3226 Posts Categorized "Blog Pile"

Everything that does not have a home, just a big old stinking pile of posts.

Blog Pile

EDUCAUSE Seminar: Objects, Trackback, RSS… maybe even the kitchen sink

FYI and for self (and colleague Brian Lamb) promotion… if you are attending EDUCAUSE 2004 (October in Denver), sign up now for our pre-conference seminar Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, TrackBack, and Related Technologies: Customized collections of learning objects from multiple repositories are achieved with simple, existing RSS protocols, creating access […]

Blog Pile

Rip. Mix. Feed. How?

Apple had the perhaps now ill-fated “Rip, Mix, Burn” concept for music– I am looking for something similar (less lawyer intensive) for RSS feeds. It is taking feeds breaking them apart, and rebuilding them into something new. We can rebuild ’em. Stronger. Faster. The Six Million Dollar Feed…. So it goes: Rip a few RSS […]

Blog Pile

Is Someone Calling Us?

flickr foto Is Someone Calling Us?available on my flickr Cadu and Mickey hear the sound of a bag of potato chips being opened… 3 miles away! It’s hard enough to get people to pay attention to your blog, but when the dogs have wandering attention, what is one to do? That’s okay as Mickey (right) […]

Blog Pile

To San Fran and Back: One Day for Horizon Project

I was a commuter today- a one day trip fro Phoenix to San Francisco for the NMC Horizon Project meeting… I am rather humbled and honored to be a part of a group of heavy hitters in the instructional technology realm- Phil Long from MIT (we first crossed paths at the TLTGroup‘s mid 1990s summer conferences in sultry Phoenix), Diana Oblinger from EDUCAUSE (long friend of Maricopa and guest speaker here, she is brilliant), Lev Golnick of Case Western (we go back to some email exchanges like 10 years ago when he did a sabbatical at ASU), Ruth Sabean from UCLA (we worked on some eportfolios efforts recently), Cyprien Lomas (NLII fellow and another from the great crew at UBC, Cyprian pops in via iChat and says “Hi from Vienna!”), Peter Samis (“Dr.Pachyderm” and another guest of Maricopa), and more were there…. and little ole me from a community college.

This was an awesomely dynamic group gathered to do the initial brainstorming of a pile of 40+ technologies that will be whittled down to a smaller number, researched, and highlighted in the 2005 Horizon Report.

Anyhow, for no other reason beyond frivolity, I decided on the flight home to jot down a chronology of the day- from the desert to “the City” and back in a flash…

Blog Pile

IndyJunior – maps of travels per year

It’s been a while since I updated my data files for the nifty Flash mapping app- IndyJunior. This application reads coordinate data from an XML file, and maps locations and current geographic location. Check out the CDB travel maps for 2003 and 2004. By turning the template for this MT page from a *.html to […]

Blog Pile

XSLT + RSS: Why Pretty for only some browsers or is some implementations?

I’ve been mildly curious about some of the new attempts at making RSS feeds more human readable at first click- rather than seeing ugly XML code, these “new” feed displays use CSS (Style sheets) and some sort of magical transform method called XSLT — basically it means if you click a link that points to an XML file, it has some nicer formatting applied.

I want to believe.

The problem is that I think a lot of folks doing this are not widely testing, because while it has pretty formatting on a PC with MSIE, or perhaps Mozilla/Firefox on Mac or Windows, it works. I’ve seen less then stellar appearance on Safari, which I had assumed (wrongly) was one of the more standards compliant browsers. Is it a limit of Safari? Am I doomed to switching browsers?

But then I peeked at a feed from a Blogger site, on Safari, and it had the feed + CSS + XSLT cooking. So what have they done right?

Blog Pile

Feed2JS Build and Style Tools

Back to code. I modified the download-able version of our Feed2JS to provide local installations the same build and CSS select/modify tools we offer on the main site. The primary reason is getting it set up on a server in New Zealand for my pending visits there for workshops in November. This was a fairly […]

Blog Pile

The Power of Grouping RSS Feeds

I’ve been using my CDB Bloglines site mainly to run a master copy of my regular RSS feeds (keep my home and work computers in synch). But playing with grouping of feeds, I’ve found some new tricks to play with.

I had just been dumping all feeds into one Bloglines folder, organized alphabetically. I run them on the sidebar of the main entry to CogDogBlog— yes, “blogrolls” are like, so, 2002, but I have used it myself numerous times to share the URL of a blog I read. And when I visit new blogs, I very much like to scan who they read and it has helped me to uncover new blogs. It was the low tech Friend of a Friend approach.

Anyhow, Bloglines provides a JavaScript cut and paste that puts my current RSS list on the blog page. I had noticed James does something similar, but his generated feed has labeled groups, which is what I found Bloglines does for you know for the different folders you create on the BL site. So I made a few general feed categories.

But the fun stuff came when trying to use this with my desktop RSS reader…