Everything that does not have a home, just a big old stinking pile of posts.
No Respect for Stupid Spammers by cogdogblog posted 11 Aug ’08, 8.41am MDT PST on flickr Important URLs (mine) and unimportant ones (spammers) deliberately blurred. All other identification left readable intentionally Well, I doubt I would ever use the word "respect" in proximity of "spammer", but I am at least a tiny bit less turned […]
Cloud computing is the looming buzz word. All these magical “apps in the cloud” sound exciting… until the cloud fizzles on you.
In June, we switched our email service over to the Google Enterprise version for Education, and until this morning at 11:04am PDT I was a happy camper. My IMAP email connection was failing to connect from the desktop. When I went to the web version I got a 502 server error. I then IM-ed the office in Austin to see if they were able to access email. Everyone there is okay. I tried another computer. I rebooted. I thought of prayer, but stopped short.
Then I called the customer support number (11:30am) and spoke to someone who confirmed there were some intermittent outages, and I was assured their engineers were working on it. No problem, not having email for a short while was nice. Just for grins and a multipronged approach, I submitted a report via their web form (using my cogdogblog gmail address as a return), and got this response at 11:41am:
I understand that several users at your domain at experiencing 502 errors.
Typically, these errors are temporary, however, it appears for a small subset of our users this issue has persisted for longer. We’ve escalated this to our engineers with the highest priority and they are working diligently to resolve this problem.
That me now in the small subset club. But look! Those clever Google genius engineers have me as thei highest priority! They are working diligently!
Talking To Myself From an iPod to an Avatar in a Virtual World by cogdogblog posted 6 Aug ’08, 2.49pm MDT PST on flickr What does it mean if I am sending text messages from my iPhone to my second avatar in Second Life? It could mean some sort of techno-psychotic meltdown as my world […]
Cant Get No (GraphJammin’) by cogdogblog posted 5 Aug ’08, 5.04pm MDT PST on flickr As a followup to my deeply philsophical blog post on the Tigger versus Eeyore Debate, I slaved for minutes in Excel to produce this visual. I sent it off to GraphJam a while ago, but I guess it did not […]
There’s just somethings you don’t think of going together, but the web never fails to unveil, almost on a daily basis, an example of some use you would not have imagined the day before. So when Coop was visiting this weekend, she told me about a local group of Arizona folks participating in the 100 […]
As noted with much excitement last week, I am going to WordCamp August 16. It all got notched up a bit now when I got an email from Matt (yes that ma.tt – what a URL! I looked into getting al.an but the Dutch refused to go for such a short domain). Anyhow (with a […]
More Moo Goodness by cogdogblog posted 2 Aug ’08, 6.19pm MDT PST on flickr My moo note cards arrived today! I got a set of 16 cards with photos from my journeys to Australia. Yep, got more moo card goodies– my set of 16 notecards came today; I made a set of selected photos from […]
While I tinker with them, I’ve yet to code my own WordPress plugin. There are so many to choose from!
A few weeks ago I got an email from a guy named Joe who I had met at Northern Voice. He was developing a plugin that would connect blog posts automatically to related content in a site called DonorsChoose.org— I had never heard of it, but what a great concept. Teachers (and/or students) submit ideas for learning materials or activities they don’t have, and the site connects them with people willing to help them get what they need. Donors can choose which project to contribute directly to.
DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to addressing the scarcity and inequitable distribution of learning materials and experiences in our public schools. We believe this inequity is rooted in the following factors:
1. Shortages of learning materials prevent thorough, engaging instruction;
2. Top-down distribution of materials stifles our best teachers and discourages them from developing targeted solutions for their students; and
3. Small, directed contributions have gone un-tapped as a source of funding.DonorsChoose.org will improve public education by engaging citizens in an online marketplace where teachers describe and individuals can fund specific student projects. We envision a nation where students in every community have the resources they need to learn.
According to Joe, the site has over 14,000 developed lesson ideas, and his concept was to create a system where blog posts would automatically by linked to relevant content at DonrsChoose.
I was a little curious since I really doubted the rants and whinges I post would have some correlation in a school project database, like when I use words like “cat piss”, but he said apost I made about the Learning 2.008 conference had a great amount of correlation.
Besides manually updating six separate instances WordPress (to version 2.6) in the NMC fleet of sites, I also finally paid some over due attention to the version of WordPressMultiUser I have had up since November 2007. This tool some rustling to get it to the right version and also what had not been done in a while- making the front door.
I am hardly a WPmu guru, certainly no bavatuesday… maybe a bavalatethursdaymorning. Most places running WPmu are doing it to provide a blog hosting service, like edublogs or the crazy stuff the Rev does at Mary Washington.
My need was to have a series of separate sites hosted in WordPress w/o having to have an even bigger fleet of separate installs (Heck, maybe one day I can rope them all in under the WPmu hood). No these are all a series of online publications we have done at NMC in the lasy 8 months, all using the slick CommentPress template. Developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, CommentPress provides a way to post a series of publication chapters as “blog” posts, but the special feature is that comments can be attached to individual chapters.
So we have things like the 2008 Horizon Report in this format as well as the text of a keynote given by Howard Rheingold on Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action.
Until just a few minutes ago, these were separate little sites, but now I have at least a crude launch page for the entire WPmu site at http://wp.nmc.org.
I Am So Un Cuil by cogdogblog posted 31 Jul ’08, 3.01pm MDT PST on flickr I did not spend much time poking at www.cuil.com since it was pretty well blasted across the blogosophere. My ego search left me depressed, nothing for cogdogblog but plenty of "cat piss" Oh well, they must have wised up, […]
