Woah, I lifted a rock on post about the pachyderm project from last month, and 6 spam roaches came scurrrying out. It seems the thoughtful folks at Cykan*ax were so impressed with the educational possibilities of Pachyderm that they wanted to share their “fantasies”, “group activities”, and other things about beasts, though they seemed to […]

We crave feedback, right? That is the tickle bloggers get when there is email notification that someone has posted a comment. That is the reason why we build commenting features into system. It is what we look for in our online courses. It is what sends the blood boiling when spammers use this channel to […]

The party from the January RSS Winterfest seems to be lingering on- but I am not festive. I get daily emails notifying me of changes on their site, which I am not following nor interested in. Four freakin’ times I used the link on their messages to set up email notifications to “never” . But […]

About every three-four works, my non-friend John leaves a message offering his services from “Credit Foundation of America”. His recorded voice has a faux concern about why I have not called him back regarding their debt consolidation services (did I ever tell anyone I needed this? noooooo. Do I now John? Noooooo. Why does he […]

This blog, as well as our RSS2JS service and our eportfolio server all took an unintended four day holiday. Last week was Spring break for our system, and our admin offices close on Thursday and Friday of that week. Our building had a planned electrical outage planned for Thursday AM to test a new back […]

It’s been a while since I posted about those smelly blog spam cock roaches… mainly because the MTBlacklist Plugin has been quietly running in the background. However, in the last two days the number and frequency of blogspam has picked up. You can identify them quite easily when the comments are emailed to you– especially […]

My work commute is not much more than 10 miles, but invariably during that morning stretch I witness at least once, someone tossing their cigarette butts out the car window. Maybe it is a lot of pent up frustration since the number of public places available for their habits is shrinking, and maybe so far […]

Set up a feedback form on your web site, and you get cruft like: I am a marketer and am interested in buying the e-mail addresses of all your community colleges. Sure! Your odds are as good as a July blizzard in Phoenix. At least this spam merchant was direct.

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).

Wow, XPLANA’s Interface Impact When Developing and Teaching Online Courses : When using graphics in a course, it is imperative that the graphics match the subject matter they are being presented with. When graphics are either inappropriate (meaning that they either do not correspond with the subject matter or they are culturally biased) they are […]