Just came across this presentation by Dale Pike. It's a great summary of the reasons why weblogs may be valuable, and how they might be used in a community setting.

I've been asked to put together a "non marketing" feature list for CAREO. What can it do? What sort of functions does it have?

Anyway, my first, 10-minute stab at it is located here. I'll also leave a link to it in the left sidebar of this site, so it's handy. I'll tweak it when I get a chance, but most of the important (or at least visible) features are in there. There will be some more additions in a few days, but mostly for behind-the-scenes kinda stuff.

SciQ just went live. It's a K-12 theme for CAREO that is being used to push learning objects into the classroom in Alberta. Could be very cool, especially when teachers and students start using it in the trenches. This is a product of a whole bunch of educational stakeholders in the province, from content production to curriculum to technology.

It's cool, from my perspective, since it's a completely different look and feel for CAREO. A real test of the theming engine. Actually, SciQ was one of the major reasons that the theming engine is as flexible as it is now.

Ken Bereskin is Apple's MacOSX Marketing Director. He recently returned from Safari in Uganda and Kenya, and posted some of his 3000 photographs online.

In a word: WOW! Those are some amazing photos. Powerful, beautiful, and completely amazing. Thanks to Ken for sharing his photos. Many of these would make great learning objects...

Thanks to David Carter-Tod at Wytheville Community College, I've added a subscription to the CAREO Newest Objects RSS Feed to this weblog's main index page.

Not sure if I'll leave it there, but it's kinda cool to see external content. I actually intend to use the RSS-HTML utility that David graciously provided to demonstrate integration of Learning Objects and RSS into online learning - a WebCT or Blackboard course could include live external resources, without having to manually hunt for them. That's a Good Thing.

I just ran a cool little utility called Comstats. It sniffs through my Mail.app mailboxes, and runs some stats on the contents. It generated this cool and somewhat scary graph of number of emails received per day, over the past 2 years:

It's a little scary to extrapolate what appears to be something loosely resembling an exponential curve out another couple of years. Yikes.

Just tried both the Solaris and Linux versions of X-Hive, and MacOSX puked on the binary files for both (binary file not executable). Doh. Frederik at X-Hive suggested there might be MacOSX support by the end of the year. Guess I will have to wait until then.

In the meantime, we'll have to scare up a Windows or Linux box to test on. Rob's always got a RedHat box laying around, so that shouldn't be a problem. Sure hope the Linux build of X-Hive likes RedHat...

OK... I'm feeling like a bit of an inept bonehead for not being able to figure this one out, and I'm hoping someone out there in blogland has done something similar...

I was hoping to create a simple HTML web page that included several RSS feeds, including several from CAREO. I was sure someone would have done something similar, but haven't found anything that works. Reliably.

Is there anything I can use to embed live RSS feeds in an otherwise-static web page? I don't want to be pre-processing anything, or cacheing XML or anything. I want a live display of a live RSS feed in a static HTML page. I don't care if it's a PHP or PERL or whatever-based CGI that does the heavy lifting, as long as it's relatively portable (i.e., don't have to recompile PERL on MacOSX like rss2html.pl seems to want to do). Oh, and it has to be able to run on my server. I don't want to have a cross-the-pond round trip like what is required to use the feed processor at curry.com

A couple more XML databases for the list:

X-Hive
Ipedo

Both claim to support multiple simultaneous xml schemas, XQuery, and lots of other goodness. Both claim to be relatively portable (although they don't list MacOSX as a supported platform. ARGH! They both list Solaris and Linux, so maybe that's close enough?) Both carefully hide what it costs to license their software.

An O'Reilly book by Ben Hammersley. Just added itself to my "Books To Buy" list.

From David Wiley's Autounfocus weblog:

I've been implementing the browse objects interface for the SciQ project, and it struck me just how different it looks from the current browse utility in CAREO. They do basically the same thing - allow the user to use predefined vocabularies for searches based on standardized metadata elements - but the presentation difference is quite striking.

Compare the two, CAREO on the left, SciQ on the right: