Blog Pile

iSight Deno: 6 Video Chats or Around the Continent in 30 Minutes

Last Friday I did a demo of Apple’s iChat/iSight for two-way desktop video conferencing. This was for a group of faculty and staff who attended our Ocotillo Online Learning Group (OLG) meeting, an open monthly event held at different colleges within the Maricopa system.

Like any technology demo, it had its highs and not so highs, manly some connections where the internet was not cooperating and the bandwidth not sufficient for full quality video or sometimes the audio was muffled. But the demo did demonstrate the ease of video chats, and we heard some different ideas how people are using this technology now.

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BlogSpamming: Tossing Good URLs into the Spam Mix

Another twist by the blog comment-spamming “community”. In a twice submitted comment to 2 unrelated posts on my MovableType blogs, “Peter” blog-spams: Great comments guys. Peter <a href=”http://www.fda.gov/”>FDA</a> As if Peter was trying to get me to toss the US Food and Drug Administration into my MT-Blacklist?? Or Peter is just getting his cockroach fingers […]

Blog Pile

GotW: Abbey’s Writing Quotes

It’s been many weeks, maybe months, since I updated the CDB sidebar “Google of the Week (GotW), so today was as good a day as any. Also, I added GotW as a category archive with requisite RSS feed. The GotW appears in the CDB sidebar, using MovableType’s built in API to Google, in essence, a […]

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WebCT Opens Doors to OPSI e-portfolio

It was bound to happen, once the interest in electronic portfolios has bubbled widely, the big Course Management Monoliths would bring them in under their hoods. I am not at EDCUASE (hardly seems to be any blogging from there? trying a feedster search now- hey who put all those banner ads in there?), and this […]

Blog Pile

Seat of the Pants iSight Demo

Later today I am doing a risky demo at our Ocotillo Online learning Group Meeting. Most technology is a risky in demo mode– here I am showing off the two-way desktop video capability of Apple’s iSight/iChatAV. I’ve got a good number of people, both in the Phoenix area and scattered across the US, Canada, even […]

Blog Pile

A Thousand PowerPoint(less)s of Light?

Some interesting ideas at the IA Think blog on PowerPoint and Idea Development including the often linked (and still a riot) PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg address. But this post is not just another lambast at the results sometimes called “no power and no point”– the author has a valid wonder about the value of […]

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Print Styles for MovableType Blogs

One of my main reasons for using MovableType (MT) for blogging is that most of the blogs I read that seemed well designed, structurally and graphically, had MT under the hood. And the pages produced are clean HTML, even XHTML validat-able, and the templates use CSS sensibly too (as opposed to osme other blogs that are still publishing cruft table-laden HTML, full of extraneous divitis, font tags, etc).

But while they look great on screen, full of nice colors, MT blogs do not print well, especially if you opt for the cool grey background/white text style sheet (e.g. “stormy”).

Ironic isn’t it? An appication named “MovableType” is missing a key element to make it printable. Sadly, it is a fact, that despite our “modern” digital age, a lot of web pages are printed.

So in this post, I will describe how to add a print style sheet to your MT blog so that when the pretty pages are printed, they come out readable. And this is without needing a “print friendly” icon, just the brawn and power of CSS.

This came into play when I ran the workshop yesterday, our the “blogshop”, as I wanted to provide paper handouts for the step-by-step instruction sections…

Blog Pile

RSS in Governments

This one should grow.. RSS in Government: In this site, we’ll monitor creative uses of RSS to provide information to the public above government information and services…. There seems to be a connection or at least a lot of content from the Utah State Library site that has a great RSS tutorial but they seem […]

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BlogShop 2.0

Maybe a bit ambitous to call this a complete revision, but today I ran the second iteration of our weblogging workshop, or BlogShop 2.0 for a group of 20 faculty and staff at Phoenix College.

Pretty much the sections for using MovableType are the same, but I spent some more time trying to illustrate with more examples the potential of blogs in education.