide them in edits; each year I migrate content to its own namespace, e.g. http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Horizon2007:Main_Page and http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Horizon2008:Main_Page. I’d like to know if I can have different Sidebars for these, but that’s another tinkering.
I was thinking a nice feature would be to add the Google Custom Search Engine I toyed with last year- a CSE is an incredible free tool where you can make your own search site, that rather than searching all 12 trillion Google pages, confines the search to a set of web sites that you pick. That is an amazing tool! Where is yours?
It was easy peasy to put it on the NMC web site, as the page I made is completely custom PHP- it’s not even drupal, just mocked the style of the main site, and to add a drupal block with the form that pushes searches there as a block on the right sidebar at http://horizon.nmc.org/:
But getting that functionality inside MediaWiki? Hmmmm. There is embed code provided with the GoogleCSE, but it is merely (well not so merely) a Javascript tag linked to a remote source file, and you cannot just slap JavaScript into your wiki text.
Then a light bulb went off- I bet it could be done by writing a custom MediaWiki Extension- I had done some mods of an RSS embedding extension almost 2 years ago (and still use it extensively!). You just need to know the syntax and have it spit out web content.
Doh! I wrote this two days ago and forgot to click publish! n00b! It’s the first week of classes for the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course and I am already lapsing behind. As a Massively Open Online Course, maybe I cna get lost in the crowd of 2000 gazillion students. Would you believe a dog […]
Oh yeah, it does pay to give stuff away! Or at least to put half baked ideas “out there”. After just posting late last night about my crude 5 card flickr story demo I lamented the problems in code I had in easily getting random flickr photos from a given tag, John Krutsch emailed and […]
Wow are my PHP coding pencils dull, but I’ve had some fun last 2 nights getting them back (we’ll see how sharp they really). I have a really crude, ugly, unformatted demo of a tool I want to use later this month for a session at the Learning 2.008 conference. So I am asking (a) for feedback on the idea I think is brilliant may not be; (b) contribution of some content by simple tagging.
This blog post will wander a bit on concept and sometimes take a nose dive into code but may surface again.
I’ve been ultra interested in the idea of telling stories in pictures. Ever since I saw Ruben Puentadora‘s workshop on web comics back in 2007 (and later at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference) a little idea has been brewing. Ruben does this fantastic group activity based on work from Scott McCloud, that makes creative work, from all things, of old Nancy cartoons. Using the Five-Card Nancy web version of Scott’s original card game, Ruben conducts an exercise in visual story weaving.
Basically, you get a shuffled deck of five panels from different Nancy cartoons, and you have to pick one at a time to, in five steps, produce a coherent story, or at least die laughing trying. The point is to make connections and discuss the reasons for the choice.
The idea that has been brewing is to create a web tool that works the same, but rather than drawing from a pool of Nancy cartoons (no offense to the Nancy-holics), draw from a pool of images, say in flickr– this is different slightly from the Flickr Tell a Story in 5 Frames, but presents another way of facing the challenge of telling a story in images only.
Rashmi’s Vote Did Not Help by cogdogblog posted 6 Sep ’08, 10.58am MDT PST on flickr Sigh. I did not win the MacBook Air in the Slideshare Best Presentation Contest, and did not even get close with what only I thought was clever as The Last PowerPoint. And how sad for Guy Kawasaki, I don’t […]
Custom Bb Mug by cogdogblog posted 6 Sep ’08, 10.58am MDT PST on flickr Don’t settle for the swag they choose for you; make your own with the Mug Generator: www.metasolutions.us/mug/ More generator fun. Must stop. Someone pull my plug.
Are You Talking To Me? by cogdogblog posted 6 Sep ’08, 9.49am MDT PST on flickr Next time you need a good nom de plume, try the Mob Name Generator. Tell them Shakes Pretiili sent you. Yes, I am all over the Generator Blog a nearly infinite list of fun little things to do on […]
I always knew some day I’d have a reason to blog about something I could relate to the insurance duck (don’t seek an answer why). In my travels last week, a friend I stayed with shared some (well a lot) of concert audio files, all in .flac format– which I had maybe heard of before, […]
Going Where I Have Been by cogdogblog
posted 3 Sep ’08, 12.36am MDT PST on flickr
This is in the last hour of my 1700+ mile jaunt to Denver and back, a 6 day road trip with only loosely defined plans– mainly just to spend some time not glued to a laptop (ironically, I was glued to a steering wheel).
There is so much that is magical about a road trip, especially to counter the aspects of living out of your car, but mainly the freedom of choosing directions, where to stop, where not to, what kind of horrible non nutritious food to ingest. My preferences is secondary highways, and only resort to the bland interstate when time is short.
As I rode along many familiar roads, I kept wondering what it would be like to see myself go by in years past; when I first drove west n I-40 in 1987 for my first move to Arizona; the back and forth I did in 1991 in the weird Summer at Los Alamos, numerous family camping/road trips.
But alas, I saw no ghosts, only majestic and sometimes eerie large open, empty spaces, many devoid of human touch, and many many too many littered with human touch.
I got to finish listening to audiobooks- Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything which was as sweeping and broad (and sometimes funny) as the open lands I zoomed across. Bottom liner- the entire existence of this current human race was a long series of mathematically unlikely events and luck. And we seem to squander such a thing.
I also listened to the
preview chapter
of Thomas Friedman’s new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded — he is likably bold in his assertions that to "save" the earth its going to take more than token statements and swapping out light bulbs- it would require a massive international rebuilding of energy and infrastructure and change that the world has never done before– and I would agree that the prospects of any of the current politicians to lead this are nil. So for future generations that are going to face the impact of a doubling of the CO2 emissions… well its not going to be pretty.
But there were so many highlights; solo camping in the Jemez National Forest, climbing to the top of the Great Sand Dunes, seeing friends and family in Denver, crossing many a range on highways 285 and 160 to Durango, and just mainly… being small, but moving, across giant open spaces.
So what if I missed some new web browser? I was on the road.
There’s nothing like a road trip.
