I’ve not been blogging.. much. On the other hand, something that was always utterly fascinating to me is the concept of “comment blogging”, someone who has no self-published blogs, but actively participates and ‘exists’ more distributed-like in the comment space of other people’s blogs. Often, I have found this to be a missing piece of […]
While updating one of our projects and searching for web links to a mentioned organization, I came across a site proudly displaying this lovely disclaimer: Needless to say, no content beyond the patheticly sad home page was rendered in FireFox (or Safari). Someone please load up a gun with some Zeldman and squeeze the trigger.
Cannot…. form… sentences… You gotta check out gada.be. Cool URl. Cooler ides. Create a multiple prong web search be foisting words into a URL. Aimed to mobile users for quick results. Wow. Huh? Try http://rip-mix-learn.gada.be/ Or, http://rss.gada.be/ Hey, http://wilma.gada.be/ What? Is there a http://dead-cat.gada.be/? Mergermania! http://blackboard-webct.gada.be/ (Nahhhh, that one is empty. What a surprise!) But […]
flickr foto impulsive optimistavailable on my flickr One of the images tagged in flickr as physicalmetadata. Wow, much better than cryptic “labels on soup cans”! With this metadata, we know this is a good dog, an optimist! I think (rather I Google) this is connected to the Flickr Peep Show exhibit. Wow, to be in […]
I got an email recently from someone trying to suggest we were inserting adds into a feed displayed with Feed2JS falsely suggested on pappamashkin blog. Nothing could be further from the truth. Heck we do not even insert a credit back link in the free service we provide. But curious, I dug deeper. The culprit […]
This semester I am taking a complete respite from the usual big ed tech conferences… well, I am taking a break from all of them. The time spent traveling, the cost of travel, really do not balance for the things gained. That said, online conference have yet to really find a niche yet that provides […]
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 […]
I’ve been tinkering with my simple approach of using MovableType as a publisher engine to create podcast feeds and content listings for audio content that is used across several different web sites. While there are many ways one could go about this, I am finding this to be efficient and fast. I only have about 7 feeds set up, but they are pushing across multiple web sites, with different design layouts.
This allows me to create a single directory of content and RSS files that can be accessed by any of our other PHP web pages. So the main podcast entry page lists all the casts on our site, and th elistings provide links to web sites connected to the audio, a description, a URL for the MP3 file, and now, stealing the idea from the EDUCAUSE blogs, the slick niftyplayer, and embedded flash audio player, e.g.:
But by setting up categories, I can have content filtered to feeds that are associated with specific project, such as our Dialogue Day podcasts, Ocotillo podcasts, and our Online Learning Group podcasts.
MovableType generates the correct RSS 2.0 feeds with proper enclosure tags, as well as generates the small text files that are used to provide the content to these pages. There is also another template that provides the content used to display as “What is Podcasting” info on these different pages. It works well because it is not publishing a full blog, just some small bits of content files.
For example, a snapshot of my current directory includes:
where *.inc are the main podcats listings, *_nav.inc are shorter listings that are just links to the sites that include the audio, and *.xml is a podcast feed.
Below I will describe in a bit more detail how it is done and provide a download of the template files. To use these you will need to
* have a web site that uses PHP for its content pages
* have an understanding of linking to web directories up and down a web server structure
* use or be able to set up MovableType on your server (I use the last free version, 2.661, but it ought to work on the 3.x versions)
I read a long time ago a column by an auto mechanic who said the hardest customers to deal with were ones who tried to guess what the car’s problem was rather than describe the symptoms, e.g. someone saying, “I think the hydrowidget is sheared off” rather than, “I hear a harsh squealing noise when […]
How says there’s nothing worthy on blogrolls…. Found on a sidebar— is this a long lost blog cousin to CDB? http://sitcogblog.blogspot.com/ Strike out on Jakob’s Weblog Usability Law #1…
