I’ve been tinkering this week for a new approach to building basic web sites driven by a single HTML file (with a backend of sophisticated CSS and Javascript). It’s a style you can start to recognize — see Medium, Sports Illustrated, and countless others once you tune into it.

It is exploding. This is a future of web design based on Bootstrap, a framework first created by twitter that is focused on responsive (any device it reformats) and actually a mind set of mobile first in design. But it looks gorgeous in a web browser too. And it looks must less “pagey” than what came before it. And it is standalone- it needs no database, and can run in a browser offline.

And it is also exciting to be dabbling with a new approach for web design. It is not, however, something that you make through a GUI interface, punching buttons, and menus– you need to get in the code. You do not need to understand how it works (I am a model of that). This is not a tutorial but my own record keeping as I start learning how to build.

But stop talking and start showing. I am using this for a new version of my “calling card” or a “landing page” site at http://cogdog.info — explore it first, then I will roll through what I have done here.

New site for cogdog.info

And the same site on a mobile

I bought the domain a few years back, and for a while simply had it pointed to my About.me site which is easy to set up and connect to your various social media sites. What I liked for a while was that it had a contact form, so people could message me. Then they changed the way it worked, so you have to log into About.me to leave a message. Then it turned into something that keeps messaging me when people “like” the site. And its run by AOL.

So I decided to take back the site and built it myself, after all, I want to show what I can build, not how I can be dependent on a third party site. Keep on Reclaimin’.

Guard your time, precious. Physicists and philosophers will carefully explain that time is not a quantity we can possess in any quantities. But we still want to. I have had a long gag reflex to any device or technology which proffers to “save you time.” In workshops i used to say that when you hear […]

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by laura I can be so clever I… oh forget it. But still, I think this is neat. back in the beginning of my web career I “discovered” something in my first big (and the “big” was never planned, it just happened) web project that […]

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Kim’n’Cris Knight

The Headless ds106 Experiment is mostly over, in the never really over way of ds106. I had a great time, we saw a nice wave of new energetic folks come into the fold, and we ended with a big bang of a project that was not even in the plans.

You will most likely never read about this in the New York Times, Slate, Fast Company, The Chronicle of Higher Education, not even the Weekly World News. That’s fine by me.

This post has sprawled far past the reasonable bit size attention span length everyone seem so acknowledge. I planned to close with this, but for TLDR or whatever it is–

Massive online learning in numbers does not interest me at all; what does is massive amounts of creative effort by perhaps a small core of participants and a lovely long tail of activity by a larger number.

To recap the original idea…

Since January 2011 ds106 has been taught at University of Mary Washington (UMW) and other institutions as a course for credit but also has at the same time been open to participants from the web (learn more about ds106). However, for someone new to ds106 as an open participant, it has not been very clear what they can do (we’ve made some suggestions as a starting point).

Because UMW is not offering a formal course for Fall 2013, I had a thought”“ what if we set up a syllabus based on the previous iterations of class, set the weekly assignments as scheduled posts, and invited people to participate in it as a course w/o a teacher?

It was not simply copy old posts and republish… I greatly underestimated what it would take to remove the parts of previous UMW classes that was specific to them, take out wording that says “required”. About halfway in I started trying to add a weekly video, arttcle link, etc as an “inspiration”… sometimes toed to the topic, sometimes just more general.

So we have a complete syllabus of the experience. More on a plan for this later.

extracted from an actual, individually composed comment on my blog… Me: Why hello, it is so nice that you stopped by my blog. cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by LEOL30 BlogSpammer: What you published made a lot of sense. Me: Sometimes I hit the mark. Rarely. BlogSpammer: However, what about […]

When I first came across the reCapctha project, then at Carnegie-Mellon, now a Google owned product, I thought the concept was one of the most clever things ever. Those two scrambled word things you have to type into a box on a web form were there to make it harder for bots to pretend to […]