From the monthly archives:

November 2007

I worked with our Faculty of Education to build a community blogging website for use by after-degree student teachers as part of their personal/professional development, reflection, and collaboration process, as well as to collect materials for use in ePortfolios. They had a set of pretty simple constraints. Because the student teachers would be writing about [...]

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3000km in 2007

November 22, 2007 · 5 comments

in fun

I did it. I managed to ride my bike 3000km (so far) in 2007. Last year, I rode about 1500km. I estimated I might ride 2000-2500km this year. But this morning, after dropping Evan off at school, I pulled the bike out and rode along the Bow River Pathway. I’ve now ridden over 3000km this [...]

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I just went to the Dell website to look something up, and was rewarded by this incredible bit of sleuthery on the part of Dell’s crack team of internet designers:

Thank you, Captain Obvious.
The web designers didn’t indicate if my being in Canada somehow altered the behaviour of the website, or if the selections were somehow [...]

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Dashboard’s widgets really aren’t helping me. Between the live video feed from the beach on Maui, to this:

Having this kind of info just an F12 away isn’t going to help. Especially as we head toward SAD season around here… Le sigh.

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When I switched from Drupal to WordPress as the software that runs my blog, one of the things I missed was tag autocompletion while writing posts. Drupal has a great freetext tag field, including an AJAX utility that automatically checks with the server for tags that match what you’ve started to type in the tags [...]

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WPMU Blogs Directory?

November 17, 2007 · 17 comments

in fun

I’ve been trying to figure out how to build an effective directory of blogs hosted by a WPMU service. There’s the list-all mu-plugin widget, and it has a handy dandy list_all_wpmu_blogs() method. I’ve created a page template for my theme, and added this code to dump the list of public blogs:
<!– directory stuff goes here [...]

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Flickr Faves 2007/11/16

November 17, 2007 · 0 comments

in fun

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Alan’s getting some grief from Anarchy Media Player under WP 2.3.1 so I installed the latest Anarchy plugin to see if it works on my 2.3.1 blog. Now, to find an audio file that won’t get me sued…
test mp3 file
test podcast
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/6mhbxlz_wrI" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Did that work?

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Blog Readability Test

November 15, 2007 · 3 comments

in fun

Following Paul’s post about the Blog Readability Test, I pumped in my own URL just for kicks. Here’s the result:

I take that as a compliment, and it’s probably pretty easily explained by the algorithm. I tend to write short, active-tense sentences with not many long words. The readability test doesn’t take the actual content into [...]

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I just set up a copy of WordPress Multiuser, running at calgaryblogs.net. It’s an open and free blogging service. I won’t be running ads, or charging for individuals to use it. My only goal is to get more people publishing content online, and if yet another blogging service will help, then so be it.
It’s configured [...]

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