Uncategorized

Go, Blog. Go!

godog.jpg Out of coincidence, I was recently reminded of one my most important, early literary influences. No, not Dickens, not Dostoevsky, not Thoreau… it was P.D. Eastman’s timeless classic, Go, Dog. Go! (GDG).

In fact, I still have a copy of GDG in my office. Not the one I had as a kid, all marked up with crayons, ripped, dried food, and shoddy, no this was one in pristine condition I must have picked up later in fond memory. We were having an office lunch conversation about great books for young kids, and I remembered GDG, and loaned it to a colleague with a child just starting in his own reading adventures.

So yes, the dogs got to me as a toddler. But there are so many parallels between those madcap, partying, busy multi-colored dogs in GDG and the crazy blog world now…

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3 Blog Spam Roaches Smashed

Just when you thought it was safe to blog…. 3 pairs of blog spam comments came in over night, and STOMP, STOMP, STOMP, they are gone thanks to Jay Allen’s MT Blacklist plugin. But the pattern is disturbing. Each of these came as faked comments to the same 2 blog posts, likely ones that have […]

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Blog Spammers Getting More Desperate, More Subtle

Now that MovableType bloggers can feel slightly more protected from weblogs comment spam thanks to Jay Allen’s MTBlacklist plugin, do not feel like this will drive the pesky spam-roaches away. Remember that their whole goal is to insert their viagra, porn, rip-off sales, etc web site addresses into your pages as it improves their Google […]

Blog Pile

Pachyderming Learning Objects

It’s been a full 2 days of intense action here at the NMC Pachyderm project meeting in San Francisco.

This project was origiinally developed to create rich media web experiences based on exhibits at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)— Pachyderm 2.0 will evolve it to a tool that is able to do something I have been unable to really see anywhere else- to allow non-technical individuals to easily create interactive multimedia experiences from learning objects.

The best part of this is the impressive collaboration of talent from at least 5 educational institutions and 5 other museums– and the energy of the group is contagious.

Blog Pile

Wow, ABC News has Discovered RSS

Ho hum. From the far seeing “FutureTech” at ABCNews.com, they reveal Web Tech to Keep Users Up-to-Date on News!!!! Maybe I ought to look at this RSS stuff 😉 Now it is easy to lambast a rather feather-weight overview of RSS, and frankly it is good to see more of this in the media, but […]

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MT-Blacklist 1.5 Out: Stop Blog Spam Cold

Now out to improve your MovableType blog sanity, is Jay Allen’s miraculous MT-Blacklist – A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin version 1.5. This is a large update and offers one click, de-spammiing of both comments and trackbacks, adding to blacklist file, and rebuilding of offended files. It is like magic. I had one arrive today with […]

Blog Pile

Syndicating “Best of Show”

I’ve took a little twist on RSS to deploy it in another fashion here at CDB. This was partly to response to a post by James Farmer as he tried to find an alternative approach to blogrolling.

Maybe not understanding Radio as much as I should, I commented that it might be feasible to create his own RSS feed his blog could subscribe to. Not being able to clearly explain it in text, I decided to code an example on my blog.

Here is what I did- on my right side “links” i have a section called “Best of Show” where L list the title and link to my recent presentations. Until now, what I did was to edit my template every time there was a new one (and there were four this month).

I thought I could just create my own RSS feed for this content, display say the 5 most recent on the front page, and display them all on an individual page.

Now I can update both by editing my RSS feed. Simplifies my life! Here is what it took to pull this off in MovableType and the MT-RSS Feed plugin: