Trying to teach and old RSS feed some new tricks? At first RollUp seemed like a nifty idea- build a customized collection of RSS feeds into one site, theoretically coalescing a pile of feeds into one sensible pile. And that becomes a web page you can customize some layout- colors, fonts. And then that single […]
Tuesday is my keynote presentation at the NMC Sipring 2004 Online Conference – register now to tune into “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange”. For this presentation I, ahem, went well over the suggested length of 20 minutes, to more than 50 (!) but it covers a lot of ground, and is all pictures, […]
Back in November 2003, when I was wasting a lot of time dealing with blog spam, I wrote blogged the approach I took to close comments for this site after an entry had been up for 30 days. In a nutshell, I have a timed job calling a PHP script that rummages through the MT database and closes comments for entries that are more than 30 days old.
It worked great.
Except yesterday that it was doing this not just for this blog, but all the other blogs hosted on the server. Not quite what everybody may want, though we heard nary a complaint.
But I found out when Bob Stepno wrote asking, Is that real or phony blog spam in demo blog?
While following links about the NMC conference, I found my way to your previous Breeze thing about RSS… not a bad tool, it seems, and a nice presentation that I’ll point some friends to.
However, if you’re going to link to fictitious blogs (e.g., http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/boris/), please put a note to that effect on the blogs themselves so that real humans don’t waste their time posting comments trying to interact with the “authors.” (All readers might not get to the disclaimer/credits at the end of the presentation. They might even google themselves into the blog itself.)
Meanwhile, I don’t know if this blog-comment-spam is authentic or also a “demo”… but it’s amusing either way. Yikes, “phony spam” — what a concept!
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/boris/archives/000010.html
And sure enough, Boris’ old entry was littered with porn comments and nude people links, likely sneaking in under the radar before we put up the blacklist and closed the comments. Strangely enough, the blog spam cockroaches descended on the post titled “Cool Gizmo”.
Then I started looking around the database and noticed that every entry had its comments value set for closed.
The fix was easy, modify the PHP script so it acted only on one blog. Since I was rzor sharp on my mySQL queries from banging out the last bits of the online dance registration site, this was cake.
My position have been made too many times regarding the apparent over-obsession with learning object meta-data, 4 words guaranteed used together will put most ordinary humans into a mild coma. I’ve given thought to meta-data and our Maricopa Learning eXchange, where the “M-D” words will never appear, but certainly lurk under the cover of our […]
This will likely be a first and last blog entry referencing politics. I might be judged as apathetic, but I do my research quietly, make my decisions, and vote, without foaming at the mouth or making it an obsession. However, after some hasty mulling, I decided to share my summary of the political scene. We […]
I am coming up for air…. gasp…. gasp… This is crunch week for prepping my keynote session at the NMC Online Conference, scheduled for Tuesday March 9. My Breeze-d up show is called “Mysteries Revealed! Inside the Maricopa Learning eXchange” and should be action packed, irreverent, and over the top. This will be a guided […]
Today should be an international holiday, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Theodor Geisel.
Yawn? Better we should have said, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Suess, that’s right today is the Suessentennial. Who cannot connect with a favorite child hood read? Therefore a re-iteration of an earlier post on this dog’s favorite Suess book (scratch your heads hard to figure out this one!)….
As part of our support for some of our system-wide Arts programs, a few months back I agreed to build a web site and some online registration tools for the March 2004 American College Dance Festival (Southwest Regional) being hosted by our Scottsdale Community College. There are some 350 attendees from 31 different college dance programs.
This was a fun design project as I got to go full bore into using pure XHTML design, two sets of style sheets to mask out those pesky NetScape 4 users/abusees (plus a print style sheet), a one template PHP output template, random background images, use of fancy CSS for a navigation bar that looks like the kludgy JavaScript image swaps, but renders iin source as a good old, accessible friendly, <ul> list….
They did not give enough lead time to set up totally online registration, but we did take some weakly formatted materials, and have the attendees use MS Word protected “Form” documents to submit their registration details.
But the fun came this past 2 weeks in setting up a completely online system for the college representatives to sign their students up for the classes that are offered over 4 days. The first part was getting the class details (name, location, instructor, maximum registration). I had made an Excel spreadsheet with different sheets to match the database tables (especially as the class titles continue to change, student names were dropped, added) so that the conference folks could send me data, I could then import into the mySQL database. The fist tool was generating a schedule preview, with link to the instructor bios (also drawn from the database).
This was a messy pile of data to sort out- nearly 150 different classes, with different maximum numbers (room dependent), participants could select 1,2,3 class preferences for 14 time slots, and having to work around conflicting events such as rehearsals and adjudication (I have no idea what that is, but I had to type it a lot ;-). Oh, and there are these “Master Classes” where each college was allotted so many registration slots, AND, a person could take only one Master Class.
I was told that in years past, attendees had to stand in line at the conference registration to get their class requests, so if this work, it would take away that hassle, and provide the event planners more room to plan for the conference details.
The system has been open just a few days, and it appears that 26/31 colleges have already gotten their participants . registrations in. It is competitive as classes fill, so they were eager to log in and sign up. I cannot let you see, but have collected some screen shots.
No, Willie Nelson did not pen this song, but I think Alan Cooper may have been an influence 😉 And this old song has been eating a lot of my time and productivity this week.
But here is the moral first- Programmers are brilliant, intelligent people in their areas of expertise, but for the most part (ducking to avoid the lobbed rotten vegetables), they should never be allowed to lead or do web design for use by any normal humans (e.g. potential site visitors).
Rumors are that elusive character, Biff Cantrell, will be appearing at the New Media Consortium Spring Online Conference (March 8-11, 2004). The NMC Series of Online Conferences is a new form of meetings based on social computing concepts and delivered entirely online through a collaboration with NMC partners iCohere and Macromedia. The unique environment allows […]
