I finally got around to hanging the poster I had made of my 2007/365photos project. It turned out to be a bigger task than I’d originally thought - not the hanging, but the finding a place to hang it, and then getting the poster there.
The poster is 3′x4′. That’s a big poster. It didn’t register just HOW big that was when I placed the order at Qoop.com - I just picked the biggest option. But that’s a BIG poster. I don’t have any place in my home that’s big enough to hang this (without family conflict, anyway), so the only place left was in my office. And the only space large enough to hang this sucker is behind the door. Great. Now there’s a place to hang it - I just had to get it onto campus. The poster had been sitting in the shipping tube for almost 2 months at home, waiting for a time when I’d be driving to campus, or taking the bus, or running an errand near campus so I could drive it there. That never happened, so I stuffed the tube into one of the paniers on my bike and brought it to work this morning. With over 2′ of cardboard cylinder sticking out the top - almost as tall as I was on the bike (didn’t get any photos of that, thankfully…)
The 2007/365photos project poster now hangs in my office.
Also, it appears I truly am physically incapable of hanging anything perfectly straight and level. Dangit. Maybe that’s intentional? Yeah. Totally intentional. It’s part of the charm of the poster… That’s the ticket…
I bought Tetris for my iPod Touch today, but it keeps crashing before I can actually play it. I reported a problem through the App Store, and was rewarded with this gem of a dialog box:
I have a recurring pattern when implementing a project. I start simple. Then things get complex. Then I start overthinking, overdesigning, overengineering things. And they start getting really, really cumbersome, awkward, and unmanageable.
I’ve done this with every development platform I’ve used. WebObjects. Rails. PHP. WordPress. Moodle. Drupal.
Yes, even Drupal.
So, again, I need to remind myself.
Work WITH the tool.
NOT against it.
Or, if you’re working too hard, you’re doing it wrong. If things are designed properly, using the most appropriate approaches, more often than not things become quite simple. Easy, even. If something isn’t easy, it’s being done wrong.
If you’re writing a bunch of custom code, you’re probably heading off on a blind alley. Chuck the custom code and find a shared framework, module, plugin, etc… that will do the job. The less code you write, the less to debug and maintain.
I’m working on a website for an agency, where I’m building a system to manage the data and daily operations of a 100-person organization. I’d started writing custom code to embed snippets of processed data. I was writing code to chunk data into reporting periods, grouped by staff member, client, and any number of other criteria.
But - Views already does that. When combined with other modules like Calendar to provide the date-based chunking. And some other helpers to expose UI widgets and data selectors.
So, by working WITH the tools at hand, I just dumped a bunch of silly custom code. I’ll need to refactor a bunch of stuff, but it will work much better in the long run, and take MUCH less to maintain.
The biggest thing I have to do at the moment is refining the data entry process - I need to find the best date selector widgets to make the process as painless and error-free as possible when in use in the field.
I currently run two separate blogging services on campus, and think both actually have their place and so continue to maintain and manage both a community blogging service running on Drupal, and a more individual blogging space running on WordPress Multiuser.
weblogs.ucalgary.ca is the Drupal-powered community blogging system. It’s got the organic groups module enabled, with access control configured, meaning people can easily login using their campus LDAP credentials, create groups, and publish content knowing that only members of the specified group(s) can see it.
I first set the service up three and a half years ago, and in that time it’s seen activity by 1060 users, publishing 1599 posts. That’s a whopping 1.5 posts per person. Not a lot of high end activity, and a lot of tire-kicking (and possibly content deletion) going on.
The second service, ucalgaryblogs.ca, is less than a year old, and has received almost no marketing or promotion. Only a handful of people even know it exists (mostly readers of my blog). I just snuck a copy of WPMU onto a server, configured it to host subdomains aplenty, and let it sit there.
Why haven’t I started pimping the heck out of it, in the hopes of fostering something insanely awesome like Jim did at University of Mary Washington?
I’m not convinced that the Institution needs to host a blogging platform anymore.
WordPress.com, edublogs.org, and any of a number of other blogging services are doing extremely well, for free, without requiring any of my time to maintain any software.
The reasons I keep coming back to needing a campus-hosted blogging platform are:
integration - potential integration with other services, explicitly campus-wide logins so people don’t need Yet Another Account to remember. This may not be a big deal. It’s not hard to remember a new username/login, and if you forget, it’s easy to get a reminder.
trust - if it’s on a campus server, there may be a higher level of trust and/or confidence that the service will be there, that it will not change terms of usage, and that it won’t get sold to another third party that may not align with the needs of the users. This one could also go the other way - it’s possible that students may trust an off-campus service more than they would trust one offered by The Man.
authority - having a campus-related URL may be beneficial, especially for people trying to build an online identity - but this could also go the other way, because it backfires for people who may be leaving the campus community and would then have to pack up their stuff and move to a new URL after ditching any googlejuice they’ve generated.
With that said, none of the high profile blog projects on campus (the President’s blog, CIO’s blog, solar challenge team,etc…) use either of the services I provide. Maybe that’s a sign that they’re really not necessary?
The referrer logs for my blog just turned up a tool used by someone who is apparently a commercial spam publisher to track various spam campaigns. Interesting.
What’s more interesting is that the tool appears to have no login. It’s an open form on the internet. We all know what happens to open forms on the internet - SPAM! It’d be a shame if the campaigns got jammed up with garbage content…
Looking through some of the campaigns, I see several of my friends’ and colleagues’ blogs as well. Not cool.
Update: looks like the spamroach finally got a clue and put his spam campaign script kiddie app behind a login. about time, moron. now, maybe stop with the spamming? mkay? thx.
Alec posted a link to this a few days ago, and I finally got around to watching the video. It’s Professor Michael Wesch’s presentation to the Library of Congress, where he talked about the anthropological effects he observed after producing his awesome video essay The Machine is Us/ing Us.
The presentation is a fantastic, rich, and deep investigation into the connections and their effects on communication and media. Free up 55 minutes and watch the whole thing.
It’s been just over a week since I decided to make Twitter a read-only medium. I haven’t posted a single tweet, and have only scanned Twitter a handful of times in that week.
And I haven’t missed it one bit.
I’ve been having many more IM chats with the people I care about. I’ve been conversing more via email. I’ve been writing more blog posts. I haven’t dropped offline. I haven’t disconnected. All I’ve done is lengthen the feedback loop - no more constant reloading of Twitter.com to see if there are updates. No more composing tweets while offline. Just a healthy balance, and a reconfiguration of the social connections.
This is going to sound bad, although it’s not meant to. But most of what happens on Twitter - I just don’t care about. People I don’t know. People I simply don’t care about. Not that they’re not good people, or smart, or funny. Just that they are not people I know. And as a result, I simply don’t care to hear constant updates and jabber from and about. There is a strange distortion that I noticed on Twitter, where I was spending a fair amount of time reading updates from people that I don’t know. I’ve never met them. I don’t read their blogs. So why am I bothering to read their tweets? It sounds bad, and goes against the spirit of 2.0 - being connected to everyone all the time - but pulling back to a closer, tighter, more important (to me) group of people just feels right.
Here’s the crux of it for me. Overextension of social connections dilutes and devalues them. Hyperconnectivity negates the connections I care about. If everyone is a “friend” - what does that mean to my real friends? If I spend as much time reading updates from strangers as I do from the people I really care about, that’s not fair to the people I care about, nor to myself.
I’ve been having a fair number of spam comments get tgrouh the filters on my blog. I’ve tried Akismet. I’ve tried SpamKarma2. I’ve tried Akismet AND SpamKarma2. Still, I get over a dozen spam comments published on my blog every day (and hundreds successfully killed by the filters on a typical day).
It doesn’t sound like much of a problem - a dozen or two spams to deal with every day - but it makes keeping a blog with open comment posting more tedious than it needs to be. I shouldn’t have to fear leaving a computer for extended periods of time, nor dread returning to connectivity after a couple of days to sift through the crap that got through (and hopefully not accidentally nuke any valid comments).
So, it’s time to give Mollom a shot. I’ll try it for a week to see how it works out. It’s free. It works with WordPress (and Drupal, and several others) and claims to be quite effective.
Update: wow. I know it’s waaaaay too early to tell, but in the hour since enabling Mollom, I’ve had ZERO spam get through. 26 attempts blocked already, and no moderation needed. That’s a VERY good sign.
Update 2: jinx! as soon as I posted the first update, 3 spamments got through. doh…
This article is currently on the WordPress admin dashboard, so people who obsessively check their WordPress admin page will have seen it already. But, it’s worth pointing to the article again as it outlines some things to consider when using WordPress as a CMS. I’m still a pretty hardcore Drupal guy - I use it for dozens of website projects, and it’s the Officially Supported Web Content Management System on campus (YAY!) - but there’s just something so nice, clean, and elegant about the WordPress UI.
And since we’re at a point now where the exact technology chosen really Does Not Matter Anymore (you can get pretty much any web software to do pretty much anything with proper prodding and understanding - and they pretty much all now properly grok RSS and tags, so it’s easy to reuse and republish what you get out there in multiple other formats and locations), it’s good to keep an open mind. Especially when getting ready to start rolling out a campus blogging system based on WPMU…
And I would have used a photo of me in my awesome WordPress hoodie, ala Jim Groom and/or Alan Levine, but alas mine never showed up. *sniff* I’ll just have to use the photo of me in my red WordPress shirt, taken by The Reverend Jim Himself at Open Ed 2007.
I thought the MS Surface table computer prototype was pretty laughable, but they’ve managed to take the awkwardness up a notch with the Sphere prototype. All of the wonderful distortion of a spherical projection, combined with the limited shared visible space around the sphere to impede collaboration. Wonderful. So now I can view a distorted photograph, but the person next to me sees an oblique partially obscured view of the same photograph - unless they’re on the other side of the sphere, then they see nothing. And vice versa.
try to collaborate with one of these. i dare you.
It’s surprising, because there is some seriously cool technology under the hood, using the projector lens to detect multitouch control gestures. But they just don’t seem to get what a touch interface can really do. It’s not about flinging photographs around. It’s about providing an adaptable interface that conforms itself to what you need to do at that moment. MS seems to get hung up on the metaphor of the projection device - flat == table, curved == sphere - rather than focusing on what a truly dynamic touch interface can do.
I’m turning twitter into a read-only medium (for me). I’m not deleting anything. I’m not going anywhere. I just need to cut down on the noise and shallow superficial connections that just aren’t real. Twitter’s just a website. It’s not like it’s real, or important.
If anyone needs me, I’m really easy to get in touch with. And I’ll periodically monitor summize to see if anyone is sending stuff to my now-silent (but still active) account…
Now that I’ve updated ucalgaryblogs.ca to WordPress MultiUser 2.6, the cool new native iPhone and iPod Touch blogging app will work. Just point it to your blog(s), give it login credentials, and you’re off and running!
What’s cool is that now all of my blogs can be managed via my iPod Touch using a native application!
For example, I used dlnorman.ucalgaryblogs.ca as the blog address, and gave it my login info. It will work with multiple blogs, too - but each blog needs to be configured separately.
Real keyboard, connected to iPod Touch via USB through iPod Camera Connector accessory.
I want this. Well, maybe with a slimmer keyboard. Possibly a foldable version of something the size of the Apple Wireless Keyboard (pictured below). Doesn’t have to actually BE wireless, though. I’d be FINE with a USB cable, and even with slapping rechargeable batteries in the keyboard to prevent an additional power draw from the iPod Touch…
Apple Wireless Keyboard - perfect companion to my iPod Touch? Please?
This would make the Notes app much more useful. And the WordPress app. And email. etc… etc…
Well THIS is the best mobile blog posting interface I’ve used. Thanks to Automattic for the app!
It also supports offline writing of new posts (but not of editing existing posts without an active connection). Very cool. I’ll be using this app a LOT!
Here’s a screenshot of the blog post/edit interface:
I’ll keep this rant short. I don’t know what the future of education is, or will be, but I do know that it’s not “web 2.0″ despite the hype.
Education is, always has been, and always will be, about the acts of teaching and learning. It is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, a form of technology. It is not a suite of distributed online tools, no matter how buzzword compliant they might be.
We need to move past this infatuation with technology, this desire for shiny things to change everything, and get back to basics. To storytelling. To valuing and respecting the work of all participants (students, teachers, and others). To working together to teach our children, and ourselves. To extending the activity outside of some industrialized classroom and into the community.
Sure, “web 2.0″ has a role in this - in providing tools to enable individual publishing and collaboration - but it is NOT the technology that is the future of education. It’s people. Without proper philosophies and pedagogies, all the shiny websites on the planet don’t add up to a hill of beans.
(donning asbestos underoos in preparation for ensuing deluge of fire and brimstone)
(didn’t get any photos of that, thankfully…)
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