Archive for April, 2006

I just realized that it's been approximately 5 years since I started "blogging" - shortly after the untimely demise of The Company Who Shall Not Be Named (March, 2001), I started dabbling with weblog software. First, I played with a copy of a blog app that was included on my Dad's MacAddict CD-ROM, then... »

My various online bits are now living at Dreamhost. It took only a few minutes to install my stuff, copy over the files, and get up and running. It's taken a bit longer to have DNS changes propagate, but I think that process is pretty much over now. Wordpress seems pretty happy there, and... »

I've hopefully finished shuffling around the bits that run this blog. Sorry for the extra noise in the RSS feed. This will hopefully be the last move for D'Arcy Norman dot net for some time. It's now living on a Dreamhost server, and DNS should be propagating over the weekend. »

I've been trying to figure out a workable solution for a couple of months, and have come up with nothing more than some hacks and approximations of what is needed. Here's a use case: User "A" (let's call her "Amy") writes a blog post. She wants it to be readable by her professor (let's call her... »

While Writely is cool, it deals with online documents. You can import/export, but the document lives online. That's cool for many uses, but scares some people. I just found a link to AjaxWrite (via Tangled up in Purple) - it's a javascript based word processor that appears to be compatible with MS Word. You open... »

From Slashdot comes a mention of the Canadian Music Creators Coalition. This is one of the coolest things from the world of musicians with respect to IP and copyright. Some of the biggest names in Canadian music just put their feet down to tell the Big Labels not to be evil. They have a handy website... »

The colophon, listing the various bits that get twiddled to run my blog, has been woefully out of date. I get periodic emails about the various plugins I use, especially the latest Podpress plugin, so I thought it'd be a good idea to automate the process of updating the list. Enter the bdp_setup plugin... »

For some of our projects here at the TLC, we need to be able to manage identity information - traditionally, user accounts, groups, roles, etc... We're taking a bit of time to think about a better way of implementing this, and how to use a flexible, distributed identity model. I've been going through some web... »

I'm playing with a pre-Cardinal (the next Big Release) build of Flock, and man is it nice! They've replaced the blog editor, and it's the best blog editor I've used. Very nice. The blog manager topbar appears to have disappeared, but I assume it's just being tweaked and will return before the Big Release. My... »

My copy of Will's book "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" just came in. Looks like it's going to be a pretty good read, providing the perspective of an in-the-trenches teacher, rather than just the geek echochamber I usually expose myself to... The book is definitely on top of my nonfiction... »