Everything that does not have a home, just a big old stinking pile of posts.
I do not want to go out on a limb, but I think we have done something for the first time- a combination of two technologiies I have had my paws in this year, electronic portfolios and RSS. It reminds me of a trip to the Lee’s Ferry crossing of the Grand Canyon, when the […]
Okay, it is less than an hour before I leave for time Spring Break R&R and a box full of precious archives lands in our office- brochures, posters, memos from the last 2)+ years of our Maricopa Community College Honors Forums. Among this is a March 1983 visit : 1982-1983 HONORS FORUM“Technology: Its Impact on […]
Ahhhh, Spring time is almost here in the northern hemisphere (though here in Phoenix we have already experienced 90 degrees F for more than a week). This is a favorite time of year in the Sonoran Desert, as those precious relatively small, but important amounts of December, January rain, cause a burst of color as cacti and desert wild flowers burst into a raging riot of colors, even if for just a few weeks.
We have desert landscaping at our home, not a lick of grass nor any time spent pushing a lawnmower, and last weekend, while tending the gardens (pulling weeds) metaphors began wafting through my mind…..
The natives are restless and rumbling among the online web teaching course I am co-teaching this semester. One student’s self-evaluation referred to the “hostile” environment (a weeks worth of angry posts to the discussion board). There are a number of factors I am accepting my role in: * It is a course taught previously by […]
Just like my bookmarks, for a while I have noticed (and done little) about the discrepencies of the RSS feeds I have on my work and home computers. So in the contnued spirit of the work of Brian “Housecleaning” Lamb, I devoted some time to cleaning up the doghouse. Mainly this was exporting my feeds […]
Some interesting attempts at clustering or building maps of web search results (tip of the blog hat to EduResources). I cannot say I have found either of these more intuitive, but they are interesting.
Mooter is beta, but not bad. It sports a Google-like search engine (though there is no information or explanation what “mooter” is or does). A search result displays your query in the center of a map, with clusters of related terms around it, and clicking on the cluster essentially yields a Google-like list of results, though now a cluster is more refined than your original search.
For example I ran a query on “learning object” (It looks like you can copy/paste the URLs of search results, but this seems to fail due to a session variable) and you get this “map”
Niiiiiiiice. I have been mildly using Furl because I tend to bookmark things on my home computer I end up needing at work, and on my work computer I end up needing at home. Call it Murphy’s law of bookmarks. Furl does this with little fuss, just a bookmarklet link. I thought I had noticed […]
Last Friday’s Ocotillo Online Learning Group meeting was the first announcement and access provided to a new experimental electronic portfolio service we are hosting. This is a new installation of the software developed at Chandler-Gilbert Community College— we have set up this new server so that faculty form our other colleges could explore the potential […]
Trying to teach and old RSS feed some new tricks? At first RollUp seemed like a nifty idea- build a customized collection of RSS feeds into one site, theoretically coalescing a pile of feeds into one sensible pile. And that becomes a web page you can customize some layout- colors, fonts. And then that single […]
Back in November 2003, when I was wasting a lot of time dealing with blog spam, I wrote blogged the approach I took to close comments for this site after an entry had been up for 30 days. In a nutshell, I have a timed job calling a PHP script that rummages through the MT database and closes comments for entries that are more than 30 days old.
It worked great.
Except yesterday that it was doing this not just for this blog, but all the other blogs hosted on the server. Not quite what everybody may want, though we heard nary a complaint.
But I found out when Bob Stepno wrote asking, Is that real or phony blog spam in demo blog?
While following links about the NMC conference, I found my way to your previous Breeze thing about RSS… not a bad tool, it seems, and a nice presentation that I’ll point some friends to.
However, if you’re going to link to fictitious blogs (e.g., http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/boris/), please put a note to that effect on the blogs themselves so that real humans don’t waste their time posting comments trying to interact with the “authors.” (All readers might not get to the disclaimer/credits at the end of the presentation. They might even google themselves into the blog itself.)
Meanwhile, I don’t know if this blog-comment-spam is authentic or also a “demo”… but it’s amusing either way. Yikes, “phony spam” — what a concept!
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/boris/archives/000010.html
And sure enough, Boris’ old entry was littered with porn comments and nude people links, likely sneaking in under the radar before we put up the blacklist and closed the comments. Strangely enough, the blog spam cockroaches descended on the post titled “Cool Gizmo”.
Then I started looking around the database and noticed that every entry had its comments value set for closed.
The fix was easy, modify the PHP script so it acted only on one blog. Since I was rzor sharp on my mySQL queries from banging out the last bits of the online dance registration site, this was cake.
