Why? Because I can. The plain text of the last 100 posts….
creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by maol Frequent words I heard as a kid was reminding me of my household chore-- "TAKE OUT THE TRASH!!!" I'm finally getting around to doing it regularly. Even with Akismet running on this blog, I have seen it accumulate more than 1000 trapped spams per day, and by the time the count hit 10k, the Wordpress interface hung on how long it too to empty the spam odored trash. The only way to clean out was to jump into the database via phpMyAdmin, and manually run an SQL command. I finally decided to set up a cron script to do this, and here is how I did it via my Reclaim Hosting cpanel (I await some technowiz to tell me how bad my approach is). I am essentially doing a command line database query to empty the comments marked as spam (the ones that Akismet IDs as spam). To do this you will need info that is stored in your wp-config.php file on your server- they will look something like: // ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** // /** The name of the database for WordPress */ define('DB_NAME', 'mygroovydatabase'); /** MySQL database username */ define('DB_USER', 'trickyusername'); /** MySQL database password */ define('DB_PASSWORD', 'X4somehiglhycryptic8password'); the name of your wordpress database (below referred to as DB_NAME) the user name that logs into your wordpress database (DB_USER) a password for that database user (DB_PASSWORD) The thing you are looking for in your cpanel is Cron Jobs down in the Advanced Section [caption id="attachment_35538" align="alignnone" width="500"] Finding the Cron Jobs[/caption] When you add a new cron job, you need to choose how often it will run. Mine is every day at 4am; but a more reasonanle setting might be as shown below, every other day at 3am The command is the big deal here. Mine looks like this, you will have to fill in your own values (no quotes) for DB_NAME, DB_NAME, and DB_PASSWORD (and make it all one one line, I broke mine up so you can see it) mysql -u DB_USER -pDB_PASSWORD --database=DB_NAME -Bse "DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'spam'" Note that there is no space after "-p" and your database password, so for my fake example above, it would look like mysql -u trickyusername -pX4somehiglhycryptic8password --database=mygroovydatabase -Bse "DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 'spam'" So far, I am finding it is keeping the number of flagged comments to a more reasonable number. I did get more powerful solution from Brad Emerson that essentially blacklists IPs at the server level, and am hoping to sort that out eventually. For now, I just wanted something to keep the database from bloating from all the trash that piles up. I do not fault anyone else for making the choice, but I refuse to turn off comments. Call me a masochist. And sometimes... sometimes.. it is mildly entertaining to see what floats through. It's kind of like occasionally lifting your floor to scan the sludge for curiosity of how life can exist down there, The eclectic Woody Allen has had many romantic encounters, on and off screen. How could he ever forget his lively yet draining down under love affair? I was going to make a new assignment for the #ds106 GIFfest, but sometimes it is more fun to make the GIF fit, in this case making it slip in facetiously under Michael Branson Smith's I'll Love You Forever: Help that cinematic love last for eternity by turning it into an animated GIF. There is a good and growing set of GIFable tasks, time now to fill in with examples. So far RIFF a GIF is in the lead. These starry eyed lovers first met at sunset on a brushy hill top north of Adelaide, he the pasty white skinned American burning under the solar flares, she the bouncy yet quixotic marsupial who did not pull punches. They loved, they fought, and mostly just danced around their own emotional issues. It really was more of a spectacle. We could not help but watch as the sparks flew, not knowing if either was worth cheering on. Maybe it was like rubbernecking a road wreck. Lasting for eternity? Love is fleeting for these two, but the moment? Forever. I could hardly resist after discovering the clip (via Open Culture) from Woody's 1966 appearance on the apparently circus themed British show Hippodrome (it was the 1960s after all). Just look at those biceps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPqvqPIGFts Adam Kalsey provides the rallying cry to in his Comment Spam Manifesto. Also check out Adam's story of nailing a blog spam roach where it hurts. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected, and more technologically savvy than the average email user. We control the medium that you are now attempting to exploit. Youˆ‚ve picked a fight with us and itˆ‚s a fight you cannot win... Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated. Bloggers will track you down and notify your hosting providers about your activities. We will tell your ISPs what you are using their connections for. We will let the makers of the products you are advertising know of your despicable sales methods. We will hit you where it hurts by attacking your source of income. This is also time to announce the appearance of our official icon of war on blog comment spam roaches, thanks to the talented Don Synstelien who gave permission for me to use his realistic cockroach image (I shrunk it and added some spam words under Mr Roachy, Blattaria Spamicus). Please credit Don for the image! All posts bearing the roach banner mark another victory, another stomped, squished, and obliterated spam roach from this blog. March on. Sign or trackback the manifesto. Track down a roach's ISP and ask them to yank the plug. Install the MTBlacklist Plugin and report comment blog spam. Splat! I saw the link to Anil Dash's End Game for the Open Web shared Friday, scanned it quickly. I've been a long fan of this man's writing and staking a position. He sure outlined the ills of the game. The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is. Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system. .... I don't say this lightly: it looks to me like 2026 is the year that decides whether the open web as we know it will survive at all, and we have to fight like the threat is existential. Because it is. https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/ Serious, right? Still I might have not read all the way through. When a good friend shared it by email with a note of it's "stirring call to action" I re-read this end part again. Huh? The action called for is to support the organizations making a stand (not that I disagree) and hold on to hopes of some kind of "Good AI"? I feel less than stirred. It was coming across Anil Dash's novel style of web site in the early 2000s, you know the "blog thing" that I learned of Six Apart, and this made my own blog's first home on Movable Type. And I sure was a big fan of Glitch (it's game ended 2025). I had more connected memories and went into the text box of my favorite tool to type in my query... not some bot thing but my own blog. Bear with the tangents that happened. First I was in a run down of a crazy zany bit of travel stretch I did in 2013. https://cogdogblog.com/2013/11/40-days-of-travel-stats/ The hit on the search was in reference to one great stop in there was attending the Moxfest 2013 conference in London, noting "Keynoter I Most Wished To Meet But Did Not: Anil Dash at Mozfest." I see him listed in the event web site (wow still alive), mentioned in a few blogs, but not sure what the talk was about. I'd guess it was on the heels of Anil's 2012 post about the Web We Lost, so it was 14 years from that to end game. Ahh, but wait a minute, I was there near the front of the room to get this photo (and for which, this 13 year old posted image registers a like from the subject) https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/10502072285 Anil Dash flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license But then I got myself distracted in the middle of my post scanning the talks, presentations, pocasts, etc I did in those 40 days. Sure its my vanity, but this is my own web page, and I was curious about the links that persevered. The video from University of Alaska Fairbanks for the talk I gave. Gone. a Digital Beards podcast I did there. Gone. A video I recorded with Martin Weller posted on the OER Research Hub. Gone. An etherpad for some session I initiated at Mozfest. Gone. An Edutalk podcast recorded in John Johston's kitchen. Gone. Now here is what I found interesting. Of all the recordings of stuff I did, the most reliable source of this 13 year old content was the ones posted on YouTube. I ended up taking a bit of my day replacing dead links with ones from the Internet Archive, and found a few more where the media left alive... was on YouTube. Now look, I am in no way denying that Google ins front and center with all the blame to heap on the web's end game, yet here I am looking at maybe the most reliable archive of media. It's so easy to get up and proclaim Googles evilness and urge everyone to jump off the ship, but when I see how much of the web has been abandoned by the organizations and individuals that originally made them, I am not quite confident of heaping all the web end game blame on the broligarchy. I defend them not, but I feel individuals have responsibility here. It's way I spend my own time here in the blog fixing old links, and scouring for lost media. I am a reclaimer and a maintainer of my own stuff. The job never ends, but I won't quit. https://cogdogblog.com/2016/04/digital-durability/ Hang on, I am not done yet talking about Anil Dash. He personally stepped up in 2011 when I was faced with a hosting problem for this monster I created called Feed2JS, a web thing I cobbled from other's ideas to do what now seems arcane- being able to include in a web site a dynamic widget.sidebar powered by RSS and added as cut and paste Javascript. Some kind folks had run it for me for quite some time, but their company got bought, and my freeloading traffic eating abrge of a site had to find a new home. I put out a call for help on this blog, and added it to the output itself. https://cogdogblog.com/2011/09/red-alert-for-feed2js/ I do remember that Anil directly contacted me by email and did financially contribute to help with the server costs. I went deep into my gmail and narrowed the search for just that year, but did not find his message. The thing is I found tons of message from others, many who donated small and medium amounts of $, quite a few messages came via a link I had for a while on About.me. In combing through messages friom that era, I was rather overwhelmed at how interpersonal and generous email was then. There was not just the people who ponied some money but many more that expressed their gratitude. Then it struck me again. I was there in the vile Google platform, able to do pinpoint searches on 13 year old messages. One more time, I am not aiming to make a defense of all that Google does, but am finding this weird irony of getting this long running bit of my digital past. And I have not even cracked open the Google Drive, The End End Game I really want to relish Anil's last message to his Web End Game post: Ultimately I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time. https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/ I do not find this true at all. We have been given choice, and predominantly over the last X years, most people have opted for the fast food of social media. We are not just passive victims here, most of us gave in, caved in to the convenience of the Big Sites, It deserves a look in the mirror, Pogo. It's more than one set of initials on the knife./ Featured Image: 2009/365/127: The Earth Takes the Dead flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) edited by me to add a bit of the title text of Anil Dash's Post, the dates 1989-2026 for the age of the web, and Open ClipArt image of a hunting knife by j4p4n. My self-imposed sentence of hard labor is not over. The next phase of our backyard landscaping project involved a delivery of 20 tons of 3/8 inch minus coral granite on our driveway. This is everything that passes through the finest sieve at the rock quarry (folks in the know just call it "minus"), so it is pretty much sand. Landscaping in arid Arizona should not involve grass (though many people try to replicate Midwest/ East Coast greens here). In the 7 years we have owned our house, we have had two deliveries of crushed granite and one of rounded "river rock" gravel that has been moved by wheel barrow front and back. Where has it gone? This latest effort is meant to provide a more level look to the back-- because of poor drainage we could not extend much of our cement deck, so we needed a more porous surface. So since the big pink pile was dumped Tuesday, my wife and I have spent 2 hours the last 2 nights shoveling and hauling sand. Our neighbor across the street mentioned something about "why break your backs? Just hire some guys at $10 an hour to haul it." The remark has stuck with me-- it's not that we cannot afford to hire help, but we have this silly pride in doing work ourselves. Is that like some old Puritan work ethic? We enjoy the physical exertion, especially after a full day of desk jobs. This has no direct relevance to anything blogged here, but then again, there is something to the "do it hands on" approach rather than taking the easy way out and just paying someone to do the work, be it tons of sand or technology. Or not.... ask my back in a few days. Something unusual happened in the NBA this year. The game actually got exciting. There is action, points are being scored. I went to a Phoenix Suns game about 3 years ago (someone felt bad because they forgot to show up for a meeting and offered to share me his ticket, I encouraged him to miss meetings more often) -- and it was a dull, listless affair. I swear fans were reading newspapers, balancing their checkbooks, cleaning their fingernails, during a game that was lucky to hit the high 80s in points. That went out the window this year with the unexpected run by our Phoenix Suns. There is scoring, enthusiasm, passing, youth, and a sense, even if it not true, that they actually enjoy the game. And the selfless and electric play by Steve Nash is just one more reason to love Canada. Yet all year long, the naysayers kept waiting for the bubble to burst and it failed to do so; it was not til the last week of the season that Sports Illustrated found room on the cover for the Suns. The most pathetic case is Charles Barkley, who cannot miss an opportunity to badmouth this year's Suns. He is so transparent is his desire to see this team not achieve what he failed to deliver in his mid 1990s days here-- showboating and hogging the ball with those lame triple pump fakes in the low post while the current team plays as a team without the Grand Canyon sized ego feedings required of "Sir Charles". I cannot wait to watch him eat crow or at least Amare Stoudemire's used shoes. Even if they do not win it all, it's been an exciting year and it is actually refreshing to see a game played rather than a bunch of millionaire prima donnas strolling up and down the court. Eeek, I am a closet sports nut. cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by dmixo6 For open participants in ds106, we can dispense of the entire "I dropped out of another &$*#ing MOOC" because there is nothing to drop out from. No one-pace-for-all ramming speed schedule, no weekly lectures, no multiple guess quizzes. We have a very easy to understand Getting Started Guide, itself with not one way to do this course but TWO, the Fast And Easy Way and the Blogging Way. But here are ten things you can do to be part of ds106, without even signing up. How massively un MOOC is that? (0) The Stephen Downes Clause Feel free to ignore all of the following and make up your own. (1) Do one daily create a week. Just because it says daily does not require you to do it every day, it requires us to publish one every day! Each day at 10:00 AM EST, a brand new creative challenge, none of which should take more than 20 minutes to complete. It might be Photography, http://tdc.ds106.us/category/drawing/, Audio, Video, or Writing. You just need to post them on the designated social media site. And there is no reason to be stuck to the present ones. We have a collection of almost 400 past Daily Creates many suitable for creative activities. Try one at random or explore the archive. (2) Comment on a few student blogs. If blogging is old hat, you might have forgotten how electrinic those first comments can be. Pay it forward by giving feedback to our registered tudents, by they mine at University of Mary Washington, or Bill Generuex's class at KSU, Briant Short's class at the University of Michigan, or Michael Branson-Smith and Chloe Smolarski's class at York College/CUNY. Even one comment is golden to these new bloggers. (3) Do or Borrow a ds106 Assignment If there was a heart to the class it would be the Assignment Bank. This includes over 500 visual, design, audio, video, mashup, fan fiction, writing, web created by ds106 participants, plus connections to over 4000 examples created for these assignments. Sure you could call these OERs you could call them Fandangoes. You do not even need to have a blog connected to ds106, we have a loinked form on each assignment where you could submit a single response. Not sure whare to start? Spin the random wheel or see the ones that are featured. Or follow the ds106bot on twitter- it tweets out random assignments. (4) Answer questions or share resources in twitter We use a single hash tag for all things ds106. Students ask questions, people share related resources, or just informally exchange ideas. Take one day a week to pop into the #ds106 stream, how hard could that be? (5) Create a New Daily Create You think our ideas are lame? You have something better? Toss one in vis our suggestion box and it should appear in the next weeks. If you follow step (4) above, it just might lead to step (5). Ask Joe MacMahon: https://twitter.com/pragmanic/statuses/291701236384813056 and a few days later? http://tdc.ds106.us/tdc381/ That's how we roll. (6) Tune into or take over the microphone for ds106 radio. We have a live web radio station, and not only is there music, shows, and people to listen to, anyone can broadcast at any time. Does Coursera do that? No. Does Udacity do that? No. Blackboard? Nope. We do, we give it away. http://ds106.us/ds106-radio (7) Create a ds106 Assignment Got a creative idea bigger than a Daily Create? Well, just make it part of the assignment bank (preferably doing it yourself so there is an example). That's how we grow. Not by any mass replicant scaling, one creative brick at a time. Now just tweeting out "This would be a cool #ds106 assignment" is not up to snuff for us. Step up and make something! And you may run into our snarky bot: https://twitter.com/ds106bot/status/276170554971660291 (8) Share ds106 work that inpsires you If you see something from a ds106 participant that causes a "WOW" reaction, then submit it to the in[SPIRE] site, our effort to collect the Best of ds106. This site itself was created by students in last year's class. (9) Help Us Figure out What to to with a subreddit One of our current students, asked us if we had a subreddit. Huh? Well, in fact there was one about two years old with only 2 things in it -- http://reddit.com/r/ds106. So if you have reddit experience or want some, jump in and help us imagine how o use it. Maybe its a place to upvote good examples of digital storytelling. or away for students to get early feedback on their work. We don't know, we are looking to you to help us make it emergent. (10) Be part of our weekly show We are experimenting with a live weekly ds06 show via Google Hangouts. We have students from UMW, outside experts, and anyone else who wants a seat (if it fills, it can be watched via the YouTube stream). (11) Remix an Assignment Ok it is wild enough we have over 500 different creative assignments, but then do the math on our Assignment Remix site which applies a random "card" and gives you the challenged to to that assignment in a new way. Like doing the Big Caption assignment played with the Yo Momma card .. or the Spreadsheet animation one played with a Dr Suess Character Card. Woah, how about those 10... turned up to 11. And I could go on. cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by me and the sysop So while other MOOCs cause feelings of remorse (or lack of remorse over the death of aprticipation), not ds106. In fact, the opposite happen. Drop the obligation, the breakneck pace, and you can do as little or as much as you want. And pretty soon you are tweeting #ds106 $4life The ds106 classes at University of Mary Washington are underway this week- I had my first class last night (with assistance from the Reverend), and I have set up a new blog for ds106 teaching posts (and just to go through same steps I am asking students to do) see http://106tricks.net/. I will next start pulling in those posts using FeedWordPress. Maybe. But I will continue to do my assignments here. My students are charged with doing 3 Daily Create assignments a week, and given this first week's timing, I am having them do only one before Monday. What is this about? Why do this? Doesn't this speak for itself: 1 Take Tongue Twister: Below is the tongue twister you will recite. Record a video of you reciting it in one take (honor system of course) and upload it to YouTube with the tag tdc011. Remember: BE CREATIVE! Thanks to Noiseprofessor for this assignment. Luke Luck likes lakes. Luke's duck likes lakes. Luke Luck licks lakes. Luck's duck licks lakes. Duck takes licks in lakes Luke Luck likes. Luke Luck takes licks in lakes duck likes. Of course, I rushed out and did mine, using the record from the web cam option in YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0NtihOGhYY Are we serious? Hell yes. As a low minimum, this activity, which should be done in 15 minutes or left, from record to publish, gets you some proactive in basic video recording/uploading (as well as adding description info and tags). But there is more. In doing this, you are going to be performing. You are going to want to find some original way to represent yourself. It has those elements of improv I think are important, learning how to be a personality in front of an audience (in this case, the internet is your audience). Yet there is more- this is your community already rising to A-Game status: We are seeing people in their spaces- with pets or kids. We hear the ambient sounds of where you are (laughter in the background). People are already augmenting the format- doing it graphically, or introducing Mt Bag Man as a speaker. This is the infectious nature of ds106. I would suggest checking out the assignment when tweeted at 10am EST. You might want to rush out and do it, be first. Get it done. If you have that vision. Sometimes it is better to let it percolate, and be in the background as you go about your day. Or you may want to see what others have done as inspiration. Copying, riffing, remixing- those are all game in the Daily Create- heck you can even do it as an interpretive dance. And look, those people in my class that recorded a 20 second video and shared it? Consider your Daily Creatr work done for the week (but nothing stops you from doing it daily- I am at it 7 days a week). flickr foto Presentation Interruptusavailable on my flickr Here at the New Media Consortium (NMC) Directors meeting in Austin, I was doing a reprise of the 5 Minutes of Fame session at EDUCAUSE ELI Conference. This was supposedly highlighting the NMC Horizon Report section on "Phones in Their Pocket" -- the report suggesting cell phone technology is in the 2-3 year horizon for becoming more broadly used in education. Less a report than being a bit goofy, I arrange for my presentation to be interrupted by a cell phone call (has thay ever happened to anyone else?) - where I am trying to handle a crashed server situation with someone at the other end-- who turns out to have the name "Mom". The transcript and a link to some of the background flickr photo slide shows are available in the back blog. Thanks to Barbara Truman for sharing the photo... I usually try to position myself behind the camera rather in front, so thanks again! Mom calls again in the middle of a presentation! Submitted for no one's approaval, another design example for the ds106 Minimalize Your Philosophy assignment: Pick your favorite quote OR make up your own phrase which describes a philosophy that you try to live by. It can be about love, friendship, family, education, culture, health, charity, etc. Design a minimalist poster depicting the concept. Extra challenge: Try to include a unique element that makes it YOU. Don't forget to explain your thought process. :) Okay, I am not going to claim this one as MY philosophy, but I had this idea, and needed to make a poster, and this was the closest assignment I could find (yeah, I could create a new one, but we have plenty). Today on our walk around the country roads near their home, friends Barbara and Bill pointed out some innocuous nondescript green plants on the roadside. They had been mowed down, but there were taller stalked nes in the adjacent field. "Have you hear of wild parsnip?" No, I'm kind of a city guy. Well, as it turns out, wild parsnip creates these bright yellow flower heads cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by wackybadger but if you contact these plants at all, they will burn your skin and leave scars. It is labeled as a dangerous plant. Can you think of a more clever evolutionary strategy to be left alone? Create attractive flowers but then easily poison anything that touches it. SO I decided to make a poster of this. In PhotoShop I used the image above, and simplified it by using Image=> Adjust-> POsterize which reduces the color set to a smaller number, and turn a photo into something more abstract like a print. I played with the slider and ended up on something like 11 levels. In landscape orientation it did not look like a poster (nor did it leave room for words), so I rotated in 90 degrees. The text "Survival Strategy" is Gil Sans Ultra Bold, because, it is big and thick. I used Layer=>Effects=>Stroke to put a 3 pixel outside edge to the letter, a good effect for making text stand out. The lower text is Mistral, which I liked because it looks kind of hand drawn and more ominous. The black text was not really looking good on its own, so I used Layer=>Effects=>Outer Glow to put that yellowish haze around the letters. Poster done! Again, this IS NOT MY PHILOSOPHY! Just had fun with today's learning moment. Learn more about Wild Parsnip... I think it gives our Corn Overlords something to worry about http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C78Gl_KBFBc To add to my list of burps in the Panther-Tiger upgrade: I seem unable to print any web page from Firefox... its infinite beach ball spin, and forced quit to escape. I can print fine in other applications. I rarely print web content, but its not too much to ask for. Finder sidebar disappearing icons... I keep all of my project/working files on a portable FireWire hard drive, so I can move them from work machine to home machine and back (yes, they are regularly backed up as often they are transported in a backpack). Pre-Tiger, I marked often used folders (local copies of web directories for 4 different servers) on this external drive as sidebar icons by simply dragging them over there. I've been trying to figure out why they would disappear next time I mounted the hard drive. Finally digging down in the bowels os Apple's support forums, I found a message that said the sidebar is activated dynamically based on connected drives, so when I remove the hard drive, Poof! go my shortcuts. What is up with that? How is that even helpful or useful to remove my shortcut links to removable media? Heck, they've even trashed the Favorites thingie. So what, I have to go in and set up some sort of Spotlight search to make 4 shortcut links to my frequently accessed folders? First of all, the built in Apple help has nothing even close to useful information- in fact, beyond beyond cleanly layed out on screen, it is the most helpless help system anywhere. I can count on one toe the number of times I have found an answer there-- its ideal for new Mac users... but for anyone else, it should be replaced by a Google search button. But beyond that how can Apple change the functionality of its pre-existing systems and not let it be easily known? Isn't this something against in the Human Interface Guidelines?? These are relatively minor things, but are consuming my productivity time. This is why I really hate operating system changes. I suggest a species change for 10.5-- let's call it Fido. Or Marmaduke. Or Cujo. Completely unrelated to technology... Today, after two months of excuses and ignoring the messages from Mirror Mirror on the Wall, I got back on the bicycle for my 11 mile commute to work. And today's weather was so... optimal? Here in Phoenix we are expecting a record high of 112 F, and once you add in the summer moisture lurking in the air, plus the car fumes it feels something like 192 degrees. Actually the morning was quite comfortable, at 6 AM it was only 87 and believe it or not, that felt cool while the sun was still hiding on the horizon. This morning I was only cut off twice by large SUVs, drivers completely oblivious to anyone in their wake, about an average rate. And a bonus- I had an opportunity to deal with a driver who was convinced the world was his ash tray-- waiting at a red light to cross a busy intersection, I could see the driver of a van waiting to turn left was almost at the end of his cigarette. Surely enough, we dropped his smoking butt 18 inches from where I was standing, and I got to say, "Excuse me! Excuse me! I think you dropped something, do you want it back?" I cannot repeat his reply. The real test is the ride home, when it will still be about 110, the road radiating enough heat to cook a meatloaf. If there are no blog posts tomorrow, I might have disappeared into the hot asphalt. Seriously, I do some of my best thinking while pedaling, and feel great about stretching my brain, getting some aerobic activity, and not using up natural resources. And the real test- will I ride tomorrow? Tonight the WordPress tinkering I was doing was way down in the weeds, but it never fails me how the codebase let's you manipulate almost every thing in the interface. So a current project I am doing has a custom post type for something called Artifacts (yes, it's for a portfolio project). I was showing my client's how they could use the WordPress admin bar (the black menu site owners have where-ever they go) to easily create a new one via the + New menu at the top: They like this, but asked something I would bot have thought of since I am a little too familiar with the interface--why can't Artifact be at the top of this menu, as its the most common thing users will be doing? That's a good question. And while I am looking at it, almost none of them need the shortcuts to New Media or New User. As usual I found a similar question in Stack Exchange, but as it rarely happens, the answers were not too helpful. My own digging got me in the corner of the WordPress Codex about WP_Admin_Bar. Apparently, everything on this menu is considered a "node". I played a bit with the get_node() function thinking I could get the thing as an object I could modify and stick back. Dead end. So I went a bit more brute force. There is a remove_node() method to take things off, and add_node() to put things up. My task then was to remove everything but the Artifact item my post_type creates, then put back the ones I want. In order. You need access to the CSS ids for the menu items, so the browser Developer Inspector comes in handy to fetch the entire menu. Post Media Page Artifact User The parent menu has an id of new-content and the menu item for New Post has one of new-post (you look at the list item ids and remove the wp-admin-bar is that obscure or what>). To make this happen, my theme's functions.php meeds a hook for the action wp_before_admin_bar_render as we are mucking around with the admin bar before it is assembled add_action( 'wp_before_admin_bar_render', 'portfolio_adminbar' ); My custom function first goes through and removes the nodes for New Post, Page, Media, and User. Then I put back the ones I want. Note the use of the admin_url() function to create the URL for the site's dashboard, and also, I can make the menu item for Post be Blog Post function portfolio_adminbar() { // admin bar needs to be known global $wp_admin_bar; // remove all items from New Content menu $wp_admin_bar->remove_node('new-post'); $wp_admin_bar->remove_node('new-media'); $wp_admin_bar->remove_node('new-page'); $wp_admin_bar->remove_node('new-user'); // add back the new Post link $args = array( 'id' => 'new-post', 'title' => 'Blog Post', 'parent' => 'new-content', 'href' => admin_url( 'post-new.php' ), 'meta' => array( 'class' => 'ab-item' ) ); $wp_admin_bar->add_node( $args ); // add back the new Page $args = array( 'id' => 'new-page', 'title' => 'Page', 'parent' => 'new-content', 'href' => admin_url( 'post-new.php?post_type=page' ), 'meta' => array( 'class' => 'ab-item' ) ); $wp_admin_bar->add_node( $args ); } It's rather brute force, but it works. Now the theme has a simpler +New menu, and the Artifact one is first, Tiny details, tiny ones. I dig 'em. Just to be a good StackExchange citizen, I posted my solution. Featured Image: Added a screenshot of part of the Wordpress Admin bar (screenshot from my development site) to Shark steam mop on white wall and wood floors flickr photo by yourbestdigs shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license As he does so well, Jonathan Worth turns the expected a bit inside out with his latest, inspired, phonar nation project, Selfless Selfies. The project aims to raise awareness for the plight of children affected by Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a fatal disease lacking a cure. What is a Selfless Selfie? A campaign to raise awareness of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy using photography, by taking a socially inclusive act, the selfie (everyone takes them), and pointing out how this is in fact socially exclusive for many in the DMD community (if you can’t hold a smart phone, let alone a camera, it’s not easy to make a selfie). We have designed a simple portraiture activity that should be fun and informative for a young person to take. The idea is to make a photograph that says something about you, not just that shows what you look like. The new site asks for people first to show their awareness by sharing in social media a photo showing the interlocking finger symbol shown in the site's photos. Just do yours and tag it #SelflessDMD. These then show up on the front of the site. I decided to do my #SelflessDMD while traveling in Puerto Rico. I forgot to do it at one of the lovely beaches I was at, so you get me along highway 52 outside of Ponce. https://instagram.com/p/9BZ5VOsAUA/ Of course the thing is, if you think about it, unless the vain or stick enabled selfie, it's pretty hard to take a photo of yourself posing with both of your hands locked together. Typicaly, that means you need to ask someone for help. Or, as I did it, set your camera on self timer, and preciously balance it on the back of a rental car, while the bridge you are standing on bobs up and down from the passing trucks. Actually it does not matter how you do it, mostly that you do it. And then see more ways you can pledge support. Learn more about it from Jonathan's Ignite talk at DML 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQyQtnzvMVs Top / Featured Image: "Archive, George, and Isaac" from the Selfless Selfie site "MERLOT Focus on: Federated Search Technologies" Martin Konig Bastiaan Waiting for the overview, background slides about federated searches. In a nutshell, use web services to spread search and retrieval across multiple sources. But the three dollar (Canadian) question- will they put a URL on the screen of a MERLOT RSS feed? (more…) Yesterday's twitter was piped with laments of the too early death of musician Chris Cornell. I have to admit not knowing much of the man, but his distinctive voice and raw style have been swirling in my mixes for a while, a handful of Temple of the Dog and Soundgarden tracks. Dr Sava(SavaSava) reminded me too: https://twitter.com/savasavasava/status/865221323106263040 The original Soundgarden I know well is Rusty Cage but more so is that for a while I used the Johnny Cash cover as a metaphor for the idea of remix being more a new interpretation than an exact cover, like a tribute band. I had rolling around the file system a mashup of the two versions, I pulled the overlapping clip into a video that is likely a copyright violation (come get me): https://vimeo.com/218021193 I also got an email of mourning/tribute from Jabiz Raisdana who is taking this year as a social media / blogging hiatus (damn I miss your voice, brother). Cornell meant a whole lot more to Jabiz, being in the way the music and musicians of your teen and young adult are the ones that embed in your DNA. Cornell was a bit later in my life arc, so my connection is not as vivid, but I appreciate it. The music that was incised in my soul was actually even from a former wave, for me the British Rock invasion of the late 1960s early 1970s. It's still the dominant stuff in my pod mix. Mine was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjN5uHRIcjM And when I ready the Cornell died at 52, I sit here at but two years older and think... maybe Pete was wrong. I want to get old before I die. I don't want the music to be over for a long time. Featured Image: I sought out Google Images searching on needle turntable looking for a photo of the arm of a turn table at the end of an LP or in the dead wax. This image was the closest I found. The funny thing is... that it's my own photo 2012/366/25 Drop a Needle flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license I ought to stop, but this is too much fun.. today I completed my 16th mini "Skyperview" with folks near and far about their use and ideas for digital audio over the net. I'll be scraping a few more before the end of the week, but I need to get around to actually writing my article this is going to be used for. So added yesterday and today: * Steve Dembo, Director of Technology at a school in Chicago, blogs at Teach42 fame. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/steve_dembo.mp3 * Diana Oblinger, Vice President of EDUCAUSE. We were discussing a summer project over the phone, and I just recorded her with my iRiver 3p3 recorder stuck in front of the telephone speaker. Not the greatest quality, but she has such great ideas and perspective. And EDUCAUSE is going full bore into podcasting. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/diana_oblinger.mp3 * Rachel Smith, Director of Development and Programs with New Media Consortium, from her home in Sonoma County California. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/rachel_smith.mp3 * Amy Gahran, blogs at Contentious from Boulder Colorado. She was very patient as I initially recorded her yesterday, but something between Skype, WireTap, LineIn completely hung my G4 and the whole thing was list. She did the interview a second time. There is absolutely something different about the person to person voice connection-- Amy and I had traded some barbs via the written (blogged) format, but person to person it was respectful and fun. And she had a boatload of great ideas she mentioned in the Skperview. Heck, we might even be friends now ;-) http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/forum/spr05/amy_gahran.mp3 Interesting trends are that everyone I have spoken to is today taking advantage of content by digital audio, many have more than one device, a few have some high end home network systems for audio, and all are optimistic on the potential for this new communication form. Also, the overall quality of audio via Skype is superb. Since I am recording just the interview-ees audio, it makes it easy in Audacity to snip out the gaps where I was talking as it is just a flat line in the audio form (mine is not recorded). I love tagging and still persist in vain hopes that I can encourage others to do some shared tagging, but feel lucky if I can get a handful of people to use a single tag. I am regularly tagging web sites in delicious with tags destined to be repurposed on at least 10 different web sites, and am starting to wonder what my cranial capacity is to remember what topics I am tagging for. photo credit: Steve Roe So its with some irony I saw some tagging "instructions" for a flickr group. I'll likely lose my membership for posting this, but small beans. I liked the concept of this Project NetPop group -- to "depict how the internet is changing life around you... Post pictures to show the impact of the Internet and technology on your life and the world around you." In fact I was noodling about a blog post asking folks to share their stories of Good Things that have happened solely through the connected nature of this web thing. I was invited to drop photos in this group but was floored at the tagging instructions: Tagging is important! Here's what we ask: 1. NETPOP: You agree to assign the tag "Netpop" to all the photos you add to this group. 2. LOCATION: You agree to tag all the photos you add to this group with the location where it was taken (if appropriate): a. City b. State c. Country 3. CATEGORIES: You also agree to use any of the other tags, if applicable, listed in the library that is covered in the "USE THESE TAGS..." discussion. 4. SEGMENT: If you take the survey at ProjectNetpop.com and find out which segment you belong to, add the segment name to your tags. Have fun! Moderators agree to review tags and categorize pictures according to the Project Netpop tag rules. Have fun? As if I am free form tagging I am going to remember all of this? Do I have to tag my mood, the room temperature, my cartesian coordinates, what I ate for lunch? Top down tagging seems to me a pipe dream; consider your self lucky if you can get a group to remember to use one tag. But then again, what do I know? More fun, graphics creative Frivolity. Logogle, the Google Logo maker, allows you to turn any text into the style Google's word log. See for example, the new monetizing entity, CogDogBlogoogle: This was found via a curious site trendalicious which bubbles up popular sites that have recently been tagged in del.icio.us: trendalicious is a near real-time view of website popularity trends as reflected by the del.icio.us social bookmarking service. All URLs that have been posted by a minimum of two people in the past fifty minutes are displayed, ranked by the total number of recent posts. Could be an interesting way to do an animated screencast over time to track popular memes... but in general, it is a powerful use of the collective delicious hive mind. When I embed a tweet in my post, that's all I want. But Wordpress, and the Twitter API, wants to give me more. I don't have to accept that. What am I blabbering about now? Well in a recent post where I am talking about using Wordpress to publish your own versions of the soon to be deep-sixed storify content, even the examples I used in my post exhibit a problem. The tweets I am embedding by the Wordpress oEmbed Magic are the ones in white. But what I get, and occasionally does not bother me, but what clutters the crap out of what I am trying to achieve, are prepended by an older tweet in the chain (background color a bit darker). After a few rounds of swinging the code axe, I am cautiously optimistic I have an answer. Be warned. What follows involves code modifications to your theme's functions.php and for older posts, some clearing of stuff in your database. Now that there are maybe three readers left (Hi Tom!), here we go. As usual doing some Wordpress Code Axing leads into a variety of answers but also often futile swings into StackExchange. But this suggestion offered for a different desire (removing media from embedded tweets) looked on target. Way down in the Twitter API docs for oEmbed where the hide_media in the exmaple is listed, just below is the one that sounds like I need hide_thread When set to true , t, or 1 a collapsed version of the previous Tweet in a conversation thread will not be displayed when the requested Tweet is in reply to another Tweet Bingo! I add this bit of code to functions.php /** * Hide threads for all twitter oEmbeds, using the hide_thread=1 query argument * ----- h/t https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/225081/14945 */ add_filter( 'oembed_fetch_url', function( $provider, $url, $args ) { // Target publish.twitter.com provider if( 'publish.twitter.com' === parse_url( $provider, PHP_URL_HOST ) ) $provider = add_query_arg( 'hide_thread', 1, $provider ); return $provider; }, 99, 3 ); And nothing happens. I make sure my caching plugin is off. No dice. I step back, try a different swing. I poke around the content in the Chrome Inspector, and find a class for the divs that contain the tweet I want to hide, it is .EmbeddedTweet-ancestor. I experiment with adding a display:none; and it seems to work on one tweet. So I update my CSS, reload, and... nada. I do more digging, poking, experimenting in CSS. After way too much time, I learn that the way the content is structured inside this mysterious entity known as the #shadow-root my CSS cannot override it. Put the axe down now. I've reached my limit, so I shrug and cast off a question myself to the Wordpress StackExchange. I usually have good luck and get nearly instant and multiple replies. This time, I got one, but it seemed vague. I think your code is good, but the oembed is actually in transient so your code isn't in use until the transients disappears, you may have to clear them. I sort of know of Wordpress Transients, they flood the post_meta table in the database. They are basically options that expire. Whatever. I installed a plugin that lets me see storied transients but I could not find any. Another missed axe swing. It's back to the Google Flail with a search on wordpress clear transients oembed cache and it's a good one. I found a post that explains how to delete some database post_meta data that the oEmbed plugin caches. Now I am in deep, inside phpMyAdmin the cpanel access to my wordpress database. I'm in the wp_postmeta table. As a test I am going to look for the cache files for one post with embedded tweets (one of the ones I populated with stuff from storify), a post ID of 65496. The embedded tweets all gave an earlier ancestor: This is the query to find all postmeta that have _oembed in the name SELECT * FROM `wp_postmeta` WHERE `post_id` = 65496 AND `meta_key` LIKE '%_oembed%' Lots of them: I select all of these (breathing deeply in case I am about to cause major damage) and delete them. When I reload the page... BOOM! I killed those ancestor tweets. If I was going to really start whomping with the axe I could nuke them across my site with a mySQL query DELETE * FROM `wp_postmeta` WHERE `meta_key` LIKE '%_oembed%' But I might just wait a bit before going wild. Most of these should disappear, right? There is an expiry value for a timestamp. At this point I may just lean on the axe in pride. I guess I could wrap my function in a small plugin for someone who does not want to muck with their theme files (and when I say muck with I mean doing this via a child theme, you should never ever ever edit a theme that can be automatically updated. You will lose all your stuff) There is nothing as satisfying as a good axe chop [caption width="640" align="aligncenter"]2013/365/85 Axe Therapy flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license[/caption] Featured Image: 2010/365/83 Axe Marks The Spot flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Oh, what I would do with $72,000,000 of blog bucks! From How Much Is My Blog Worth?: Inspired by Tristan Louis's research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, I've created this little applet using Technorati's API which computes and displays your blog's worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. My blog is worth $72,825.66.How much is your blog worth? Yet another cool thing swiped from D'Arcy Norman... There's alway room for another Three Letter Acronym. So did I un-intentionally build an LXP? Tannis Morgan first suggested so in twitter https://twitter.com/tanbob/status/1216547869114556428 and even more in a recent blog post. But wait a minute- whatsa LXP? As a TLA it sounds buzzword-ish. But because I know and respect Tannis, when she first blogged why these things could be of interest, that raises the bar a bit on consideration. Her blog leads outside the edu realm to the corporate learning one of Josh Bersin both big time consultant and a company, and heck, an academy too. Apparently Bersin coined the LXP term in 2018 and is a "booming" market in 2019. Here's his definition: As I describe in some of the original articles, the LXP market exists because the paradigm of the Learning Management System is out of date. People no longer search course catalogs for “courses” the way the used to, and we need a way to train and learn “in the flow of work.” So while the category is a product category, it’s also a category of systems designed with a new philosophy: learning in the flow of work. What this means is that LXP systems have a set of key capabilities:1. They present content in a “Netflix-like” interface, with recommendations, panels, mobile interfaces, and AI-driven recommendations, 2. They accommodate any form of content, including articles, podcasts, blogs, micro-learning, videos, and courses, 3. They are social, and include social profiles which connect content to people to create authority, 4. They have paths or learning track or trails so you can follow content to a logical learning outcome, 5. They have some form of assessment and often badging or certification, 6. They make it easy to publish your own content as an individual, 7. They are mobile, fun to use, fast and easy to traverse and have great search and embedded learning features.https://joshbersin.com/2018/09/the-learning-experience-platform-lxp-market-expands/ That helps some but it's still not 100% clear to me what they do or what one looks like. He cites examples of EdCast (an "AI-powered Knowledge Cloud for personalized learning"), Degreed ("a lifelong learning platform that individuals and organizations use to discover learning content, build skills, and certify their expertise.") , and Pathgather ("the learning experience platform for forward-thinking enterprises seeking to reshape their workforce and stay competitive in the digital world"). Those descriptions are from the google summary on search results, e.g. what's in their web site description SEO tags. From my brief foray into the space (mainly reading what a few others are writing about LXPs), content and experiences in an LMS are ones an organization/institution organizes, designs and packages for learners. An LXP aims to be one where learners get to pick and choose their own paths, possibly even contribute to the collections, and have available a wider range of potentially useful resources, from places like YouTube, wikiHow, the rest of the public internet. Why Do We Have Learning Experience Platforms?The original problem these products solved was what I would call discovery.I want to learn something or take a course and I simply cannot find it in the course catalog (LMS).LMS systems were never designed to be employee-centric. They were developed as “Management” systems for learning, focused on business rules, compliance, and catalog management for courses.The LXP, which looks more like YouTube or Netflix, is a true content delivery system, which makes modern content easy to find and and consume.https://joshbersin.com/2019/03/learning-experience-platform-lxp-market-grows-up-now-too-big-to-ignore/ The likely shift Bersin cites is LMS's aiming to strap on capabilities to be more LXP- look more corporate goop names! If you have Bridge (Instructure), CornerstoneOnDemand, CrossKnowledge, D2L, Docebo, Saba, SuccessFactors, SumTotal, or another LMS, most of these vendors now have add-ons that perform LXP-like features.https://joshbersin.com/2018/09/the-learning-experience-platform-lxp-market-expands/ Will education get prodded too to look at LXPs? I dunno. CorrLeader as LXP "Lite"? I probably would have never even read this much were it not for Tannis's tweet calling the Corrections Leadership project ("CorrLeader") I did last year with JIBC. I wrote a detailed series of posts covering the project from a first metaphor based on maps through prototyping and implementation as a WordPress site. The project really was about making a WordPress site. Which I did. But there is always more I get into a project if I can (and they want). And while the project does not have all seven characteristics of an LXP (hence "light") in looking back I see some resemblance. Plus this was not some megabucks corporate development project, it was me and WordPress, and a lot of googling on how to do some tricky parts. The project was meant to be a resource hub for leadership development for middle managers in BC Corrections, working with an established process. It included a mix of what we called Recommended Courses - workshops and classes or, in person offerings that the department was arranging plus independent learning options, some purchased online mini course content and other ones previously developed (many of this were previously tucked away in the bowels of a Sharepoint site). In the map metaphor for the project these were provided as established trails on a map. These were to be mixed in with a wide variety of Additional Resources including books, TED Talks, articles, podcasts. For the map metaphor these were more like points on a map that participants would seek themselves. All of this would be used with the program's professional growth model so a mentor might suggest specific workshops/courses to pursue components or areas for a manager to explore. The site/project itself did not call for any kind of tracking or reporting. I a few places we built forms to submit feedback or reviews or materials, and in somewhat an LXP vein, at least a form to suggest new resources. Going Being the Project Specs: The Navigator If you get me on a project, the specifications are always a minimum, but not necessarily the end. In the early conversations with my client, there was a desire for a means to keep the potential audience for the site informed of new, interesting additions/offerings to the site. The base level is as old as anything on the internet - email. I had some ideas sketched about some easy ways to provide the content so a person sending out emails could easily cut and paste, or maybe generate, summaries of the content. But I also remembered being told that the reason to offer resources such as videos and podcasts is that the type of people this is aimed at are very much on the go, that things that could be easily accessed on a mobile device would be even better. This eventually came to be developed as the CorrLeader Navigator This is a separate lightweight HTML (Bootstrap theme) site designed for mobile screens. It is not a version of the full site crafted for the small screen. Rather, it accesses quickly a summary of all content on the site via the WordPress API, presenting it in either a text summary listing or a richer media version (where videos are embedded, links work, etc). But more than that, on your device you can store preferences for the mode of presentation types of resources, and filter by the 27 content topics or any of the three broad leadership areas. While building it out, this was what I called my Crazy Checkbox interface, as I weaved different ways to have all of them be coordinated (selecting all or none, or all in a leadership area, or turning off the All selections if a subsection was chosen). Now the thing here that I was so sure would catch interest (well I thought this alone was pretty damn amazing) was that these options were saved on you device, but never by cookies which could be sent out. All of this is done with browser storage, it's preferences (tracking maybe) that never leaves your device. Now surely someone would think this was amazing. Useful! Worth asking me about it. Well... I have not heard any peeps of interest. Curiosity. Well Tannis just spoke up. So I cannot say "no" interest. Maybe I did not explain it well. What a Lite LXP Might Do This can put into action the idea of "headless" WordPress Content Management Systems (CMS). It means you could use all the affordances of WordPress to let your content designers build content, but not use it (or just very lightly) as the presentation means. So stop fussing with the templates and themes and plugins. Turn WordPress into a content management system. But let the client side not be hitting your WordPress database, but just grabbing it's data as JSON API data (basically text). The CorrLeader site's 88 full media content entries comes over in totality in about 1Mb of text data. And we have it cached, so you are not hitting the WordPress server hard. I should add that after the CorrLeader Navigator loads, any change in view, filters, is just done locally., there are no further HTTP requests except for maybe media. And this is where I can think an LXP approach could go. You could have a client platform that maybe draws from multiple sources, not just one, and perhaps one the users choose themselves. Yu provide the browsing, searching, finding to be done on a site with a much smaller footprint. But let's go farther. One of the nifty prototypes I did build for Tannis was her idea of a Constellation metaphor to represent groups of resources that are related. This whole prototype was done by a pile of WordPress custom development using D3js (yep, a long blog post exists for that too). But having done the CorrLeader Navigator, I can see it would make maybe more sense to dynamically generate the constellations on the client side; let it draw from maybe multiple WordPress content sources? I am just conjecturing here. But having done a few WordPress (and other source) projects/demos with API calls, it's got a lot of potential for getting back to a web of pieces being loosely joined. What's Not There I have built a decent working prototype. It lacks use of what seems to be needed by the Big Programmers- a layer of some kind code buzzword named frameworks. And my stuff does not have reporting, tracking (if it were left to me I would build systems where the learner decides when, where to submit their data, not have it harvested), AI, recommender systems, badging, social media integration. But it sure could. Or not. Hey! Anyone Out There? I'd be excited if anyone sees enough potential in all of this to want to build something like this for your project or program. And to be honest, sitting here between projects I have time and need for new ones. This may not be Big Enterprise Level Stuff but I think there's quite a bit here even conceptually that feels, excitingly... new. Throw CogDog a project bone? Featured Image: A complete fabrication by me and Photoshop of a mock Jeopardy game board. I started with a screenshot of a real one, but completely traced it over, faked fonts and effects (well I did find a source suggesting the font for the cards is ITC Korinna and it worked great). Is this a copy? No. It is parody I claim, so I choose Sue Me for 100 cents, Alec. I wish I could remember that light bulb turning on moment when I realized succeeding in the school game had little to do with studying, knowledge, or intelligence-- but learning how to score on multiple choice exams. My skills carried me through many standardized tests and college exams where I can really say I got better at figuring out the answer than knowing it. But I am not sure I can fully yank off the Emperors Statistical Clothes. Instead I offer a trivial example, which may not extrapolate as far as I believe. In my combing of the corner of my RSS reader where I collect Weird/Funny/Strange stories (the Google Reader tag is "odds-and-ends" sounds like I am playing Jeopardy... "I'll take Neatorama for $200, Alex"), I found tonight a fun thing to try-- the M*A*S*H trivia quiz. While I have not seen an episode of this iconic TV series in at least 20+ years, I did watch it extensively in the 1970s, all the new episodes in prime time and daily re-runs at dinner... maybe even having seen the entire series 7, 8, 10 times? I've watched the movie at least three times. And at the time I could faithfully quote the classic lines, after more than 2 decades, it seems pretty rusty, like at best I might recall the character names. So I took this 10 item "quiz". I got an "A" Yes, I got 9/10 correct, although on review, I can say I knew "for sure" only 3 answers. I got maybe 2 more right on hunches, 1 on totally gaming the "All of the above", and 3 more on outright guesses (author of the original book, for example). Of course, this test construction is utterly simple- 3 or 4 choices make it easy to guess. But I am thinking here I got a 90% rating when I knew 30% of the content. And when I think about how much of education is based on multiple choice exam scores, all carefully charted and graphed, and statistically validated-- I cant help but casually wonder what it all really measures. I don't mean to ridicule the entire franchise and field of examination as there is much more to it than I will ever know, but... well, I will anyhow. I don;t know what to do, but I am heading over to the Swamp to see if they fixed the still and maybe have a good poker game going. You are working on some project and just decide to look at an older WordPress site that should be just sitting there humming along, and see this... Fatal error message on thoughtvectors.net Fatal is not pretty. My hunch is that since it is a reference to "undefined function mysql_connect()" that it's related to the changes in PHP 7 - I only know this from dealing with it on another non WordPress site before. In that case, my response was to bury my head in the sand and revert the server on that site to PHP5 rather than recode my old stuff. But this is WordPress, which should work. What's my way through it? Not very technical. It's a big shock. I copied this part of the error message Fatal Error. Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function mysql_connect() in wp-includes/wp-db.php and googled it. There were quite a few possible results, but this one from Wordpress.org looked (and was) on target- specifically this suggestion to delete a line from wp-config.php. I launched my cpanel, went into the File Manager, found the file. Rather then deleting, I simply put a # in front of the line so it was commented it out. Commenting out line 52 "define('WP_USE_EXT_MYSQL', true);" I don't even know what this does... except make the site work as it should. And I'm really glad because the other suggestions looked a bit more hairy. A good percentage of my work is looking stuff up, weighing the sources and differences in suggestions, and just trying stuff. I rely heavily on the 'net don't go messing with that, ok? Featured Image: According to Google this is a photo from Air Force Medical Service Unit although it does not appear on the link I followed. Maybe it was a featured image removed from a post? Where does your Creative Commons Choo Choo train metaphor go from here? Oh well, as a photo from a US Government agency, it should be public domain. Call my lawyer! Even brain surgeons get stumped? Or laugh about it? Air Force Medical Unit photo. cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I've been in New York City a few days, a city who's lively pulse is fed by the incredible density of people crammed on a small island, so many languages, so many shapes, colors, that you cannot even parse it all. It may not be all peace, love, and harmony, but in the span of a city block, you can easily share the space with ones from 25 different countries, and at least, on the surface, they all respect each others right to be here. It's just how it is. But it was shame, embarrassment, and anger I felt walking through two different protests on May Day, seeing the "Boycott Arizona signs", one in Union Square, one down by the US courthouse, a building enshrined with the epitaphs of the basic human rights that (are supposed to) be our foundation. It was shame, because of the rights people were exercising that seem to be eroding in my home state of Arizona, a place where the state representatives, leaders have taken a position of sanctioning, enacting a law that, to me, tramples on the rights of people living there. I removed my Phoenix Suns cap. I did not want to be identified with Arizona. Just off shore, Lady Liberty stands confused, wondering if Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Now bears an asterisk, a clause, that says, "unless you enter the Arizona door." The things I love about Arizona are its grandeur cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog places that feel large, expansive, on scale that dwarfs humanity. I like the open sky and spaces, the gazillion stars in the night skies, the freaky survivalist plants that thrive and flower in water starved deserts. To me, the land is so different, I dance in its weirdness. I'm not ready to say I want to move from here, because I like my home and local friends (plus the economy of course leaves little choice in mobility). But I am mad. The governer, our legistlature, has enacted a knee ass jerk response to a problem that asks for intelligent solutions, not palyground antics. Yes, there are some people who cross the Arizona border and do bad things here (darn that California border!!). But the measures enacted by the nimwits at the state house, instead, puts an antire swath of innocent, law abiding people in fear of being singled out for to "show me your papers". That is wrong, and that is not what any framer of the country had in mind, and I would think Lady Liberty is dropping a tear or two. The "law" says police offices are to ask for papers for people possible suspected of being illegal immigrants, Since they don;t have training materials, I created this little simulation: cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I would like someone to try the exercise, and then write a short essay how this task is done without profiling. IN fact, I want more. I want our governor, or legislatures who voted on this, to be put before a video camera in a van, driven to a corner on Phoenix,m and indicate who they would ask for paoers, and explain why. Explain it to me. Explain it to our state. Explain it to the world,. for whom now, Arizona, maybe known as the "Grand Canyon State" may now be known as a pathetic joke as the "Grand Police State". This is wrong. Tell them, tell everyone. There is a window of time, where maybe some sanity can be done, in reversion this shameful act. This is wrong, and I am ashamed of this place. This internet can be so recursive on itself. Nada Dabbagh, Professor & Director Division of Learning Technologies at George Mason University (she is the person who invited me to teach a DS106 class for GMU starting now) emailed about an ironic event in one of her classes. She has an assignment where her students are asked to compare a constructivist learning environment and compare it to an objectivist learning environment. Without her prompting, one of the student groups had found and selected on their own, DS106 as the former. I asked if they would share their project and was curious how they discovered DS106; she got this response: I'm fine with sharing it with anyone who is interested. I came across it largely by dumb luck. I had been trying to research MOOC's as a possible option and came across the idea of a Connectivist MOOC. Then I came across a reference to ds106 as a constructivist MOOC on pinterest of all things (http://www.pinterest.com/pin/444026844482264651/), which led me right to their site. Apparently Brenda Boyd, Director of Professional Development & Consulting for Quality Matters Program maintains a pinterest MOOC. And look where DS106 sits, right next to our pal, St Sebastian of the Thruns (not a suggestion that DS106 emerged from his head) You can listen to the student's project as a screencast at http://www.screencast.com/t/u4IzpiWe. I was impressed with how well they were able to encapsulate the characteristics of DS106 just from what they found on the web site. And now form the irony department. Apparently the objectivist course the students looked at, something called Skillport, would not allow the students to use screen captures of their site in the screencast. There's open and then there's _________________________ It's interesting to get smidgens of insight into how people link to your blog. For a window of time last week I saw an interesting pattern (when was traveling and missed out on the week of celebrity deaths). Look at the keyword searches people used in Google to get to CogDogBlog: It's all Farrah all the day in the keyword search box linking to my mention of her poster and how it reflected the TV age I grew up in which is now gone. Even more curious is that I paged through 10 pages of Google search results and could not find one link to my blog. People are diving in deep! May they find what they seek... Just arrived in the big city for the League for Innovation conference that starts tomorrow. Perched on the 40 something floor of the Marriot with my own commanding view of Manhattan. About 1/3 the plane from Phoenix was loaded with folks from Maricopa, almost like a chartered jet. Sometimes you have to travel to a different city to interact with your own colleagues. One of them, Rich, is a New York native, and led us on his preferred transport mode from JFK via the AirTrain and the E train subway. There is nothing quite like the human spectacle of the subway... until you emerge to the human spectacle of the street. From a very suburban city like Phoenix, the crush and density of New York is like being transported to some entirely new dimension. Its exciting and strange all at once. Woo-hoo, well, later time for bloggin', it's time to hit the town. I'm not all that hepped on blogging this conference, so it may just be snippets of observations or a flickr-fest if the weather cooperates. ... then the server move has been successful. You are viewing the same old dog blog on a new server host, with a shorter and more memorable URL: http://cogdogblog.com/ and its RSS feed: http://cogdogblog.com/feed/ If all goes well, all old links, RSS feeds, etc from the old host at cogdogblog.com/...../ will be automatically routed here. I will leave the redirects up for at least 6 months, if not longer. Speaking of which, one gripe I have always had is when web developers move directories around, create new URLs and do not leave a forwarding note or path, and leave in their wake a long tail of broken links, bad search results, and a funky smell. If you are wise enough to be running an Apache server, it is bone easy to set up re-directs, if your server is set up to pay attention to .htaccess files. This is a simple file placed in the root directory of your server, and I am able to make any URL that starts with the old URL address permanently re-direct to the new one by adding a line on the jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu server: Redirect 301 /cdb http://cogdogblog.com This makes an automatic browser re-direct for any URL under my cdb/ directory to go to the new home. And what a coincidence. I have written about this before. If you go to the old URL: http://cogdogblog.com/2005/02/03/this-old/ as a living example, you will see in action what it does. Web re-direction is something any web site manager should be able to handle without much effort. flickr foto Northern Voicedavailable on my flickr The coveted t-shirt from the Northern Voice 2006 conference. It's been one day of favorable rest since the close of the Northern Voice 2006 conference here in Vancouver... and I still struggle to capture all thoughts and impressions. The flickr tag stream for northern voice photos was impressive and made it to the list of "hot" tags. You may also trace the wide impact via Technorati space. Apologies to the EdTechTalk guys Dave and Doug-- I pretty much slept through any chance of a Skyperview. Hopefully in the future. Firstly, there is definitely more of a community spirit at this grass-roots organized conference, purposefully kept simple to keep the fees low. All the logisitcal stuff was very smooth at the UBC downtown Robson campus. If anything, being down below in the concrete made us unaware of the gorgeous clear weather hovering outside. And as it was discussed by several in the Moosecamp session on Community Building, there is some true magic in meeting other bloggers face to face, as well as meeting some new people as well. To me, there seemed to be a tad more presentation heavy sessions than discussion/conversation, and the 2 days felt pretty crammed full on the schedule. It made the Moosecamp not all the differentiated from the main conference- I had thought the former would be something mroe akin to one of those hack-athon things where you sit around trade code/ideas, and build stuff. There's also something else I've had truble putting my paw on... The blogosphere is (and was here) described as an "ecosystem", and I am comfortable being just a small insect scurrying around on the floor. Down here, we don;t blog for ego, or advertising, or technorati points, or attention-- we just do it to put our voice out and to connect with other. At NorthernVoice, there seemed to be a clique of "cool" bloggers, who all reference each other by first names, etc, who I guess are some of the larger creatures in the same ecosystem. Hey, I grew up outside the "cool people" so this was no new revelation. While the "Blogging in the Bedroom" session was amusing (it was about relationships between people who blog), my main reaction was, "Who cares about the publicly displayed details of personal lives?" I support the notion of blogs as being a place for everything, but this sort of celebrity like fascnination with personalities is why I do not watch soap operas, read tabloids, or watch Entertainment Tonight. It was very silly stuff, when it could have been a better discussion about personal disclosure, online representation of self, it turned out to be more like the "Dating Game". So in sloppy summary, being here was great, hanging out and co-presenting and debriefing with my blog amigos was electrically energizing, I picked up some good photo and podcasting tips, made a good number of new connections, it all just did not seem as kinetic/electric as what I seemed to read about the first NV conference last year. But really, I did also come here to get a sense of what a conference is like that is unlike the big EduTech extravaganzas, and those are some things I am going to let percolate a little longer. I could barely ignore an appearance of a new site called Inside a Dog, a new site from Victoria, Australia aimed at promoting youth reading and interesting in writing and those lovely old fashioned portable content devices called "books". But what a clever web theme (yes, I am biased)- that a program all the way in Australia will build it around a quip of a US comic. Gosh, over here, the equivalent program might be a drab acronym or something corny like "Reading 2.0". When was the last time something here was built around an Aussie pop culture reference (aside from the crocodile hunter guy)? Lintribution to HeyJude Stand back, set the blog phasers on snark! Before the rant starts (and if you cannot tell from the graphic above it might be juicy) for those that miss my not so subtle reference, do you remember all those times on Star Trek when they said, "Set your phasers on stun"? Did you ever notice, that they never set it on "annihilate", "zap", or maybe even just "tickle"? Phasers had pretty much one setting, which begs the question whey they had settings at all (besides the need for said script line). C'mon, my kitchen blender has more settings than a phaser! My day started on such a roll! I drove down to Phoenix this morning for a dentist appointment, and I had no cavities despite being a year late for my six month checkup. An errand for some legal documents did not provide the hassles I expected. I picked up my old MacBookPro with the busted shift key and worn keys -- I had forgotten to get AppleCare on it, but the repair cost only half the amount that plan would have caught. I then went to my yearly checkup at a retinal specialist- last time I spent more than 90 minutes in the waiting room for a 5 minute doctor visit, and this time I was in and out in 20 minutes. On a roll! So I was primed to drop in at the Apple Store at Chandler Mall and get me a new shiny 2G iPhone. And the lucky sheen evaporated like water on the Arizona sidewalk. The store was mobbed, and I hovered around the phones expecting the usual quick response from the staff at Apple Stores. Nothing. I then heard an Apple guy say to someone else about a "line" and "just ran out". Here I thought a few weeks after the launch they would be no problem to come by. I tried calling the Apple Store at the Biltimore; first no one answered, then it was busy. I can guess what the calls were for. I looked up the number for the new store at San Tan Mall- their recording suggested checking an Apple site that would provide availability. That seems cool- I would know if there were phones w/o calling or driving. Except the site says I can pick a state and city, but there is no menu, and it says I need to check after 9PM. WTF use is that? I'm not gonna even be in town at 9PM. Hmm, so the Apple Stores were a wash. I next thought I might be able to snag one at at AT&T stores which seem to be second in frequency only to Starbucks. There was one just down the street! I walked in the store and said I likely had a popular question and pointed to the big iPhone sign. He shook his head before I even finished and said they were all out, but they could take direct orders and have it set up and shipped directly to me ("10-12 business days"). Since I drove 100+ miles to get here, that was starting to sound reasonable. I then thought to ask about the signal strength in Strawberry where I live as I know their cell signals are weak here. I keyboarded a while with no reaction and then said, "We have no service there." "Well that makes this purchase decision easy. Goodbye." So not only cannot I buy an iPhone, even if I did I could not use it at home. The luster has completely worn off the excitement. What a luxury business Apple is in that it can pretty much shoo away people willing to spend hundreds for their devices and still rake it in. I have no conspiracy inkling of artificial shortages but the lack of products in stores weeks after a launch in these days of high fuel costs seems a bit smelly if people end up driving from store to store in vain. Walmart has this inventory fulfillment perfected- they never run out of toilet paper there, do they? Pffffft on Apple. And their lock in to AT&T as a sole provider is appalling or worse. AT&T does these full page color ads in the Phoenix papers boasting how they have expanded their network in Arizona, with those bars superimposed on Monument Valley, yet here I am in a location where other providers (Alltel, Sprint, Verizon) all have strong signals and AT&T has tin cans hung on a tree branch. Pfffft on them. Wish they would spend advertising money on improving their infrastructure. Maybe I need to move to Mexican Hat where I could at least have a sight line to the AT&T Monument Valley bars. I don't really need an iPhone, though I was anxious to try all the shiny cool apps and start to use it for business travel rather than lugging a laptop, but am starting to think of looking at whats going to come around the bend, and maybe hang some hopes on Android. I love my Mac, my iPod Touch, and see no chance of that changing. But this is really under my skin, and while it may be fun to have the cool device, I may just skip it out of stupid principle, until (a) it is less of a hassle to even plunk down my 300 clams to get one, and (b) when they break the lock of the AT&T pirate ship and allow my to use a provider that actually provides service. Yeah, right, like I expect anyone to take up my gripes. So I am setting my snark phaser on "disintegrate into tiny shreds". Keep your distance, I am aiming-- Pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffttttttttttttttttt I actually managed to grab a few hourts the last few days to focus on the openMLX, the supposed open source version of our Maricopa Learning eXchange. We have a "de-Maricopized" version running (this does not have the latest changes), but I am doing the new developments on another copy of the MLX. This works well, as once I can bang them on the R&D version, I just merely copy the updated .php and assorted files to the other versions. All of the customization is carried in an external configuration file. There is some deadline pressure mounting, as I hope to have a copy of it running in Auckland for my November visit to new Zealand (check out the inverted CDB!) as well as another grant funded project group in our building that has some good needs for their own MLX. Today's work was re-routing the method for generating the MLX Feeds. On the Maricopa server, I am running cron scripts that generate updated static feed files on a regular basis. I had been using the RSSWriter code for generating RSS files on the fly. But I did not want to make the openMLX hinge on cron. I just implemented today a different strategy using FeedCreator.class.php code as it is capable of writing the files instead of only returning the XML directly. It also has a built in cache logic, to save hits on the database. The code looks ok, but the documentation is rather sparse (as will mine for the openMLX ;-) Once the feeds are in place, we have most of the pieces functional. Next week I want to deconstruct the kludgy tables based HTML layout for the public pages, and move it to complete web standards CSS so others can more easily do customization. The inner part of the MLX, the loading dock" will likely remain in tables for now (I cannot see a pressing need to change the layouts here) as might the packing slip layout. This needs to mostly happen next week, and then I can whip up some documentation, build the sourceforge site, and perhaps let it out. It's all a bit scary. The spam is still coming into the MLX comments, but my fixes so far are working good. The notifications sent to MLX package owners now provide one click links to either hide a comment (toggle a database flag so it is not inserted to the packing slip) or to delete it completely. There have been 87 documented spammers stuck in my trap just in the last 4 days, and they are trying a range of new IPs, more than 25 are already in my Blacklist. Too bad they do not realize that spoofing IPs will not get around my wall. Also, sniffing in the database, I found 3 that were chugged into our "Shareback" form ( a web form that allows people to entering information that is the same as a TrackBack auto generated by weblog postings). There is now some new code the plug that hole as well. This all is happening in the background of keeping our web site current, build new event sites and registration forms, create a new database calendar editing tool, build a site for a theater festival with online registration and class selection, make sure our online learning grants is ready for business in November, modify the online faculty professional growth summer project applications for deployment in January, help guide and develop events for Ocotillo, stay up to date with the FightSpamClub, keep up with all the other blogs I read, prepare for 3 weeks of workshops in New Zealand.... oh and get a pre-conference workshop ready for EDUCAUSE on Oct 19. Oh, and a faculty group wants a new web discussion board. And Apple wants to schedule a demo here (as does Macromedia). Sigh. So much fun. I mean that. To gear up for the crunch next week, I'm off tomorrow night to our cabin for a 3 day siesta. Get out of the office and chop some wood or scale some peaks. Or sit around and watch DVDs. A Fracking Understatement posted 31 Jan '08, 8.30am MST PST on flickr Twitter is surely loosing fans left and right, and really ought to be sharing more info than this crappy screen. Heck, I;'d rather see the cat in the server picture. I know! It was the severe twittering at the ELI EDUCAUSE conference that did in the system (yeah right). Someone (Google? Yahoo) buy these guys and get them more servers or pipes or magic pixie dust. My habit is suffering, I might have to resort yo doing work. Twitter, get yer _____ together. The vultures are circling. On a long distance driving trip this week I'm getting a good chunk podcast listening time. One of my favorite ones is Song Exploder: Song Exploder is a podcast where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. Each episode is produced and edited by host and creator Hrishikesh Hirway in Los Angeles. Using the isolated, individual tracks from a recording, Hrishikesh asks artists to delve into the specific decisions that went into creating their work. I've blogged before how I thought of extending this idea into the kind of blogging we are asking participants in Ontario Extend to do. My rewrite of the Song Exploder was: My blog is a place where I take apart my ideas, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. Each episode is produced and edited by host and creator aka me, wherever I am. Using the jumbled, thought tracks that keep me awake at night, I ask myself to delve into the specific decisions that went into creating my work. I barely edit them, and not frequently enough checking for typos, but condensing the story to be tightly focused on how bring my ideas to life. While driving today I thought of going one more notch with this, and creating it as something to add to the Ontario Extend Activity Bank as "Class Exploder": [caption id="attachment_66244" align="aligncenter" width="760"] A parody recast of the Song Exploder meant only for parody and educational use, don't sue me, ok?[/caption] Class Exploder is an Ontario Extend activity where teachers take apart a single class plan, and piece by piece, tell the story of how it was made. Each blog post is produced and edited by a teacher who produced the materials. Using their notes, memory, influences, this activity asks teachers to delve into the specific decisions that went into creating a class plan. Before I add this to the Activity Bank, I need an example, so I am choosing from my recent Networked Narratives class the one for Week 11.0: The Game Board of Digital Redlining. This is a class I taught Spring 2018 for a class at Kean University; the unusual structure of the class was that the students were in a classroom in New Jersey while I taught by developing materials on a course web site and appearing in class via Google Hangout. This was for part of the course where we had already investigated principles of games and explored a collection of classic computer games as well as empathy games. It's important to know that for the entire course I have been weaving a theme of asking students to question what it meant to have a Digital Life. I wanted to do something that was not just about games themselves, but how gaming principles might be used to look at things outside of games. I had a seed of an idea earlier in the semester, that meant reaching out to Chris Gilliard for his work on digital redlining. Redlining was a practice started with National Housing Act of 1934, where the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) produced maps for cities that "color-coded the areas where loans would be differentially available. The difference among these areas was race." Chris has defined a current form of redlining not for housing, but for digital information and services: “Digital Redlining is a different thing: the creation and maintenance of technological policies, practices, and investment decisions that enforce class boundaries and discriminate against specific groups. The digital divide is a noun; it is the consequence of many forces. In contrast, digital redlining is a verb, the “doing” of difference, a “doing” whose consequences reinforce existing class structures. The digital divide is a lack—redlining is an act. In one era, redlining created differences in physical access to schools, libraries, and home ownership. Now, the task is to recognize how digital redlining is integrated into technologies, and especially education technologies, to produce the same kinds of discriminatory results. The divide is a “lack” — redlining is an act.” The idea that bounced around my head was-- could the concept of digital redlining be somehow investigated as somewhat having game mechanics, not that it was a game at all, nor for entertainment, but was situation where those in power created a set of rules that citizen players had to navigate. At the same time, one of the Kean Writing Studies graduate students I was advising was researching and writing a young adult novel about an inner city Newark teen was suddenly forced to live with a father she did not know who lived in the affluent area of Milburn. Ironically, I have visited friends who live in Milburn, but I also was aware that these two vastly different socioeconomic communities were not very far apart geographically. Since Chris's digital redlining work was focused much on his home city of Detroit, I was thinking my students might be able to investigate how things were in Newark, New Jersey. I was not really sure if this was reasonable, but I reached out to Chris by twitter DM with the idea, and he was willing to join me in a Google video chat in late February. In that conversation we landed on the idea of maps, the original redlining maps and the maps that showed differential distribution of digital services might be considered a "game board". Chris rattled of a few possibilities of the kinds of digital services my students could look at and subsequently he tweeted me even more examples. https://twitter.com/hypervisible/status/968311315243581440 We started co-editing a Google Doc for brainstorming. I felt like the hardest thing to do would be finding the kind of data showing digital services distribution in the Newark area. The idea that tied it together came again from thinking about maps. For the Mural UDG project I was part of in March, we had introduced faculty to the H5P suite of interactive web widget building tools-- the light bulb that went off was asking students to use the juxtapose tool to superimpose a map of modern digital services atop the historic digital redlining map of Newark. I mocked up a demo to share with Chris: The trick in doing this is getting maps to be aligned. I provided a "base map" of the 1939 Redlining Map of Essex County NJ from the Mapping Inequality project Knowing the students did not all have access to graphics tools like Photoshop, I tested in the ability of the web based editor pixlr. By putting the base map in pixlr as a layer, importing a modern map of digital services, setting the opacity of the later so the base layer could be seen, a student could resize that map to align commons geographic features like the two rivers that run through the city. I knew this part would be complicated, so I made a screen cast demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNfWR3AcVrc and the entire activity was written up as a "Make" in the NetNarr Make Bank (a site similar to the Ontario Extend Activity Bank). That was the activity part, but there was more to this class that needed to be in place. I start my classes with an "opener" meant to generate some discussion, so we first watched a short video about the history of redlining as well as a part of a talk Chris gave about digital redlining. I then asked students to spend some time researching digital redlining on their own using the following as starting points: Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy (Common Sense Education) https://www.commonsense.org/education/privacy/blog/digital-redlining-access-privacy Digital Redlining and Privacy (Teaching in Higher Education podtcas) http://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/digital-redlining-privacy/ Mapping Inequality (University of Richmond) https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/ Mapping Incomes: “Income disparities are real—and getting more extreme. A close look at maps of income distribution in U.S. cities reveals subtleties and surprises” (ESRI) https://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2018/mapping-incomes/index.html My real hope in working with Chris was that possibly some of his students could explain digital redlining to mine; I really like classes where we can get students talking to other students. But the timing did not work out for this, but Chris was kind enough to record a video challenge to my students https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbwTGhXdwkY I provided my students a starting list of sources they might use to create maps of digital redlining in the Newark area: Uber wait times — is there other data for ride sharing services you can find https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/10/uber-seems-to-offer-better-service-in-areas-with-more-white-people-that-raises-some-tough-questions/ Transit maps e.g. https://www.panynj.gov/path/maps.html Amazon delivery https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-amazon-same-day/ Pokemon Go https://www.pokemap.net/united_states_of_america/newark Census data http://censusviewer.com/city/NJ/Newark Google maps for locations of stores, business offering technical services, or coffee shops (?) Population data http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?services=302d4e6025ef41fa8d3525b7fc31963a Social media check-ins, act e.g. https://ny.curbed.com/2017/1/18/14309678/nyc-subway-map-instagram-hashtags or Snap Maps (public snapchat activity by location) Broadband services https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov Cell phone towers http://www.cellreception.com/towers/towers.php?city=newark&state_abr=nj Stingray surveillance https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/stingray-tracking-devices-whos-got-them License plate readers http://www.photoenforced.com/license-plate-reader-cameras.html Predictive policing “heat maps” http://www.riskterrainmodeling.com/ Other ideas? My classes meet once a week for 3 hours, and this left the second half of class as time for the students to try and complete the "make" for creating a digital redlining "game map". Their prompt for their weekly reflective blog post included: Include reflections on what you learned about redlining / digital redlining. How could people affected better understand it? As we discussed in class, while it is not a game at all in terms of being entertaining, can you identify in any ways the mechanics, process might thought of as having elements of games? Share a link to the Make Bank response to Digital Redlining: The Newark Game Board including the H5P image juxtasposition content you created. How might this be like a game board? Does it really indicate digital redlining? What would it take to do so? Because of the way these "banks" work, the Make for Digital Redlining: The Newark Game Board includes the student responses. You can see the final class plan for this at http://netnarr.arganee.world/week-11-0/. I was impressed that all the students managed to get through the several steps and tools to produce their comparison "game maps" but also at the in class discussion and followup blog posts how this unit gave them insight into a social issue they had not considered before. Featured Image: I made a mashup of the way Song Exploder blogs their episodes with the graphic I had created for the Week 11 plan-- the latter was a composite of the Essex County Redlining map from the Mapping Inequality Project licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License superimposed on Game, board (AM 1967.16-1) Wikimedia Commons image by Auckland War Memorial Museum licensed under Creative Commons CC BY Attribution license. I've heard raves and howls about Dreamhost for web hosting, but my experience so far as been stellar. I really like the one-click install / updates for WordPress; previously, the announcement of a new 0.01 update I might delay a few days, weeks to get around to backing up the database, de-activating plugins, backing up the web directory, downloading new source code, uploading.... while with one click that is all I really have to do. It Just Works (so far). Just did it for the WP 2.1.3 update. I had not identified it before, but after watching The Road last night on DVD, I realized I have a fascination with post-apocalyptic films, as one reviewers describes as "near future" views of our world. Maybe it was first watch of the Road Warrior I saw as a teen, but on my flight home from Austin Friday I found myself again watching I am Legend (I think Sam is the real star in the movie). Unlike most science fiction, these movies are easy extrapolations from the world we know today, and ones in which we cannot blame meteors, volcanoes, tornados, aliens for taking away our world- humanity does it to itself. And then there is the wondering, would I survive in this new grim world (doubtful) (but there is only one way to know) (and then I would not be here blogging about it). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94KcI0gLq1A That trailer is rather mis-leading in representing the story; it uses the bits that would draw people into the theater, but I guess as a good trailer should it never broaches the story. With some trepidation, I picked up the DVD for The Road when I spotted it at the Pine (AZ) Public Library, my main video store. It is not without some wariness I watch a movie version of a book I really liked. I read Cormac McCarthy's sparse powerful poetic iteration of this story when it first came out, would the movie rise to that or not? There is a terseness to McCarthy's writing that makes sense when you think about it. "Parsimonious" would be a drastic understatement. The lead characters are cold, tired, hungry, scared, and have only each other to use for hope- of course you would not have long flowery descriptive text. They went on. The boy was crying. He kept looking back. When they got to the bottom of the hill the man stopped and looked at him and looked back up the road. The burned man had fallen over and at that distance you couldnt even tell what it was. I'm sorry he said. But we have nothing to give him. We have no way to help him. I'm sorry for what happened to him but we cant fix it. You know that, dont you? The boy stood looking down. He nodded his head. They went on and he didnt look back again. Short sparse sentences. Dialogue that does not have energy for things like quotes and apostrophes. The dialogue merges into the thoughts into the description of what is happening. It makes it a blur, but that's more like how (I think) we operate in the world. We switch from being in our head to being with others to observing. The characters are sparse. We only know them as "The Boy", "The Man", "Bearded Man #2", "The Veteran", "Motherly Woman" "The Thief"- we don't know where they are from, what they were in life before this. And what amazingly intense short "cameos" (that word is cheap) by Robert Duvall, Guy Pierce, Kenneth Williams (Omar from The Wire)- you would not even recognize them how they appear in the film except when you hear their voices, especially Duvall. The movie takes that sparseness to the visual, no small feat. There is a thankful absence of narrated talk overs to tell us what we see, or why it is there- it is just there. The film-makers did the bulk of their work in real settings, not in a studio, using (post apocalyptic) winter Pennsylvania, abandoned mines, the grey Oregon coast, and the real destruction from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Those real scenes of destruction used as background- the trees downed at Mount St. Helens, hurricane devastated New Orleans and its grey skyline, all add to the setting that this is not some sci-fi future scale, but our own. At the same time, the lack of obvious icons of places (e.g. the Planet of the Apes statue on the beach) make it even more clear how crushed our future world is; its hard to tell time or place passage because it is devastated everywhere. And those bits of the dead trees just crashing down because they are so dead, is utterly powerful. One loses track, but the Boy has known only this world, and only has some tattered books, his father's stories, a found can of Coke, to even link him to The World Before. Watching the DVD extras (good films on disc take 2.5 times to watch- the extras plus the film again with commentary) bring a huge amount of respect for the actors who not only "got into the role" but suffered through the challenging conditions to even get deeper into the character. One should not expect the movie to be an equivalent of the book, and this one is not of course, because so much more can happen in words then in representing on film, but as the Director remarked in the commentary, it captures the spirit and message of the book. Much of the key dialogue is directly from the book. So yes, it ought to be a warning that we can, as a human race, through our own agression, greed, stupidity, wreck everything we take for granted in life. We can see how such conditions can bring out the worst and nest in us. And at first reaction, the film is so grim, so intense, you have to say, "this is far from a feel good movie." But thats where the story is, this incredible love story between a father and son, what each would do for the other in the extreme of circumstances (and hopefully we don't need the extreme to reach this plane), the passing on of the ideas on virtues from one generation to the next. As grim and gray and depressing a world is depicted here, this is a powerful story of love, the "fire inside" we ought to keep, seek, and share. Do you remember that little boy, Papa? Yes. I remember him. Do you think he's all right that little boy? Oh yes. I think he's all right. Do you think he was lost? No. I dont think he was lost. I'm scared that he was lost. I think he's all right. But who will find him if he's lost? Who will find the little boy? Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again. I give this one 4 paws up. Featured Image: Tornado Destruction flickr photo by pocketwiley shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license A year ago there were none but now there are a good handful of sites that allow you to mix in a collection of disparate RSS feed URLs, and it mixes them into a new one, with its own RSS feed. I refer these frequently to folks that write me about Feed2JS asking if it can accept multiple feed URLs (the answer is "no"). A feed mixer will do the trick. Having just come across a new one, KickRSS (love the name), I thought I;d try and list the ones I knew. Most likely I will miss one, two, ten or twelve, so let me know of other similar services. To test them, I have created a few test feeds, using RSS URLs for my favorite Canadian Bloggers: OLDaily http://www.downes.ca/ Abject Learning http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/brian/ Couros Blog http://educationaltechnology.ca/couros/ D'Arcy Norman http://www.darcynorman.net/ Roland Tanglao http://www.rolandTanglao.com/ Mezzoblue http://www.mezzoblue.com/ Feed Mix Sites and results: KickRSS - "KickRSS takes multiple RSS or ATOM feeds, combines them, and displays them as a single RSS feed or a webpage at an easy-to-remember URL." Test Feed: I Wanna Be Canadian FeedShake - "FeedShake can merge, sort and filter multiple RSS feeds." Test Feed: I Wanna Be Canadian BlogSieve - "BlogSieve is a free web-based tool that creates new feeds by filtering, merging and sorting existing feeds. The BlogSieve engine accepts virtually every (valid) feed format, processed results are then exported into any feed format you choose" None of the links on the site worked, so I could not create a test feed. FeedDigest - "With FeedDigest, mix, filter and republish or syndicate feeds to HTML, JavaScript, WAP or PHP, or to a new feed." Has formatting options for making pretty layouts. Limited to 15 items per digest. Can add filter words. Limited to 3 feeds per digest (boo!!!) Test Feed: I Wanna Be a Canadian RSS Mix - "Mix any number of RSS feeds into one unique new feed!" Test Feed: Mix ID 5449 HTML View BlogDigger Groups - "Blogdigger Groups allows you to combine the contents of two or more blogs making the combined content easily accessible all at once. You can create a Blogdigger Group using any blogs that have RSS feeds. Once you specify the feeds that comprise your Blogdigger Group you will be able to view the posts from those feeds, sorted by date, and even export your group in OPML or OCS, or subscribe to your Blogdigger Group as an RSS feed." Can load RSS URLs from an OPML file. Archives Feed items and is searchable. Can create new feeds from search results. Test Feed: I Wanna Be Canadian BlogDigger Group UPDATE: Additions thanks to the gang in the comment gallery: Aggrssive - "Read, Aggregate, Enrich: Combine feeds, organize them by TAGGING, find your feeds quickly. Out put any of your feeds to any site on the web just the way you want." Includes tagging, tag clouds, and a variation of FeedJS for display. And it is created in Canada! (Thanks to Brian Lamb for sharing) Test Feed: I Wanna Be Canadian Aggregate and Collection View lazytom's feedjumbler "FeedJumbler is a web-based application that allows you to: Convert a RSS or Atom-based feed into RSS, Atom and/or HTML and JavaScript; Merge several RSS or Atom-based feeds into one combined RSS and/or Atom feed; Put an RSS feed (or merged feed) on your webpage using an IFrame or JavaScript)" Free and direct to use, lots of output display options. Test feed: I Wanna Be Canadian Jumbled FeedMarker "Feedmarker lets you bookmark items from the Web and read RSS and Atom feeds. It also lets you organize all your stuff (feeds and marks) using an open tagging system." Its a mixture of feeds and bookmarks with tagging. it was rather finicky on locating feed URLs from blog URLs, and they were entered one by one. Test Feed: CogDog's FeedMarker FEEDcombine "a script to combine multiple RSS feeds into one." Only generated XML errors, bummer. Feed Findings "Feed Findings, originally inspired by A9's OpenSearch, is a brand new feed processing tool. Where tools like BlogSieve help you filter groups of feeds, Feed Findings provides keyword based searching across groups of feeds." Enter up to 10 RSS feeds. The feeds are generated, but you need to supply a search term (it does not like empty strings), option to specify RSS flavor. The feeds returnes supposedly as RSS 2.0 are not really RSS 2.0 in structure (no PubDate). Test Feed: I Wanna Be Canadian RSS2.0 search="blog" FrankenFeed "Egor can generate a master feed for you. What is a master feed? Do you have several feeds on the same topic that you want to share with someone (or just use yourself)? Egor will combine multiple feeds into a single simple feed. You can always come back and easily add or delete the feeds." Easy, fast to set up, flexible options. Best name for the site! My test feed fell apart due to XML errors. Test Feed: I Wanna Be Canadian (info) / RSS Hardly anything is more DS106 #Life than pingponging daily creates with folks like Kevin aka @dogtrax. Ask this 6th grade musician teacher why he is still devoutly doing this stuff, and I bet the answer is along the lines "if I have to explain it to you..." A recent example among many puts a bit of warmth under the gloom kettle, so bear wih me (or more likely, command W) as a blather away episode number 2106. TDC 5110: The Frankenpoem We start with the very first DS106 after the 14th year anniversary edition. 14 Years plus a day! On January 9 we got a challenge to write (and or illiustrate) a Frankenstein Poem When you read a ‘Frankenstein poem’ you get the sense that it’s been composed from bits and bobs stitched together, most likely from lines and images the writer has found in their notebook. Lines that seemed too bloody good not to use somewhere. https://daily.ds106.us/tdc5110/ I guess it's in the league of the cut-up method of William S Burroughs, but with the Frankenstein metaphor, stuff strewn together from disparate parts, bolted together, if you will. I blanked a bit when I saw it, and considered it one of those "Guess I will Skip It TDCs" because "Nobody Cares If You Do it Or Not." It got put aside and my attention went back... what was it I was supposed to be doing? It's there amongst the 40 some open tabs in my browser. Stop. Then I had the idea. I went from tab to tab, and copied just one word, or short sentence from each open tab where my eyes went to first, pasted it into a blank text editor. There was the poem. Amidst the darkness of the modern worldEpiphanyCars n TrucksPizza declines in the USFunds availableYour order was successfulTry these formatsWhat are the barriers?File, edit, view, insert, format, dataBootstrapAlternate path systemsPlease refresh to keep things working smoothly.Quality educationIt's twelveListen to this articleAll fiction pulpwood magazinesBuried treasure can still be found in ChemistryKey points for determining public domain status.While interesting, that's not the point here today.This includes all active issue renewalsGet the book.Do we have a map or a model in our head?Science is Important.Read about the project here.> Instructions.GAFAM, FAAMG, or more recently, the broader Magnificent Seven.Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading.The results from many hours spent reverse engineeringThis page contains changes which are not marked for translation.You instantly become curious and ask 'what's this?'. Words from my 30 some open tabs That works! I made a screenshot, and to go the extra ds106 miles, I jumped into Photoshop to place it atop a screenshot of a google image search for Frankenstein. https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog/115866357499412272 I did not clock the time, but it did feel like within the 20 minute frame I always suggested as an investment in DS106. That was it. Nothing really significant, the world goes on invading countries and shredding reason through artificial machine eaters. But I had that through that this was a reproducible prompt, and one of the best things one can do in the DS106 Daily Create I think is to make one for others, tyhen you see what happens when others take it in unexpected directions. This I crafted it as the Daily Create #tdc5124 that was yesterday. FrankenTabFranken Poem And this is where DS106 has always gone that so few other groups I have seen gone, in mutating and self-remixing directions. Kevin brilliantly replied to TDC5124 by not just doing it as instructed, but came up with his own creative response. He put my "poem" into a word cloud thingy https://mastodon.social/@dogtrax/115943980298607398 It's another layer that is new and different. FrankenTabFrankenPoemPhoto I saw no need to do the FrankenTab poem for Daily Create #tdc5124 since I had done the one as the example. But when I saw what Kevin did, I pondered what I could layer on that. I took the biggest words in Kevin's Word cloud, the first three words in my "original" Franken Poem- and did a flickr search in my own photos on all of them "Point" "Format" and "Here" choosing the first three images that came up as flickr does its algorithmic sorting (some basis of views, comments, etc). https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/3616222328 Point Lobos flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/21670945283 Formation flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/24668320888 What? What is Here? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) This is all Franken-style too, right? Photos that have no correlation if you just look at the data for each (noting too that "format" for the middle one landed on the word "Formation" in the title). The only connection came from outside, from something not connected. Thus my response was some more photo collaging of these three photos, some layer effects, and putting Kevin's word cloud on top. https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog/115944957306963424 Again, so what? This mode of creation atop creation is outside the realm of statistical formation, not matter how powerfully engineered is your promptism. But in the path we all give each other credit. There's More. The Side Paths to John's Blackout Poetry Prompt Remix is not just this linear pathing, it spawns branches and pack paths and intertwined wonderment. Me, when I see a daily create, I reach a lot for photoshop and image mashing. But for a super creative approach, the imagination of John Johnston results in him crafting magical web things. For the original prompt to just craft a Frankenstein Poem, John made a web tool that allows that through the mode of Blackout poetry. https://social.ds106.us/@johnjohnston/115865399468369712 And this remixes forward as Yet Another DS106 Daily Create TDC 5121 Make a Blackout poem from a Frankenstein poem - the challenge is to use John's Blackout porety tool on one of the responses to the original Frankenstein poems submitted! This is just too inter-remixed to not celebrate and re-remix: Making blackout poetry with John Johnston's magical tool (which I know frim his blog and seeing his URL is running on a Raspberry Pi!) It smiled like many-coloured glass up the imaginings, to be carriers of fire.https://pi.johnj.info/tdc/tdc5110/index.html As much as I try to explain this magic and joy, I doubt it truly makes any impression beyond someone thinking, "Does he not have anything else to do with his time?" #DS106andRemix4Life Mix it. Match It. Share It. Own the experience. Image credits: Mix, Match, and Own. flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) That is 31 years between a photo of me at 17 in my parent's basement and just last night in my friend's son's basement. Much chnages and miles between. But that blonde telecaster is the same as it ever was, a thing that I just enjoyed holding, then and now. I have written up the story before - I bought this guitar and a Peavey Backstage amp from an ad in the Baltimore paper. I cannot recall how much I spent, maybe $325? But it was my typical suburban dream to play in band, never realized. At some point later, I sold it to my best friend from high school Kevin, with the idea it would reamin "in the friend's family". And now fast forward to the present, when the Tele is in the able hands of Kevin's son, Cal, who really is in a band, and is making some beautifully original music with it. Although joking last night with Cal that I heard he was interested in selling it, I could not be more proud to see him use it as his favorite axe. Cal, a student at Penn State, plays in a trio called Think Twice, Dublin, and it is some rather avant garde complex music, beyond my 3 chord repertoire for sure. Cal has a deep music love, appreciation, and facility (as he shared some unique vinyl). A web site you can find the music http://thinktwicedublin.bandcamp.com/ features a photo of Kevin with the Telecaster back in the 1980s when we shared an apartment in Baltimore. Cal even has the original hard case, which was falling apart when I got the guitar in 1980. Check out their video (with another guitar), in the goddam woods, recorded in the woods near State College: in the goddamn woods [part one]: Move Quickly from ThinkTwiceDublin on Vimeo. It is fascinating to watch a love of connection of music between my friend and his son- you expect music tastes to divide parents and children, but here it bonds, genuinely. I could not be prouder to be a small part of this chain, and as Kevin said last night to me and Cal (and agreed by us three), "The Tele is here, but it really belongs to all of us." Like the Dude, the Tele abides. Perhaps it will never be used and / or no one really needs to know this technical minutiae, but I’m documenting as much as possible the work that will lead up to this Creative Commons Certificate. Yesterday I wrote up a bit of this duct taped system to collect via a Google Form resources as suggestions for the materials we will develop / provide, to organize in a Google spreadsheet, and then use some web code to create a browse / search / filter interface. Elsewhere I was trying out one of Martin Hawksey’s new tricks for his Twitter TAGS system that uses some tools to geolocate data in a spreadsheet and render it via a map using the Awesome Table Geocode add-on. In an email exchange where I had asked Martin a question, he suggested in response to my post on flipping tables that I look at the general Awesome Table tools as an alternative approach. It did not take too long to make a new sheet with the data I was using into the form Awesome Table needs (it needs on more row below the column titles to indicate the kind of filters and parameters to use. This is now in place on my test page for viewing the resources in the spreadsheet, and it’s already more awesome than what I had before. One plus is that the layout is more responsive than what I had before. But more importantly, the tools are more sophisticated to focus in on data by different filters and search. I can put copyright into the Resource field to show only items with “copyright” in the title: Now with only 10 rows of data, this may not be that impressive, but it would work the same if where there are hundreds of rows. But wait, there’s more. I can narrow in further with the drop down menu filters- these are from the form items that came from radio buttons and check boxes, so they can be used as limiters too- So if I narrow it in addition by items marked as specific to the Library Certification, I get one match. Again, this may not be the most exciting table for you since there are not many pieces of data, but when there is more, this should be useful when we are assigning them to different modules. Now if I could only get you excited enough to add some more resources to the data. Will you? Awesome. Oh one more “awesome” thing about Awesome Tables – it gives you some stats on the usage of the table Awesome data on Awesome Table data. Too much Awesome? Featured image: flickr photo by Didriks https://flickr.com/photos/dinnerseries/7894656450 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license Sigh. Maybe it is multiple personalty disorder given its Adoption of Macromedia, but my Adobe PhotoShop CS2 Updater does not allow me to choose itself, so it can update itself? Weird. Abort. Retry. Fail? cc licensed flickr photo shared by gamp Taking a page from Google, there is new announcement from the automobile industry: BillyBob and Melba Bootwaddle, the original creators of the reverse flow corn cob floating ball carburetor, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Ford Wave. As BillyBob describes it, "Knowing what we do about automobiles, we set out to answer the question: What would cars look like if we set out to invent them today?" That is exactly the right question, and one that every US car maker should be asking him or herself. The world of cars has changed, profoundly, yet so many of our cars bear the burden of decades of old thinking. We need to challenge our assumptions and re-imagine the vehicles we take for granted. It's perhaps no accident that this project, carried out secretly at Ford's Locus Bayou office over the past two years, had the code name Old Yeller. That's the Arkansas old time tradition of going off for an extended period to retrace the skunk hunting trails and learn the world anew. lifted and parodized from O'Reilley Radar and done so only in fun and respect from that Web 2.0 coiner Ford Waves are available only by a secret invite down to the shed from your cousin Earl or his brother Earl. Yes, I am mocking Google Wave, but I think Chris Lott went and Ruimated my sentiments exactly in his post today Google Wave Hype or Hope? I thought Google Wave was a solution in search of a problem. It's probably more accurate to say Google Wave is (thus far) a clumsy solution to a very small problem that can be productively solved with existing, better performing tools"”including a few applications provided by Google itself. This may change in the future: I can understand, even if I don't buy, Google's positioning of Wave as an email killer, combining functions of email communication with rich media, chat and wiki facilities. But for now it's simply a slow, buggy, painful experiment for which I've yet to see a practical use with benefits enough to outweigh the cost. [Side-note: the debut of highly hyped products like Google Wave tends to bring the worst out of many in educational technology, (sometimes inadvertently) confirming the unfortunate characterizations of my community by those outside. First are those who immediately start looking through the wrong end of the telescope and start conversations based on questions like "how can we use Google Wave in education?" It's not that this is, at heart, the wrong question, but in posing it that way we appear to be the very "geeks obsessed with every shiny new toy" that many think we are. Second are those that latch onto features provided by a product and highlight/elevate them without any evidence of their value in the first place. For instance, Wave may very well be useful for collaborative note-taking, but what supports the contention that collaborative note-taking is of any value in the first place? Just because a cool product does it?] Like Chris, I am trying to do some wave attempts but am not feeling any thing close to shine. But then again, I lack the shrewd investigate prowess of our leading spotlight of technology and I cant wait to be proven wrong. But you should see how fast a ride that Ford Wave really is! Modified my own flickr photo! I've been madly tagging sites on delicious for at least 2 or 3 years now, and rely on it solely as my web resource collection. For a long while I used as a tool a version of the bookmarklet tool I had rigged into my bookmarklet tool maker (wow there is one I've not updated in eons), but recently I have switched, and been liking more and more, the del.icio.us firefox extension. I sem to keep discovernng neat things it does to speed up and power by tagging habits. For one, it does the essentials I need- by using a mouse to highlight a chunk of text in a web page I plan to tag - it inserts that text automatically into the notes field. What is really cool about the new version, is that the pop up window now displays an indicator of my chunk of text is over the 250 character limit that del.icio.us will use: and from here I can click to add tags from its suggestions, my previous used sets of tags, popular tags etc. The other nice thing about the extension over the old bookmarklet is that it does not load the site again into a popup window- the tagging interface disappears when tis work is done. Next, what I like, is the extra bar it inserts to make available the sites I have most recently tagged (1, below)). Usually I am stingy about adding extra browser chrome across the screen (I have seen some IE users with about 35% of their screen real estate to see web page because of all the bar chrome), but having recently tagged sites one click a way is very handy-- and, there is a whole longer stream available via the » symbol on the right edge (2): And Lastly, the del.icio.us icon in the main nav bar provides a groovy interface to drill down my tag sets- on first view, I see more or less access to all my tagged sites, and as I click tags I have used in the toop, my choices of available sites dwindle to a small set, so in the example below I drill down from all my tags (1, 2000 sites) to ones tagged as "art" (2 - 85 sites), to ones with both "art" and "collaboration" (3- 7 sites). I fully expect to discover more surprises, but for now, this tool is better than a Leatherman (when it comes to tagging). FeedCreator.class.php- File this one away for future or near future code use. FeedCreator.class.php provides an easy way to create RSS feeds from within PHP using ease to use classes. * creates valid feeds according to RSS 0.91, 1.0 or 2.0 as well as PIE 0.1 (deprecated), OPML 1.0, Unix mbox and ATOM 0.3 format. * configurable feed caching This is code you can use within your own PHP that allows you to generate RSS files from any source you can load data into. I like the options to generate different RSS flavors, from 0.91 through Atom and a bunch in between. I might be using this rather than the RSSWriter (RSS 1.0 only) I had been using for the MLX feed generation. Some unconfirmed rumors that a new device is coming out soon from Apple, the ultimate ds106 device, the 106pod- its evolution: Okay, this is actually a remix created for the ds106 Remix Generated assignment, Evolution [remixed] DS106-ersizer: This combines an original ds106 assignment: Evolution created by Isaac Thesatus Alot can happen from birth to death. Be creative, show how things; animals, objects, technology, evolve throughout time. This assignment doesn't have to be precise, your object evolving doesn't have to evolve the way is expected during the process of evolution. Be creative! played with the remix card: To start, I used the Evolution assignment by kkm32 (this looks like one of Scottlo's Spring 2012 students), which graphically showed the evolution of iPod nano from 2005-2010. My idea was to insert images of the ds106 site as it evolved over 2010-2012. They are kind fo hard to see in the image, because I shrunk them to be part of the tiny pod screens. Spring 2010: "1,000 songs. Impossibly small." ds106 Spring of 2010 : early with a Lebowski themed header, but like now, aggregating blogs into one site Fall 2010: "Completely remastered." ds106 Fall of 2010- the last semester before it became an open course Summer 2011: "A little video for everyone." ds106: The Summer of Oblivion - wow, I managed to skip the first open course section of ds106, but here was its second iteration, probably the most zany, un-course like course evert taught. Completely unhinged. Beauty, eh? The screenshot is from the video episode where Dr Oblivion was banished from the course http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj2v2D08gGA January 2011: "nano-chromatic" and "Rockalicious" Ongoing from January 2010 is the epic arc of ds106 radio. Name me one other class, MOOC or not THAT HAS A FREAKIN RADIO STATION! (well one group of elementary students do) Summer 2012: "Multi-Touch. And multi-talented." The purple wild version represents to hippie love Summer of Macguffin, the summer online version Martha Burtis and I taught in 2012: Fall 2012: "Completely Renanoed." The final model, the multitouch nano represents the current iteration of ds106, where it is taught only online. FWIW, the blog post title and the slogans are ones created for each iPod Nano What can be after "Completely Renanoed"? Stay tune for the next generation od ds106, coming to your ds106pod. The editing of the graphic was done in Photoshop, using a common method. I select a region I want something to appear in, like the screen of one of those nanos. I then open the image I want to use and copy it all (sometimes on my Mac I do this in Preview, it is just to copy it for pasting). In Photoshop, with the target area still selected, go to Edit -> Paste Special -> Paste Into this essentially creates a mask layer so that the image is cropped to the region I had selected: From here, I can select the paste image, and use resize, distort, etc to get the pasted image to appear how I want it: I use this method ALOT. And for the record, again ds106 is NOT Massive, not bovine, not XRated- it is "Impossibly Small" Put that in your MOOC and smoke it. While listening to your 106Pod. cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by Matt Biddulph I missed this live act, but apparently Jim Groom has been jetting across the US and broadcasting to ds106 radio. The FAA has no clue. Nigel (@easgill) posted a clip of this to SoundCloud and it was whispering to me-- "REMIX REMIX REMIX". So added to this is a bit of what I like as the back beat of radio, Wall of Voodoo's Mexican Radio, a bit of James Bond ordering drinks after the BAVA ORDERS A COKE (edgy), and the OTR Radio Public Service announcement on Freedom. All of this mixed, edited, and tickled in Audacity. Jim Groom Aircasting on the ds106 radio by cogdog Let's hope the plane lands safely despite this interference, and this does not happen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJBTBvnT-DM ds106 Radio. Freedom. #4life. With grand intentions to stick to a schedule of daily challenges, by skin of my calendar teeth I am 31 for 31 days in both daily flickr photos and ds106 Daily Creates. I've held this pace before maybe 2 months? Does it really matter to get a perfect score (no)? But parsing some time to try something new even if not to the daily metronome I will always maintain is valuable. More so than scrolling through ___________ (fill in any social media stream). Daily Flickr Photos https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/albums/72177720304937239 Sometimes there is a 2-3 day catchup, but the photos have been taken every day. Lots of snow, sunsets, dog, the occasional taco, this is maybe the most compulsive habit I have aimed for now for the 16th frigging year. For fun I made a spreadsheet to make some stats and chart gunk. Since I started there have been 5510 days and of those I posted a daily photo 5205 times for a 94% percentage. For years, I have batted as low as 62% in 2012 and hit the 100% buzzer in 2009, 2015, 2016, 2017, and so far, 2023. Charts! I feel like I am nothing but [frozen] net https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/52638874407 2023/365/17 Winter Ball? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) But the fans are dubious. https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/52660068344 2023/365/29 Charlie and Felix 2/3: Skeptical flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) They are saying... "Show us your charts in February!" Game on. Daily DS106 Create I've spouted and presented and yowled about how great the DS106 Daily Create and while I have done (and created) many of them since 2012, I've never sustained a run at the top of the leaderboard. Well for 2023, I am running 31/31! I just love this bit of data tracking (the good kind) that runs in the now rather old, but despite the Musky One's Meddling, still works via the Daily Blank WordPress Theme. Even more, everyone who ever participates has their own archive built in-- mine is at https://daily.ds106.us/hashtags/cogdog/ Woah, that's 581 TDCs under my belr! That makes my batting percentage 581 / 2710 days or a .214 hitter. Maybe not so impressive after all. But it's still fun to see what I can conjure in about 20 minutes-- https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1618721354441793565 https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1618120303267168256 It's been a good mix of challenges in 2023. For more stats and people to be in awe of, see the all time leaderboard. Heck,even Todd Conaway is ahead of me! This year the pool of players is only 14. Without a current or recent ds106 class, theparticipation has fallen. But also the sagging spirit of twitter may be at play. I do have the site posting to Mastodon at https://social.ds106.us/@tdc but admit I am sluggish at getting my head into some code to pull mastodon responses into the site (and the board). The main task is finding or thrashing some PHP code to fetch replies to that account. If you want that, keep bugging me. That's One! (month) I may not keep this pace, but I am going to be at it as much as possible, as this is more valuable use f time than venting about ChatGPT. What are you doing for a daily constructive habit? I'm doubling down on the dailies! Bring it on, February. Featured Image: https://flickr.com/photos/cogdog/32881499591 Double Prints flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Often in my web work, I need to extract a logo or element from another web site. The old right/control click does not work if the image is set by a more elaborate CSS extension (e.g. the background image for a header). Today I used a trick I know I have done before, but hey, might was well share the treats. Ready? Sit.... Okay, I needed a banner image to use on a Google Form I am prototyping for the Creative Commons Certification project. Sure, they offer a lot of nice images from the settings in the new form editor, but why look like everybody else? They have recently rolled out a new look for the Creative Commons web site Nicely done. What I need is something like the logo and the background in the header, a banner like image. But I don't want all the menus as it might look like something you can click, when I will be using just an image. I could download the white logo and make a redo of the background in Photoshop. That gradient pattern is not an image, but some CSS magic. So I have another idea... I am going to modify the elements in my browser using the web inspector. I use the Chrome Web inspector several times a day. To use it, you have to first got to your settings, technically the extension settings chrome://extensions/ and make sure the box for Developer Mode in the top right is checked: I go back to the web page, and control-click (Mac, right click on those other platforms) on an area near where I want to look at, and select Inspect from the contextual menu: It might open as a side by side window thing, I like it better to have the inspector in its own window (I am not quite remembering which icon in the Inspector does it). Take a breath, we are looking at CODE. I open toggles on the left looking for the CSS element (probably a dv) that contains some elements I want to hide. As I click on different elements in the code, my browser shows me on screen the part I am working on: With some trying, I am pretty sure it is this div named #site-header-menu, and on the right, I can see the CSS applied to it. I can place my cursor within the CSS declaration, press RETURN, and start adding. Once I start typing disp Chrome will autocomplete to display: I can even press tab and see what options I can use-- here is the key, setting display to a value of none, then hitting TAB to put it into play, will hide the element. BOOM! All the side menus are gone. I go on to find the element that contains the DONATE button, a class called .donate-action Again adding display:none; to the CSS class that contains that green button, will hide it: I of course am not changing anything to the web site, just to the way my browser sees it. If I reload the page, all my changes disappear. But I got what I want- the logo sitting on the orange gradient background, and the tag line in the grey bar: Now I can do a screenshot and get the clean image I need: This by the way, is a totally useful way to experiment with CSS, I do it all the time on my web projects to test, which is way easier then editing CSS, saving, uploading, reloading. Go try it, and let me know how it works. I will email you a Milk Bone. Top / Featured Image: I went to the licensed for reuse well of Google Images- "little tricks" was not quite doing it, but seeing a few photos of dogs performing (sadly they were portrait landscape, I went back to a search on "dog trick" and hit gold. This is a still image from Cool Dog Trick Backstall All Fours a Creative Commons licensed YouTube video. Heck you might was well watch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY72lO_19-Y Here is an example of how we are tying events, projects into the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), and using syndication technology to provide a service. Today is yet another of our Dialogue Days, one day topical faculty development activities-- Civic Responsibility: From Awareness to Commitment: (more…)