Sending attachments by email has become as ordinary as brushing your teeth… well, substitute your own regular habits.
My mom reads and sends attachments. But is this always the best way to manage content that might be useful to others? at a later time? in an environment where it can be indexed and keyword searched? Here is a small tale.
I am curious to “be” at the January 21-22 online conference, RSS Winterfest. Most conferences, in person or online, I generally approach with low expectations– mainly out of frustration over the years that the only format for professional communication that seems to be used is the 50 minute lecture to a passive audience. I have […]
Not that anyone but me cares, but number 4 (my French numbering skills went out the ouvre) in my recent spate of blog tinkering notes (1, 2, 3) was a recasting of the date-based archives, the monthly archives MovableType builds for you. With the out of the box templates, MT simply takes every blog entry […]
Ever since I launched this weblog April 2003, I have been talking up blogs quite a bit in my system. The usual heat seekers grab on to the potential and some of the more technology skeptical folks at least do not wrinkle their brows in confusion when I mention “blog”. I’ve run a few “BlogShops” […]
Brian shares yet another brilliant article draft “Wikis: Hypertext on Steroids”, worth reading and following links from if you are looking for what may be the next edge-like instructional technology. For those who have not “wiki-d” it is an intensively interlinked web site where any visitor can edit and create new information. It bends your […]
This year marks a number of ten year anniversaries for the web site we created in December 1993 for my office, the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (MCLI). This ran on a humble Macintosh SE/30 sitting on a table in the hallway— the very first web server in our organization, running what was then the free MacHTTP server software.
As a former geologist, all of our machines in our office had domain names chosen after minerals or rocks, and the original URL for our server was http://hakatai.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ (which still works). For those unfortunate enough not to have trained in geology, we have an explanation for what “hakatai” means.
It was 10 years ago tomorrow (January 15) that we submitted our site to the NCSA What’s New Page— this was at that time the one and only place to go to check out new web sites that were sprouting up like wildflowers. Some consider this the original notion of a weblog, a chronologically organized set of descriptions of web content elsewhere. Anyhow, if you scroll down to January 15, 1994, you will find us.…
Another squirrely thing about MovableType right out of the box is that the category archive templates it create is more or less a never-ending appending of your posts to a long scrolling archive. It hardly seems useful once you have blogged say 10, 20 entries in a category, much less if you have written long pieces and/or embedded images.
Previously I wrote about my funky strategy for creating two sets of category archives, the recent 20 linked to “all the rest”, but I have modified the output templates to produce more or less a title/abstract view (example) rather than a mimic of the original post, with a link to the full post (the individual archive, old example)…
More changes I forgot in the MovableType structure of CDB. Previously, when I had a poor grasp on MT templates, I had separate index templates for each of my category RSS feeds, thinking there was not a way to generalize that. This was sloppy, requiring new templates for every category I decided to add, and the more index rebuilds you ask MT to do, it seems to get a bit clunkier.
Here is how I created generalized RSS feeds (okay, they are still RSS 1.0, but I’ve yet to figure out why I need 2.0 or pie or Atom or whatever else it is called these days. I am open to having my paw slapped)…
This rightfully belongs with the recent barking on Repository Follies— a few weeks back Scott Leslie made reference to “Best Faculty-level presentation on Learning Objects from the last 18 months”— a vintage 2002 keynote by William Horton titled “Don’t Bother Me With Learning Objects! I’ve Got a Course to Teach!, a worthwhile 4.3 Mb PDF: […]
A new year. Time to look around the house and tidy up. I had grandiose plans for some new weblog features here at CDB, but like many year-end resolutions, fell a bit short.
One thing I did (and partially messed up) was to change the URL and location of the individual archives created by MovableType. Out of the box, you typically end of with your blog postings having URLs such as:
http://cogdogblog.com/alan/archives/000379.html
e.g. creating sequentially numbered URLs which are nice if you are a database and like references such as “000379”, but the URL itself says nothing about the content at all. I decided to make some changes, with the resulting same post now residing at:
http://cogdogblog.com/alan/archives/2003/12/22/rss_winterfest.html
Which lets you know by looking at the URL (with some guessing) that this post is was made December 22, 2003 and has something to do with RSS and a winter festival (maybe). Here was the path..
