Darren posts a thoughtful piece on social networking over at Social Networking and Safety | Youth Ministry Blog
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Various learning management systems (LMS) like Moodle allow you to create online activities like quizzes and polls as part of the course content and engagement. But what do you do if you need something like that but you don’t have access to an LMS that does it or you need to put that content in an environment outside of the LMS.
I’ve been playing around with Hot Potatoes which gives you some of this functionality. It feels a bit clunky in places, but it will certainly get the job done if you want basic multi-choice quizzes, crosswords and matching exercises.
If course if you want to create a quiz that logs the results against the student (say for assessment purposes) then you’ll need to step up to something more like an LMS.
Useful Problogger article on different ways of getting a design for your blog - from the free through to the expensive. See Problogger: How Do I Get a Professionally Designed Blog?
Turning MS Word files into web pages can be a really painful experience - particularly if you have to go through them by hand looking to change or modify them. I’ve had some days when I’ve given up trying to get Word content into a nice web format and just gone and recoded the content from scratch. However, I might give some of these tools a trying in future - Convert Word Docs to Web Pages - Wired How-To Wiki.
Adobe make a version of Photoshop - Photoshop Express - available as a free web-based application adding yet another application type to the burgeoning area of free web apps offered to allow companies like Microsoft, Google and Adobe carve out their own corner of the internet - and hence a source of consumers to manage and advertise to.
After being initially released (see Adobe’s Photoshop Express and the big picture | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com), the terms of use has quickly been updated in the face of criticism from potential users - Report: Complaints trigger rewrite of Photoshop Express terms | Tech news blog - CNET News.com.
Ernesto comments on using it over at Ernesto Burden | Photoshop Express — Sweet, Free Photo Editing Tool With Social Media Extensions.
I’ll be interested in checking it out - I don’t know how many times I’ve been away from home or the office and needed to edit an image and had an internet connection but no image editing application in the computer I’m using.
Problogger, Darren Rowse, publishes his list of useful blogging tools for Mac OS X. I use (or have tried many of them) - Ecto (article editor which I have on both Mac and Windows), CyberDuck (FTP client), ImageWell (for quick manipulation and posting of images) and Firefox. I prefer TextWrangler over TextEdit though (I used BBEdit Lite from way back)
The full list is at 14 Essential Mac OS X Applications for Bloggers
There’s no standalone newsreader application in there though because he uses Google Reader to do that. See Greenflame · NetNewsWire (Free now!) for my preference there. I used the Sage plug-in for Firefox for ages, as well as Bloglines, but I really like having one app that does a single job well, but can talk to other apps if need be.
I use NetNewsWire Lite to keep up with my blog feeds, though I’ve never felt the need to upgrade to the full version. Now, however, the full version of NetNewsWire is being released for free as its developer focuses upon growing their online services. So, if you you’re running Mac OS X 10.4 or later you can grab the latest version and take it for a spin.
More information at: RSS Reader for Mac - NetNewsWire
Hat tip to: TidBITS Networking: NewsGator Turns NetNewsWire Loose for Free
(Of course, I’m still stuck in 10.3.9 for the foreseeable future [anyone want to donate me a MacBook?:-)] and will be plodding along with the old Lite version just fine.)
After some initially using the PHPWebsite content management system way, way back as a proto-blog I shifted to using Blogger, and then over to Movable Type 2 because it afforded me more control over the blog (and added things like categories). And then Movable Type 3 arrived and the licencing became confusing and more restrictive so I just kept on chugging along using the functional, but now relatively obsolete, MT 2. Finally I came to WordPress (via some playing around with Drupal and Mambo/Joomla) and it works pretty well (especially with Ecto).
Now, in part in response to the success of WordPress, there’s an open-source version of Movable Type 4 available, which might just make me go back and have a look at it if I need to set up a new blog on my own server. I quite liked MT - and back when it was more widespread there were all sorts of interesting sites providing helpful tips and themes etc. (Just like for WordPress now).
More details at: Six Apart Reinvigorates Movable Type with New Open-Source Release | Compiler from Wired.com and Movable Type Open Source - MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community.
BTW - I see PHPWebsite continues to evolve. I liked using the early versions, and I might have a look at it again next time I need a CMS.
I was wondering yesterday, with the Wifi and Safari built into the iPod Touch, whether you could blog from it. It appears you can, and there’s a WordPress plugin to format posts for the iPod Touch/iPhone screen size. See Wordpress for Ipod Touch (iWPhone)
If you’re publishing stuff on your blog or web site and you’re concerned about other people misusing your content then ProBlogger has a useful little article on how a terms of service page can help with that. See: Nip Problems in the Bud with a TOS Page.
A couple of useful web development and design articles I came across the other day.
A List Apart: Articles: Understanding Web Design by Jeffrey Zeldman (Nov 20, 2007)
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
Some good points about thinking about how web content is both similar to and different from other forms of content creation.
A List Apart: Articles: How to Size Text in CSS >by Richard Rutter (Nov 20, 2007) contains some useful reminders that all browsers do not render text the same, even if you’re being careful with the CSS.
Interesting article over at TidBITS Networking: An Electronic Book Giveaway: 2003, a Disaster; 2007, a Pittance which notes the decline in internet traffic costs over the past few year, and some things to be aware of if you’re going to make something available for download that might be (very) popular - in their case, a free eBook.
Short but helpful article by Darren at ProBlogger on How I Produce Video Blog Posts.
As part of some part-time work I’m doing at the moment I’m doing some distance/flexible learning implementation using Moodle (a free, open source course management system for online learning). So here’s a few links I’ve found useful over the past couple of weeks.
- Moodle: Teacher’s manual 1.6 (Introduction) from Lappia - The Municipal Education and Training Consortium of Kemi and Tornionlaakso (Finland). An older version of Moodle but still helpful.
- Course: Moodle Features Demo from @berNET (Aberdeen)
- Course: Introduction to Blogging in the Classroom from @berNET (Aberdeen)
- Teaching FAQ - MoodleDocs on the Moodle web site
- Using Moodle book - MoodleDocs on the Moodle web site. Again, an older book but some good examples of what’s possible.
- Moodle: Moodle 1.8 Teacher Manual from Sweet Briar College, Virginia
In my wanderings around the net a while back I came across this issue of Theological Education which looks at the role/impact of digital technology upon theological education. Looks like a helpful selection of articles.
See Theological Education 41/1 (2005)
Related links:
I’ve thought about putting Skype on the iBook and wondered about Mac-compatible hardware to support it - yelling at the laptop didn’t seem ideal. But really had no idea where to start. I’ve found in the past that quite a few USB devices (speakers, keyboards etc,) do work in Mac OS X but the boxes never say that because it’s unsupported. However TidBITS (which I’ve been reading since it used to be distributed as HyperCard stacks) has a recent, helpful breakdown here of some options.
Blog statistics. Some people admit to looking at them, others won’t (even though we know they do :-)) For some they can become the all-consuming passion - especially if you’re trying to monetarize your blog.
Lorelle on Wordpress has a very useful page that collects together the various different plugins and schemes for WordPress that collect statistic. See Counting WordPress: Statistics WordPress Plugins « Lorelle on WordPress.
I’ve been wondering for a while how many words I’ve written each year, and now I can find out.
Radio New Zealand National : Programmes A-Z : Nine to Noon : Wed, 18 July had an interesting section from their employment lawyer Andrew Scott-Howman on employers and potential employers using information available on employees (and potential employees) on social networking sites. Audio link here.
A selection of links that intersect around the role of new media in educational environments. Henry Jenkins has an essay (in two parts) that looks at the tension between participatory media and traditional educational models, and in particular emphasises the critical application of the following skill set:
- Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal.
- Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information source.
- Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize and disseminate information.
- Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms.
See:
- Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES (PART ONE)
- Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE NEW MEDIA LITERACIES (PART TWO)
Connected to this, is Mary Hess’ post about a review of her book on theological education promoting this type of critical engagement with new media by teachers and students. See:
- Tensegrities » Struggling to respond… and Tensegrities » A response to a review
- Tensegrities » Teaching/learning in theological education
Then AKMA has this post on reflecting on a meeting to discuss related matters - AKMA’s Random Thoughts - Retrospect and Prospect.
And then Tim chimes in with this post (connected to AKMA’s) - SansBlogue: Bible, Babel and Web 2.0. (Some long comments there - including some from Mark which he refers to here: E-BCNZer: Brighouse - “On Education”).
The integration of digital technologies, with existing pedagogues and technologies, will be here for a while yet. I know that I’ve found it frustrating as both a student and teacher that the roles I’m being trained for/are training people for are collaborative - they stand or fall based upon healthy, dynamic relationships (both in IT and religion) - and yet the systems promote individualism (for assessment particularly) and work to stamp out collaborative efforts (it’s called cheating). Intellectual property discussions (esp. academic ones) also connect here. There must be a better way.
Playing around with the news feeds for the site. Should be no hassles, but let me know if there are.
Felt the need to move to a cleaner, less busy blog theme and so have moved to Tarski · An elegant, flexible WordPress theme.
Had a few hiccoughs with author name of posts etc. needing tinkering but it seems to work now. I like how the stylesheet modification are moved to a separate stylesheet that is overlaid on top of the master stylesheet. Keeps the upgrade easier and the style more manageable.
I’ve been skimming through John Waters’ book The Real Business of Web Design over the past couple of weeks. It’s been a refreshing change to read a book that talks about web design from a perspective that isn’t bogged down in the ‘how’ of what technologies will be used, but rather concentrates much more on the human dimensions of good design. You can find an excerpt from the book here at DMI eBulletin - The Information Age is History.
On design, Water’s writes:
It is not the singular quality of line, or form, or color in the Apple products or the Turkish tiles, or in any product or message for that matter, which we respond to. It is the totality of those elements—the way line, form, color, texture, pattern, purpose and meaning all fit together—that creates a whole far superior to the sum of its parts. Design is a holistic language that speaks not just to emotion or just to reason, but to both sides of the human brain.
Like Web services, the new metalanguage—a transformative language about language—which allows computers to speak to one another, design may be thought of as a metalanguage for humans, one which speaks more clearly, more universally, more comprehensively than any other language we have. A language that may be used effectively on the Web to help us cross borders, not create them. A language that may help us preserve cultural characteristics while sharing universal concerns. By thinking of design as the metalanguage of humans, the circle of language on the Web can be expanded to include everyone. (p.222)
Reminds me of the Mutton Birds song, ‘A thing well made’, which includes the lyrics:
Can you see the man who made that?
Can you see him putting it down and standing back?
Can you see the moment when he said “That’s it. That’s perfect.”?
At a time like that you wouldn’t care about your job,
Or your mortgage, or the fight you had with your wife.
‘Cause when a man holds a thing well made,
There’s connection,
There’s completeness when a man holds a thing well made.
Now in the song, the items in question are rifles, which reminds us of the ambiguity of human creativity— the human capacity to be creative and innovative in design, and yet to use that capacity for both good and evil. And also of almost transcendent power found in things that are well-designed, and how that addresses something deep within us.
The Wordpress Theme Generator is a helpful tool for quickly putting together a WordPress theme by selecting template options. Seems like it might be useful.
Related link: Movable Type Style Generator
I’m a big fan of software applications that concentrate on doing one task in an exemplary fashion. Probably a throwback to my UNIX script programming day when I’d connect lots of small single purpose applications together to work on my data. Which is why this interview caught my eye (Mozilla: Why Desktop E-Mail Crucifies the Browser). I loathe web email - I use it, but it’s never a pleasant experience no matter what system the provider is using. Maybe if I was getting mail only on one address, and maybe if I was getting only a few emails a day, but with lots of mail accounts for different purposes it really doesn’t work well.
I tried an early version of Thunderbird years ago and it didn’t quite satisfy me. Maybe it’s time to try it again - especially with better web email support.
Paul’s posted a copy of his Refresh article BLOGGING – A CREATIVE WAY OF EXPLORING SPIRITUALITY & SPIRITUAL FORMATION? over on Prodigal Kiwi(s). Well worth having a look at.
Connects also with the following article published a couple of years back in Stimulus (NZ journal/magazine):
Bednar, Tim. “Blogging: Report from a Grassroots Revival.” Stimulus 12, no. 3 (2004): 24-30.
Similar to Rob Moll’s article in Christianity Today if you have access to their web portal - see Blogger Predicts Revival via Web - Leadership journal - ChristianityTodayLibrary.com
Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web, on the initiative to create a discipline (or inter-discipline) to examine the the social aspect of the Web and the Web’s impact on society. A kind of new “Web (Social) Science”. See Berners-Lee, universities launch ‘Web science’ initiative - Internet - News - ZDNet Asia.
As an aside, Tim Berners-Lee provides an interesting example of the integration of religious stories and cyberspace. In his book describing the origin of the web and its possible future, Berners-Lee connects Unitarian Universalism with how he thinks the web should function. Unitarian Universalism’s pragmatic appropriation of features from various religions and philosophies serves, he argues, as a useful metaphor for the World Wide Web. Provided one maintains mutual respect for each other’s traditions and beliefs, be they religious or technological, then the web will function harmoniously.
(See: Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), 207-09.)
Hat tip to Jonny Baker for this link to the Guardian’s focus on Web 2.0. See Weekend Magazine web 2.0 special | Weekend | Guardian Unlimited.
A whole bunch of related links that I don’t have time to flesh out.
From Paul there’s fishers, surfers and casters » Web Ministry 101 and fishers, surfers and casters » Sydney Anglicans’ new site.
Related to this is an older article by Stephen Downes - Stephen’s Web ~ Turning God and Learning into Commodities.
And let’s cap it of with the cartoon on this page about God and brands.
Related other links:
Greenflame: Marketing Jesus - Aussie style.
Before & After magazine has a few PDF articles that you can download - teasers to get you to subscribe to the magazine. One of these free articles is a nice one on choosing a readable typeface for a publication/presentation.
Via ProBlogger: Which Font is Best for Blogging?. Darren has a few extra comments there too.
If you use iPhoto and post images from it to a Gallery2 website then Karl’s post here might be of interest. See XK72 Spacelab - blog of Karl von Randow » Blog Archive » Gallery iPhoto Exporter
Gallery iPhoto Exporter
Gallery2Export is a plugin for iPhoto that enables you to export photos directly from iPhoto into your Gallery2 website. It was originally developed by Dustin Brewer, based on the Flickr and Coppermine iPhoto Exporters.
BTW - Gallery is an open-source web-based photo album organiser. (You don’t have to run iPhoto to use it).
An interesting article from a while back (2000) by Jeffrey Rosen on the loss of privacy in cyberspace. See The Eroded Self
In cyberspace, there is no real wall between public and private. And the version of you being constructed out there - from bits and pieces of stray data - is probably not who you think you are.
Something to think about.
Full reference: Jeffrey Rosen, “The Eroded Self”, New York Times Magazine (Apr 30, 2000).
Inspired by jonnybaker: if you want me to read your blog posts… I have hacked the RSS feeds (both RSS1 & RSS2) to include the full content of blog posts. Been meaning to do it for a while now, but needed a push from somewhere to do it.
The resulting changes looked okay in NewNewsWire Lite but if any problems let me know. Of course, if there’s a significant problem you won’t be able to read this if you use a news aggregator/reader.
Did not touch the Atom feed. (Does anyone use it?)
As an aside, Blogger’s atom feeds seem to be painful in the newsreader all the time. Lack of titles, constantly refreshing the feed so I get large numbers of past feeds marked as new, etc. Almost makes me think twice before subscribing to someone’s Atom feed.
This looks interesting. An open-source IDE for creating Web 2.0 type applications. When I have time I’ll download the Mac version and have a look. See Aptana. From the web site blurb:
Aptana is a robust, JavaScript-focused IDE for building dynamic web applications. Highlights include the following features:
- Code Assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, including your own JavaScript functions
- Outliner that gives a snapshot view of your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code structure
- Error and warning notification for your code
- Support for Aptana UI customization and extensions
- Cross-platform support
- Free and open source. (Source available soon)
consequently.org/news • Well, that was easy… on using an RSS feed and iTunes to distribute PDF files through syndication.
This looks like getting the old grey cells buzzing. Always interested in seeing where people across the spectrum think digital culture will go. See Aula Network.
Helpful little article on getting a WordPress installation going under WindowsXP. See [Geeks are Sexy] technology news: Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP.
Some Radio NZ programmes at now available as podcasts. Check out Radio New Zealand - Podcasts.
Interesting little article on whether the sustained use of internet connections due to downloading of video and like will screw up internet service providers’ models for provisioning of services. See Wired News: Could High-Def Choke Internet?
SEOmoz Blog | Interviewing Web Developers - 20 Good Questions to Ask has a good list of questions to ask someone selling web development expertise - especially if you’re interested in hiring one.
A brief article on some new web site monitoring software that allows salespeople to monitor pretty much everything you do on a web site to tailor return sales calls to you. See The case of the spying salesman - Alpha Blog - alpha.cnet.com. I agree with the author that it breaks some sort of social contract because the monitoring is undisclosed.
Problogger notes that the new version of Drupal (4.7.0) is out now. It has some nice videos on installation and features. A while back Drupal made my short list when I was looking around for a CMS. Now the new version is out I’ll have a look and compare it with Mambo (another on the shortlist).
The title says it all. Go have a look at TechToolBlog » 195 Free Online Programming Books.
Karl, Kim’s cousin and web developer, makes it onto one of Wired.com’s tech blogs at Monkey Bites : Charles the Debugger with his incredibly useful web proxy debugger and testing tool : Charles : Web Debugging Proxy | HTTP Monitor | HTTP Proxy | HTTPS/SSL Proxy | Reverse Proxy.
One of its features is to allow you to set the web proxy to simulate different network speeds, e.g. 56K modem or 256K DSL, so see how your web site works at those speeds. That’s pretty neat and I would have thought essential for testing the usability of web sites (along with things like testing cross-browser and operating system performance).
I’d imagine it would be extremely useful for testing e-learning system where distance students don’t always have the latest and greatest internet connections.
Karl blogs here at XK72 Spacelab - blog of Karl von Randow and you can find out more about the other stuff they do at Cactuslab > Standards-Compliant Web Site Design > Content Management > Auckland NZ.
Back last September I posted about the Nature comparative survey of Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica (see Greenflame: Who’re you going to call (or rather, look up)?). Now it looks as if things are getting a bit nastier with Britannica taking out newspaper ads against Nature and its survey. See,
- The Times : Britannica hits back in Wikipedia row
- The Times : Britannica ’still rules’ over web rival
- Independent Online Edition > Media : Wikipedia under the microscope over accuracy.
Britannica’s defense is here (PDF). And the responses from Nature are here - Britannica attacks : Nature and Nature’s responses to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Related link: Guardian : Reboot : Is Wikipedia a reliable source of information?
Today’s posting inspired by the UserFriendly cartoon here.
An article by Guy Kawasaki on generating community - Let the Good Times Roll–by Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Creating a Community. Aimed primarily at generating communities to support business it has some points that would translate into building communities - particularly online ones - for other purposes. The article is being updated and revised every so often too. Here’s a list of points raised that are expanded in the article.
- Create something that’s worth building a community around.
- Identify and recruit your thunderlizards—immediately!
- Assign one person the task of building a community.
- Give people something to chew on.
- Create an open system.
- Welcome criticism.
- Foster discourse.
- Publicize the existence of the community.
(BTW - a “thunderlizard” is like an “evangelist”)
Interesting article over at Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom : Caring About the Content about children, blogs and community.
Looks good - when I have time I’ll download these lectures on web technologies and education. See Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes: Grande Yellowhead Seminar. (Hat tip to Tensegrities: Stephen Downes seminar)
Area51 (A NZ site/blog focused on “up to date medical technology news with a New Zealand focus where possible.”) has a link to and a brief summary of an article in Nature about scientists using blogs and Wiki’s to share information and collaborate with others. See Wikis and Blogs by Scientists - a new way to communicate science | Area51.
AJAX seems to be flavour of the month while everyone makes up their lists of what was significant in 2005 or will be in 2006. Rachel mentions it here and here and TallSkinnyKiwi here and here.
So for all of you out there looking for how to distinguish an ordinary household cleaner from Asynchronous JavaScript and XML here are some helpful links:
- State of Ajax: Progress, Challenges, and Implications for SOAs (web2.wsj2.com).
- The Incredible Ongoing Story of Ajax (web2.wsj2.com).
- Ajax (programming) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
- Web 2.0 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
- Review of the Year’s Best Web 2.0 Explanations (web2.wsj2.com)
Updated - See also Cre8d-design blog: What is AJAX?
From some reading I was doing today.
Technology never escapes politics. The fiction of cyberspace is useful precisely to the extent that it allows it allows its proponents to imagine an androcentric reality in which a threatening, messy, or recalcitrant (and invariably feminized) nature never intrudes. In this respect, cyberspace is consensual primarily in its insistence that technologically mediated experience can transcend the ecological and economic constraints that have shaped and continue to shape human culture. It offers the fantasy that the more technologically sophisticated our society becomes the less it has to worry about the distribution of wealth and resources.
From: Robert Moss Markley “Introduction: History, Theory, and Virtual Reality.” In Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, ed. Robert Moss Markley, 1-10. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. (p.4)
This book is a collection of essays from writers who are more critical (even cynical) about the benefits offered by virtual reality and cyberspace, and the myths spun by the proponents of the technology.
See SansBlogue : Amos: Hypertext Bible Commentary all go! for Tim’s news on the Amos hypertext commentary.
Go to www.bible.gen.nz to have a play online.
The following blogs that I read have moved to new locations (mostly to WordPress or WordPress 2.0). Update your links for Musings of a Postmodern Negro and Rachel’s cre8d design blog.
Rachel’s back blogging more regularly and has some good material and links up for blogging, web design and general internet thoughts.
Interesting posting on storytelling and digital creativity at Craig’s blog - mountain masala: the hyperrhetoric of the quilt of the quilt.
Tim finally publishes his thoughts on the interaction of RSS and commenting on blogs. Namely that the more RSS and its analogues (e.g. Atom) are used to “consume” blogs the less one is inclined to comment directly on the blog being read. A quick skim and if it’s interesing a link from your own blog to it. Thus Tim asserts a “death of comments” theology, so to speak. See SansBlogue : Web 2.0 and the Evils of RSS. (I’m sure I’ve talked to him about this before but it’s nice to see him put it down in some concrete form.)
One of the things that initially attracted me to blogging, both as an author and reader, was the interaction based around comments and trackbacks. Now spam dealt to the trackbacks on this blog but the comments are still there because I think it’s important for the opportunity to add another voice to be there. But with the advent of RSS aggregation I think that’s a thing of the past - so many blogs, so little time. Software such as Carnglas Software’s iFeedPod only increased the point of aggregation being getting the information/data down to me not creating a two-way or multi-way network.
Personally, I think things like RSS are brilliant at getting subscriptions to content like news and podcasts, but I’m still not convinced that it’s the best way to read blogs. There’s something about going to the front page of a blog and seeing what else has changed (comments, polls etc) apart from just the next post.
Anyway, over to Tim’s blog to post a comment…
Tony Long (The Luddite) in his column at Wired writes on reducing the hype around technology. See Wired News: Dark Underbelly of Technology.
And that’s the reason for this column: to lend a contrarian perspective to a world besotted with technology and all its bright, glittery appeal. This is not, as some of my colleagues have characterized it, an “anti-technology” column. I’m not, strictly speaking, anti-technology. I just don’t treat it like a freaking religion. So this is a “perspective” column.
Just got round to listening to the podcast Open Source » Blog Archive » Google Sociology. Downloaded it a while back but never got around to listening to it. So I left it playing while working on some AI stuff and tuned in when things caught my interest.
Google is changing the way we understand knowledge and the world. And this show we’re asking what we can learn about ourselves by understanding what we’re looking for.
A discussion with John Battelle and David Weinberger.
In this week’s NZ Listener Russell Brown’s column “Wide Area News” is mostly dedicated to the ongoing tensions, or should that be conflict, between established providers of information (i.e. encyclopaedia publishers) and projects like Wikipedia. Some interesting points about Wikipedia and its like being open to the placement of “viral marketing.”
See: NZ Listener - Wide Area News - 10 Sept. 2005 (You’ll have to scroll down past the David Kirk bit and it flows over onto the next page).
Here are some relevant links. The first two were cited in the paper edition of the article but ironically left out of the online version. I’ve added the latter two because, while mentioned in the article, they weren’t linked to at all in any version.
- TCS: Tech Central Station - The Faith-Based Encyclopedia : Robert McHenry’s (ex-editor in chief - Britannica) critique of Wikipedia.
- Free Software Magazine - The FUD-based Encyclopedia : Aaron Krowne’s reply to Robert McHenry.
- Wikipedia:Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia:Errors in Wikipedia that have been corrected in the Encyclopædia Britannica
Update - some more links that go with the above ones.
- On Getting It – A follow-up response by McHenry to his own article above.
- McHenry responds to Aaron Krowne.
Also check out these posts by Tim (especially the comments sections). See “Wikipedia vs Britannica” and “What matters about an encyclopedia?“
Okay, so I’ve installed WordPress 1.5 and it works well. No problems with the install on my web host, it connects to Ecto fine and from the comments in the blogosphere is handles spam well. Plus it has a polling module which I want to add.
But getting it to look like I want could be a problem and looks to be one place that Movable Type 3.2 (but not necessarily 3.1 or 2.6) has over it. A nice simple 3-column layout would be nice, with easy to configure parameters. MT3.2 support for alpha, beta, gamma and delta models is a big plus here. Instead it looks like I’ll have to find someone else’s WordPress theme they’ve made available for download and then hack that to get it how I want. And what’s with all the themes that put the two sidebar-type columns both on the right?
Looks promising - Greasemonkey - a user-centric model for controlling the content you see in your web browser. See Wired 13.09: START : Monkeying With the Web.
Arvind at Movalog notes that the new MT 3.2 styles and layout lend itself to Greasemonkey style hacking.
I’ve been playing around with this over the past few days. Looks like it will be a toss-up between WordPress and the new, improved Movable Type for this blog. Only have one author for this personal blog so licensing isn’t the issue it might be for multi-author type blogs. The style management in MT3.2 looks really good - providing you forget a lot of the 2.6 and 3.1 stuff and start again. Now standardised across Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal.
Movable Type 3.2 (Check out the style library)
WordPress
For those of you running Movable Type 3.2 here’s an online web-based tool to generate a new stylesheet for your blog. Ingenious. See - Movalog : Movable Type Style Generator.
Via Elise at Learning Movable Type: Movable Type Style Generator.
I’ll be tinkering with stylesheets and the blog layout over the next week or so - primarily to reorganize a few things, but also to fix some problems with Internet Explorer. If you arrive and things look different/broken don’t panic - try again later. I’ll try and make changes in increments (and offline) but sometimes it’s better to simply return to a clean slate and start again.
Grabbed these two books off the shelf in the public library because the covers and titles looked interesting. They’re definitely “coffee table” books - glossy, well laid out, striking design. Contentwise they’re light and fluffy (and being books about the web a little dated). What is really, really good about them is the showcase of web sites that each has in the back. Great books for looking at 30-50 web sites to see what things you like or don’t like, different colour schemes and navigation layouts.
Worthwhile getting out from the library and skimming. Probably not worthwhile buying them. There’s also a web site related to the series over at - www.designdirectories.com.
- “www.imaging” by Robin Nichols and Philip Andrews.
- “www.Colour” by Roger Pring.
This week I’m trying to sort out the broadband dilemma that we’ve been landed with.
We have our (primitive) broadband connection with our ISP (owned by Telco #1) and have our phone account (local and toll) with Telco #2. This has worked well in the past because ISP #1 has been good to us and we’ve got our phone plan with Telco #2 just how we want it.
So when we get an email from our ISP telling us we have to move to Telco #1 for our phone to keep using their broadband we get stuck (and very grumpy). Telco #1 claim that Telco #2 won’t carry our current ADSL connection any more so we either have to:
- Move our phone connection over to Telco #1 (who don’t have the plan we like at Telco #2), or
- Change ISP’s to one supported by Telco #2 and suffer the significant grief associated with changing email addresses, ISP transfer charges, and going with an ISP we don’t want to use.
Feel like we’re stuck between two very large Borg motherships - one way or another we’ll be assimilated into the collective whether we want to be or not.
BTW - It doesn’t help too when you phone around other ISPs and their help desk people just end up confusing you. They’re all set to sign up new customers but don’t seem to cope too well with transferring customers.
This book looks interesting. Engaging Technology in Theological Education: All That We Can’t Leave Behind by Mary E. Hess.
Link to Mary Hess’ faculty overview here.
Link to additional resources here. (Including links to the Religious Education and Challenge of Media Culture Project and her dissertation “Media literacy in religious education: Engaging popular culture to enhance religious experience”)
Thanks to Paul for mentioning the book. Thanks also to Tim who supplied the link to the resources page.
May hold off on changing over to something like Drupal or WordPress until this is sorted out. From Netcraft: PHP Blogging Apps Vulnerable to XML-RPC Exploits,
Many popular PHP-based blogging, wiki and content management programs can be exploited through a security hole in the way PHP programs handle XML commands. The flaw allows an attacker to compromise a web server, and is found in programs including PostNuke, WordPress, Drupal, Serendipity, phpAdsNew, phpWiki and phpMyFAQ, among others.
Tinkering around with the Movable Type stylesheets and templates in MT2.6x to try and get things just how I want them. But it has been a bit of an exercise in futility. They’ll look fine in Firefox but not in IE (or vice-versa). So I’m wondering about scrapping the whole MT 2.6 set up and moving on. Not that I haven’t been very happy with it but just that I’d like some more up to date functionality.
So I’m looking for a system that will allow:
- Multiple authors
- Blogging (obviously)
- File management - a sensible way to manage a set of uploaded documents and files. Might be a plug-in.
- Plug-in support of some type - for polling modules, special searches, interfaces to other systems etc.
- Good comment spam handling.
- Flexible theme/appearance management (even allow others to pick the scheme?)
- Web link database functionality.
- Nested categories.
- Integration of static pages. (I already do this in MT but it’s a pain to manage)
- Integration with Ecto.
- Image management.
- Behaves well in both Mac and Windows browsers - both for admin and viewing final result.
- Cost is a factor - but it doesn’t have to be free.
So far the contenders are:
- Movable Type 3 - Familiar interface, some good plug-ins, works with Ecto.
- Drupal - the full CMS - works with Ecto
- WordPress - easy set up, good blogging tools and configurability, current version won’t receive images from Ecto (previous versions did apparently, so I assume it’s a bug)
Don’t have too much time to spend on it so I’m only downloading a few, installing them on the iBook and having an initial play around. Any suggestions would be well received.
If all else fails I’ll just revert to the default MT 2.x templates and tinker on an interactive basis.
Also check out: http://www.opensourcecms.com/ for a great site allowing you to try these types of systems out.
Min Jung Kim has put together a blogging life cycle. She writes,
Having blogged in one form or fashion for the last 6 years or so (not including personal journals that I’ve written in, on paper even, with crayon even, since I was six years old), allow me to personally provide you with a rundown on the lifecycle that I’ve observed from personal bloggers.
Where are you in the cycle?
Andrew Jones briefly answers a question about putting photos into your blog at : Mac, blog and photos. Both the suggestions cater for simple blogging - Blogger + Flickr or Typepad. (Flickr can be used with other blogging systems too - see here for the list).
Now that works probably for a lot of people but I’m thinking about setting up some photo galleries - with the option of using some of the images in a blog or two - but want more control for the set up. I already have my own web host with database, PHP/Perl and other features, and would like to configure the set up how I’d like. I’d also like to be able to provide access control - for viewing and for others to upload - and to set default parameters for maximum photo dimensions and file sizes etc. I’m also not keen of “giving” my photos to someone else to manage and then having people who need to access them giving personal information to a third party.
Enter Gallery which seems to do most of what I need, is open source and has some sort of integration with various CMSs and blogs like Movable Type (plug-in here). From the Gallery web site,
Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. You must have your own website with PHP support in order to install and use it. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums can have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. Give accounts to your friends and family and let them upload and manage their own photos on your website!
Now, I have all of my photos set up in iPhoto on my iBook where they have meta-data (comments, dates, times, titles etc.) linked to the photo. I don’t want to have to do the whole export photos from iPhoto to a folder (losing the meta-data), use the Gallery Java-based importer to upload them (slowly) and then have to renter the details in Gallery. So I was overjoyed to discover: iPhotoToGallery which is a plug-in for iPhoto (version 2+) that allows you to select your photo’s in iPhoto, select export from the file menu and send them to Gallery on the server (see screenshot). How cool is that? Now my only limits are disk-space and upload bandwidth.
Anyway, for those of you who have a technical bent, want more control over the look-and-feel of your photo sets, and access controls for others then this might work for you. I’ll be trying it out over the next few weeks to see how it works but as always YMMV.
Lawrence Lessig’s recent blog post never again links in nicely with the discussion Tim highlighted at SanBlogue: When copyright fails. In it Lessig comments on the restrictive nature of “Publication Agreements” and the loss of author’s copyright. His slant is that he will now “not agree to publish in any academic journal that does not permit me the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.” Interesting to see if it can be done.
Tim’s post here points out that sharing copyright with journal publishers does come with strings attached - as in you might not be able to submit it to an electronic repository (as hypothesised here a day or so ago).
See: SansBlogue : When copyright fails…
Might be interesting to see what the definition of a repository is. Tim and co’s idea seems to be for a place to upload files to. I wonder if instead each person is responsible for hosting the files (via department space or their own domain name) and then the “repository” merely provides an indexes to those files. A biblical studies Napster?
Following up from the posting about making theological vignettes on video, there might be an easier way to do it first up - via pod-casting. Have a look at : Wired 13.03: Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star.
Read the following essay the other day on the train which seemed to link in with a number of other ongoing threads of discussion out there.
In his essay ‘Web of Babylon’* on the nature of fan fiction Kurt Lancaster ponders the nature of power relationships within publishing and the generations of new micro communities. [Fan fiction is where writers take aspects of an existing literary world - say a television show like Babylon 5 - and create a new but derivative work that expands upon the canonical literature. So you might take character behaviour demonstrated in the TV show but place it into another unvisited context.] So the original text isn’t simply produced and consumed only as directed. Rather as Lancaster notes it is transformed and transforms the readers.
‘Fandom here’, media scholar Henry Jenkins tells us, ‘becomes a participatory culture which transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts, indeed of a new culture and a new community’. Fans may create new cultural texts, but they do not necessarily build a new full-sized community. In anything, what evolves out of their creative productions are micro-communities. (p.309)
Pondering upgrading MT to a later version for a variety of reasons - nested categories being one of them and fixing the CSS Windows IE problems being another. Given AKMA’s problems doing this (see here) I’m thinking a clean install might be the best thing after doing an export and full backup. The CSS might look plain for a while before being “greenified”. If you have comments about the readability of the site (fonts, size etc.) now would be a good time to make them (That means you, Stu).
STUFF : TECHNOLOGY : DIGITAL LIVING - STORY : Blogs of our lives has a survey of new blogging technologies that will increase the amount of personal information that needs to be managed.
While the multimedia diary will continue to be stored across a number of devices, the real challenge, says the CSIRO’s Science Industry manager, Dr Ross Wilkinson, will be how we organise and access it.“In some sense where it is stored and how it is stored is going to be less important than ‘Can we find the stuff?’. It is hard finding things on a messy desk just as it is hard finding things on a messy computer. How do we get support for that?”
Wilkinson points to the likelihood of an artificially intelligent electronic helper that will learn from our digital habits and favourites, decide what to record in our digital cache and then organise the information into our life story.
Like the messy desk image. I’m always looking for stuff on mine.
Some statistics on the growth of Red Hat’s Fedora community-driven Linux distribution for web serving. Of interest to me as I used to administer and use some Red Hat web servers, though with Mac OS X on the desktop now I tend to use that for testing web stuff (e.g. various flavours of Movable Type are installed locally for testing and potentially to maintain a personal blog/database of research information).
Anyway, see Netcraft: Fedora makes rapid progress
For a breakdown of web servers by server type see March 2005 Web Server Survey Finds 60 Million Sites.
Still looking at why the CSS breaks in Windows IE. It’s bizarre, but because I’m going to revise the overall layout of the site anyway I’m not going to beat my head against the wall over it. Now I’ve got the “printer-friendly” template working I’ll be moving to a new layout (maybe three columns) and I’ll make sure the CSS doesn’t break in the new one. Built my first home page way back in ‘94 and always thought that the tools would improve debugging pages - but at the end of the day printing out the source for a page and actually looking at the code seems to catch the errors that automated tools ignore.
Contemplating changes to blog style to fix the Windows IE image/css problem. In looking around I came across css Zen Garden. Just spent some idle minutes clicking on the styles here. I’m seriously impressed.
Okay. Now in the last couple of posts I’ve uploaded and embedded JPEG images in the blog postings. On my iBook in Firefox and Safari they show up. On the Windows XP Acer they show up in Firefox. But in Internet Explorer on the Acer there are just blank spaces where the images are meant to be. They still link if they have hyperlinks attached to them but no picture. If I just view the image URL on its own it shows up. So what’s happening that’s breaking IE? (insert deluge of IE bugs here). Alignment? Image format? Stylesheet problem?
Really annoying, because I don’t often check with WinXP - I just assume JPEGs get displayed.
Any clues?
Update: The images display fine on the individual archive pages - just not on the main page.
Update 2: And if I remove the “align” parameter from the “img” tag then they display - which is odd because IE knows what the alignment is and makes the space for the image in the right place. In the meantime I’ve just turned off the alignment - yuk! It looks like it might be a CSS clash/problem.
Update 3: Switching back to the default MT stylesheet caused the problem to go away. Looks like the interaction of container, content and blog styles. Time to update the templates and stylesheet, I think.
As the start of the undergraduate academic year looms I’ve been playing around with Moodle - an open-source learning management system (LMS) that will support students I’m tutoring this semester (as well as for other courses). I’ve been pleasantly surprised with its features and hopefully it will allow me (and others) to bring together learning material online in a much more integrated way than in the past. From the blurb on the Moodle web site,
Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a software package designed to help educators create quality online courses. Such e-learning systems are sometimes also called Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). One of the main advantages of Moodle over other systems is a strong grounding in social constructionist pedagogy.
Moodle is free to download, install, modify and use and runs just fine on my iBook (for testing). If your Windows system supports a web server and PHP then you can run it on there too. So if you’re looking for something that can support a group of students, or a wider enterprise, then it may fit the bill for you. I’ll blog again at the end of semester when I’ll be more familiar with it and I’ve seen how it’s held up under the student load.
In the past I’ve installed and used Discusware (both free and pro versions) to support distance student interaction. If you want a purely discussion-based system that has its origins in education then that is useful too.
Is it wrong to want to write an imprecatory psalm about spammers? Or to carry out the wishes of said psalm upon the physical bodies of said offenders.
One of the things that annoys me about blogging systems is that they tend to be printer unfriendly. By the time a header/title and side bars have been added typical of most templates the content becomes squashed into a narrow column. Good for reading online - bad for printing out. So you end up with a first page with sidebars etc. and then many other pages with a narrow strip of text down the middle. I’ve been printing blog pages out recently while referring to things like the Virtual Theology Colloquium and its really been getting my goat.
(The font color also affects things - a medium grey on a white background is easy on the eyes on screen but doesn’t print that well - especially if you’re compressing two pages per A4 like I do to save paper.)
So I thought, on the off-chance that people print stuff off my blog, I’d fix it here first before working out how to fix it when printing other blogs. So there are now “printer-friendly” links at the bottom of each post that generates a nice, plain page in black and white for printing.
There is an outstanding tutorial by Elise Bauer - Printer-Friendly Pages - at her essential Learning Movable Type that showed me how to get started. Together with the Movable Type manual it’s the one site that everyone who’s using MT should look at.
Finally bit the bullet and bought Ecto so I could write posts off line and edit them more easily than in a web browser. I found that Safari wouldn’t refresh edits properly due to the upstream cache and Firefox (under Mac OS X 10.2) didn’t render the edit boxes properly. I would have preferred to go with MarsEdit but when I went there I couldn’t find a version that ran under 10.2. Ecto is available for both 10.2 and 10.3 which means that I can use it while I wait to upgrade (I’m holding off because I think it will break EndNote which is more critical to thesis writing than 10.3).
Also bought the Windows version which I’m writing this with (I’m a sucker for a half-price sale) which is now installed on the Acer. Then if Kim or the kids need to blog then we’re ready to go.
So far so good. Just need to configure it so it hums along nicely.
I used to have a copy of Kung-Log (ecto’s predecessor) which was free but deleted it before I switched to Movable Type. Now I can’t seem to find a copy anywhere on the net. Not as nice as Ecto but useful if you’re running 10.1.
BBC NEWS | Education | Academics give lessons on blogs
Blogs are giving departments, staff and students the freedom and informality of tone impossible in scholarly journals or even the student newspaper.Blogging lecturers say the technology provides them with easy online web access to students and improves communication outside of the classroom.
If you’re running OSX 10.3.5 and you are looking for a text editor that has more features than TextEdit then have a look at TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software. They’ve just released version 2 as freeware so try it and see.
Seeing as I’m still back in Bronze Age OSX 10.2 I use their old editor BBEdit Lite which just keeps on working for me. Except when I’m back using my close and dear friend “vi” - years of using it to edit source code on SVR3 UNIX systems had embedded it into my RNA, I think.
:wq
Well, maybe not. However this article shows how to use a local style sheet to override the one on a web site.
Skinning Gmail with a Custom Stylesheet
No longer will I have to suffer bizarre colour combinations when accessing things like library catalogues - now I can override it so I get readable black text on a white/grey background and buttons that I can read. Content first!
A quick rewrite of the stylesheet and away we go. The link is above in case you want to do it yourself and fix any problems you think my blog has.
In a fit of efficiency I’ve moved the blog from running on the Berkley DB over to MySQL. Hopefully this will give me more control over the blog and maybe even some performance improvement.
If it all turns to custard in the near future I’ll be rolling back a few days.
BTW - Backups were made before doing this. Once you’ve deleted a database or two by accident you learn the benefits of backups (which I had - and they worked!).
Here’s a link to Rachel’s site where she has a posting with a link through to an article about her experiences on building online communties via blogging NZ Idol. See: ยป Another stint in the media cre8d design - journal.
Russell Brown wrote the article in the Listener and I read and listen to his stuff online (Public Address | Hard News), in print (Wide Area News | New Zealand Listener) and on the radio (Mediawatch) most weeks. Don’t always agree with him but there’s often some good stuff there to get you thinking.
S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System.
For simple, clean presentations that you might want to put both on the web and a kiosk it looks like a good starting point. (None of the Powerpoint for Web bloat).
Via Tim@SansBlogue
AKMA runs into problems accessing his library’s free WiFi connection from outside the building. Apparently some think that’s a Fedaral felony. See: AKMA’s Random Thoughts: So Weirdly Wrong
Nice to see “freedom” at work. 
More here too: AKMA’s Random Thoughts: For Clarity’s Sake
Following up on several of recent Steve’s postings on How do we go deep? here’s a crowd that claim to have recognised the lack of depth in the general media and blogging. Their alternative is to produce detail 5-20 page “manifestoes” to be copied, shared and transmitted across cyberspace with a view to soliciting comments and deeper thinking. They argue,
In the Internet (and especially blogging), we see the glimpse of an alternative. Taken over time, many of the best blogs create a thoughtful, useful argument that actually teaches readers something.
Alas, blogging is falling into the same trap as many other forms of media. The short form that works so well online attracts more readers than the long form. Worse, most blogs stake out an emotional position and then preach to the converted, as opposed to challenging people to think in a new way.
I’ll be watching to see if it’s productive.
See: ChangeThis.
Just seeing if I can post nicely from NewNewsWire. If it works out okay I might upgrade from the Lite version to get the web log editing tools.
Couple of recent cartoon strips from UserFriendly on blogging.
Couple of potentially useful MacOS X software apps came across my scanner over the last few days.
Firstly ImageWell is an excellent little (free!) app that you drop and image onto and it posts it to the web location (iDisk, FTP, WebDAV) you choose (or the default). And it allows you to perform cropping, scaling, basic editting etc. in the image before it goes up the line. Great for dropping a set of pictures onto, having then automatically scaled etc., and then posted to your images directory. Saves having to fire up Fireworks/Dreamweaver or Graphic Converter to do the job and then manually upload the images.
Read the rest of this entry »
Nice summary of how to get a RSS newsfeeds displayed on a Movable Type site at Learning Movable Type: Displaying an RSS Newsfeed on Your Site.
I use the zFeeder option which I made the Blog Portal page with a few months back. It stands in a static MT index page but you could get it added into the side bar of the page with little effort.
Saw this today too. Cyberduck a free OSX FTP client.
I currently use another free FTP client (when I’m not using the command line) RBrowserLite for uploading stuff to the web site outside of Movable Type but who can resist an app called “Cyberduck”?
Monkey Food have a selection of small Mac OSX apps on their web site. The “Tagging Service” looks really useful for adding HTML tags into blog entries.
Barclay Barrios of Rutgers University, New Brunswick has put together a nice site called The Year of the Blog: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom. It’s got an overview of 2003 with respect to blogging, blogging resources, blogs as writing practice, blogs in the classroom and some other stuff.
Just switched to HaloScan comments from Enetation to see if that improves the commenting in the interim before I shift to MT or pMachine. For those of you who posted comments on the old system they are still there in the ether but just not visible at the moment.
Hopefully this improves things.
I’ve been reading the local library’s copy of Blog On: Building Online Communities with Web Logs by Todd Stauffer. It’s a book for introducing people to blogging and covers most of the different options that were available when it was published (Oct 2002). It’s pretty good at doing that covering free and commercial systems as well as three chapters on how to go about installing and configuring Graymatter, Movable Type and pMachine on your web host. Even though I’ve installed each of those I still found it useful for it’s references to third-party sites and add-ons to blogging.
If you have someone who wants to get into blogging then this book would be helpful to them.
If you’re into a bit of constructive tweaking of Blogger you can get it to generate an RSS/XML feed. But you need to be using Blogger to publish to your own site. Here’s the link” hit-or-miss.org: How to manage your site with Blogger, PHP, and XML
I see also that Blogger has just announced support for Atom to handle syndication. Check out: Syndication. It’s not RSS but some of the RSS aggregators support it.
But wait there’s more!
If you click here you get the new, improved scrolling version - just right to leave running on the desktop.
Wait a few seconds (5-10 on my computer) after the window has popped up for it to start scrolling. Move your mouse into the frame to pause scrolling. Clicking on a link opens it in a new window.
So I’m waiting for my hosting provider to turn on a few things so I can install Movable Type how i want it and I start thinking about how nice it would be to have all the blogs I read on a single web page with their latest headlines. So I’m thinking RSS/XML aggregation but on a web page I can access from anywhere in the world not just using a reader on my iBook.
The result of this is the: GreenFlame Blog Portal. A quick bit of HTML and PHP tinkering with the help of zFeeder and it’s all done.
(I know that MT has a nice plug-in for doing this sort of thing but I was bored - and it may be weeks (months) before I get MT up and going to my liking)
I discovered this the other day. The Internet Archive is “building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.”
What is does provide is access to music and video material that has been placed out there for people to view and use - just right if you’re looking for a video clip or music segment for something. (When accessing an archived page, you will be presented with the terms of use agreement for that material). Helpful for Alt.W people looking for text, sound and video.
My current favourite video clip is: Horses on Mars from the SIGGRAPH Animations Library.
3.6 billion years ago, A microbe is blasted off its home planet from a meteor impact and embarks on a journey through the inner solar system. After spending time on other worlds, it decides home is best and tries to return - only to head in the wrong direction by mistake. Unable to ever return again, it has a stunning vision of home - and what lies ahead for it. The imagery mimicks the look of electron microscope imagery. Created on a Dell workstation donated by Intel. Maya and Maya Composer donated by Alias|Wavefront. RenderMan courtesy of Pixar.
Enjoy!
For all you dedicated (obsessive?) bloggers out there.
Available at:
Looks like it will be closer to a couple of weeks before everything is up and running smoothly. I’ve got the prototype running sweetly under Mac OS X and Apache on my iBook but my hosting provider won’t have a facility I need for my requirements for another couple of weeks.
So I’ll be playing with MT templates, CSS and using multiple embedded MT blogs to handle different functions.
The comments functionality on the blog appears to be having problems at the moment. I am reassured that I am not alone in this (see: comments not showing up).
Sorry if you had something profound to say and you’ve been thwarted. If things don’t improve in the next few days I’ll have a look at installing a new comments system.
Darren has been putting together some really useful information and tips about blogging over at his web site. He’s put them all into an archive that you can access at: LivingRoom >> A space for Life: Blog Tips Archives
So if you’re an experienced blogger or just starting out why don’t you drop on by and see what you can learn.
I found this today while surfing around. There are some very good points in here for both new and established bloggers. A lot of it is insightful for people who are publishing anything on the net too.
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