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David emailed me this afternoon asking about the possibility of listing posts in a WordPress blog that belonged in a given set of categories. So, you could list all posts that belong in both “Category A” and “Category B”. Ironically, Ultimate Tag Warrior offers something like this for combinations of tags, but the native WordPress category interface doesn’t seem to do it. Some way of viewing /category/CategoryA+CategoryB should do the trick.

I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon, and it’s really starting to bug me. There must be a way to do this. Lazyweb, can you help me (and David)?

This is welcome news indeed! Greg Ritter has returned from his long, long silence, and has begun blogging again! I’m guessing Greg found it easier to go underwater during the whole Bb IPO and WebCT shindigs, but now that those things have been dealt with maybe he’ll be able to blog more often.

Excellent news, Greg. I’d been keeping your old blog in my subscriptions Just In Case™ and have already subscribed to your new one.

Thanks to Scott and James for the heads-up on Ritter’s Return. Greg’s already hit the ground running with some great comments from Blackboard users about weblogs, wikis and podcasting.

Paul just sent me a link to a cool sounding (but unfinished) project called code4lib session snatcher. It sounds like it’s a pet project of a systems librarian who was working on some code on a flight to the code4lib conference. The code is intended to act as a presentation recorder for the S5 presentation system, recording both slide timings and audio, and (presumably) packaging both up for playback after the fact.

It’s currently Pretty Darned Hard to properly record a full-on presentation. Getting the audio is no biggie, but getting the timing of the presentation so it synchs up to the audio is decidedly non-trivial. The session snatcher author referenced Lawrence Lessig’s quest for a usable solution to do this. I’m not sure S5 would satisfy Lessig’s style, but this just might work…

Art took an interesting tack in recording an S5 presentation – it looks like he’s using a java client/server combination to act as both webserver (hosting the S5 presentation, and therefore recording times of requests) and recording the audio. That’s pretty cool. I couldn’t find a download to try it out (and couldn’t find more info about it on his blog), so I’m just dumping a reference to it here so I’ll eventually remember to come back and see how things have progressed.

More faves. It’s Family Day. What else to do than poke around Flickr for inspiration?

Sounds like a pretty minor bump, with Flock going from 0.5.x to 0.5.11, but some really cool new features made it in. The Flickr browser topbar rocks. I mean, wow. That sucker is sweet. And a built-in Technorati info display topbar, to get a quick 10,000′ overview of a site as defined by external links. Very handy. They also updated the blog editor to use a local copy of TinyMCE, and it looks pretty darned nice (Categories aren’t sorted, though, and no Category search is implemented, making it a PITA to select one of my 304 categories for a new post…) and is FAST since it’s local. Feels like a native app. I thought it was a XUL thing at first, until I read the change log.

I’m getting really tired of constantly switching browsers every week, between Firefox, Safari Nightlies, Flock, Camino, OmniWeb, etc… All of this darned innovation is exhausting to keep up with!  

As an aside, as I was writing this, Wynton Marsalis’ "Quick Ate" was playing on my iPod (hooked up to my TV so I can crank out the music). Evan is up in his room for "quiet time" and he calls down "see it on your ‘puter!" – the only time he’s heard this song previously was when I was playing the video (on my ‘puter) that was included with the album via iTMS. Like 3 weeks ago. Why can’t my memory work like that? The iPod has since moved on to play some New Pornographers, so he’s gone back to "quiet time."

Update: Just realized how much I miss having bookmarklets in the browser’s favorites bar. Flock uses del.icio.us bookmarks to store everything, and I don’t have a burning need to populate my account with a bunch of personalized javascripts, nor links to pages within the inner workings of the various web apps I basically live in… The change log mentioned something about private bookmarks, so I’ll check that out. But, I don’t see a way to have folders of bookmarks in the favorites bar, never mind a way to open all bookmarks in a folder in new tabs simultaneously…

Another thinking-out-loud topic here… I’m re-evaluating weblogs.ucalgary.ca – what’s worked, what hasn’t, what could be done differently. It’s best to take a long, hard look at it before it really takes off. There are a bunch of users in it now, but a critical evaluation of it is pretty important before we get into the hundreds of users level… I’m also colouring evaluation in light of the PLE/EduGlu concepts being rolled around. Perhaps the need to have a communal blog hosting service on campus is less important, or unnecessary, if that function is pushed into an aggregator service where it should be, rather than in the hosting side of things.

Elgg has improved a heck of a lot in the year since I quietly rolled out weblogs.ucalgary.ca (powered by Drupal at the moment). I really like the simplicity of the Elgg interface – helped by the fact that it’s not trying to be a Swiss Army Knife, as Drupal is.

In the back of my mind, I had been hoping to keep WordPress MultiUser as the backup plan in case Drupal didn’t work out. Elgg might be a more appropriate alternative.

Also, it’s not that Drupal isn’t working out, it’s just that weblogs.ucalgary.ca doesn’t have the right feel – it’s not a personal environment, it’s a commune. That makes it harder for an individual to find their own voice in the mishmash of common spaces within it. Elgg and WPMU are better as individual spaces, with varying degrees of built-in aggregativeness (Elgg has some cool Friends features, WPMU would rely on external aggregation).

So, in assessing plans B and C, has anyone successfully migrated from Drupal to Elgg or WPMU?

Thanks to a tip-off from James, I generated a quasi-reasonable facsimile of myself as I’d look in the Simpsons. The book wasn’t optional…

The local evening news had a special virus warning tonight. Not especially unusual – they occasionally warn people about a Big Windows Virus that went around the week before. But Nirmala began the segment “This is the first virus to infect Apple’s Oh Ess Ecks… It’s spread through the ‘I-Chat’ instant messaging application… Be sure antivirus software is installed and up to date…” (I-Chat was in big letters on the side of the screen)

OK. So, first of all, I’m screaming at the TV “IT’S NOT A VIRUS, YOU MORONS! IT’S PRONOUNCED ‘TEN’ – YOU MORONS! That’s ‘iChat’ – YOU MORONS!”

Second of all, it’s not a virus. It’s an archive of an application, disguised as a jpeg (by cleverly using the super secret hacker technique of employing command+v to trick Mac Oh Ess Ecks users into infecting their systems). It’s not spread BY iChat – some schmoe may send a file that way, but if you’re stupid enough to double-click an unexpected file sent to you via IM, well, Darwin is at work… It’s not as though simply viewing a jpg image in a browser would infect your Mac, unlike some other systems out there. You actually have to explicitly accept the download, expand the archive, double-click the application, and provide your username and password before any damage can be done.

I know it’s a bunch of silly nits to pick, but I can already hear the mouthbreathers spouting off “so, did your Mac get hit by that IChat virus?” I wonder, if this is how lax they are about checking facts related to “virus” outbreaks, what else is slipping past them?

Forgot to post this yesterday… This batch of Faves was automagically assembled and referenced through the magical wonderousness of FD’s Flickr Toys…

I’d tried Adium before, looking for a usable multi-protocol chat client so I could talk to my contacts on AIM/.Mac as well as ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk. I only have one or two contacts on each non-AIM protocol, so don’t want to be running separate apps for each. Adium was cool, but quirky, and it never “clicked” for me. It was annoying, with the silly duck icon, quacking alerts, etc. so I reverted to iChat (after trying Fire again – I swore by Fire before iChat was released).

But, the latest build of Adium frankly kicks all kinds of IM-client ass. It’s easy to turn off the cheesy sounds (I’ve got my copy sounding like iChat), and provides a sweet tabbed interface to view chats, and a great contacts manager. Encryption support is built in (iChat requires a .Mac account for encryption) so that’s cool. Not that I send many trade secrets over IM, but it’s good to know it’s there when I pull out the tinfoil hat…

I tried it out briefly last night with Josh, and it worked great. It’s supposed to handle file transfers just fine (Fire borks on those), so the only thing I’ll be missing is the audio- and videoconferencing ability of iChat. And, if I need that, it’s pretty easy to do a command-Q option-space IC to quickly switch IM clients…

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