We’re using the Event module to list our workshops at the Teaching & Learning Centre, and the Signup module to let people register to attend workshops (or other events). It’s working really quite well, but we needed to add some extra fields to the registration form so we could track Faculties, Status, etc…
“Sure,” I said, “Drupal’s open source, so we should be able to add any fields we want. Worst case scenario? We’d have to fork Signup.module and maintain our own version with our custom fields in it.”
I’ve been slowly working through the TED Talks video podcasts - making time to watch several sessions each week. I can’t even begin to describe what an impact they’re having on me. I’m starting to think differently about many issues - some I hadn’t even considered before, others I thought were outside of my reach.
I watched Majora Carter’s presentation this morning. She is the founder of Sustainable South Bronx - a grassroots movement she started in her community to try to bring it back from the brink of ecological (and social and economic) devastation.
I got an email from Alan last night mentioning that his blog was actually knocked offline by the overzealous actions of spammers. They were hammering his site so hard that his host had to kill the site. He had been running the CogDogBlog on some graciously donated webspace, so it’s understandable that they weren’t thrilled about the load that spammers can add to a server.
Unfortunately, Alan’s got a Day Job™ which is currently in conference management mode (i.e., traveling and busy) so he’ll be trying to get things back up and running in the few spare milliseconds he can eke out in the next little while.
While browsing the Flickr photos from Calgary, I came across this one by Sherlock77. It prompted a brief discussion, wondering if there was a group for people to put photos of public artwork that had been hacked (or dressed, or modified, or adorned) - legally and non-destructively. I did some searching, but didn’t find anything. So, I created a public group: Public Artwork Hacks.
If you have (or plan to take) photos of public artwork that has been “improved” - here’s the place to share it. Put a Santa hat on The Thinker. Sunglasses on David. Photos that include modifications - without the use of Photoshop to add things - are welcome!
Dreamhost rocks. I mean, they just keep piling on awesome new features into their hosting package. Recently, it was essentially infinite bandwidth and storage. Yesterday, they added an automatic Flash video transcoder and presenter, ala YouTube. But, within any Dreamhost site.
All I have to do is upload a video file (.avi, .mov, .mp4) to my site, tell Dreamhost I want it converted to Flash video (using the panel.dreamhost.com site that’s used for managing everything else as well), and their magic elves do their work and email me a javascript snippet to embed a flash player in any web page (or blog post). Like, for instance, this one:
Thanks to a tip from Bill Fitzgerald, I checked out a copy of the Leech module for Drupal. Despite the rather bad name, it sounds like it is (or eventually will be) perfect for what I need.
It lets users add their own feeds, and can associate said feeds and subsequently aggregated items wit any of the user’s Organic Groups. That takes care of the Class/Cohort/etc… concepts. Users just create or join the appropriate Organic Groups within the Drupal site, and add whatever feeds they want to whatever Organic Groups they want. They could add subfeeds of a blog to different OGs (say myfancyblog.com/tags/bio680/feed to the Biology 680 OG, and myfancyblog.com/tags/poli544 to the Political Science 544 OG…)
I recorded my morning RSS checkin with BlogBridge 4.1 (well, I recorded it with iShowU, but the checkin was done using BlogBridge). The power of the feed star rating feature is really hard to describe - it’s much easier to just show it.
I wound up with a 16 minute recording, which is about how long it takes for me to check in on 443 feeds first thing in the morning. I took some time to describe the BlogBridge interface, but skimmed slightly more than usual so it probably worked out about the same duration.
I’ve been meaning to get off my butt and finish mocking up an Eduglu prototype. I’ve been dabbling with a Drupal site, powered by Organic Groups and Aggregator2. I had it basically working on my desktop box, and just tried reproducing the basic pattern here on my Dreamhost server. The whole thing took maybe 15 minutes to set up. Except that it doesn’t work. Dreamhost has disabled the curl in PHP, so the Aggregator2 feed update functions just fail silently. curl, foiled again! (it borked the del.icio.us plugin as well). Instead of spending my time fighting with Dreamhost and porting modules to not use curl, I’ll just finish mocking things up on my desktop or another server.
TUAW linked to a new game by Ambrosia Software. I’ve had a soft spot for Ambrosia since way back in the pre-MacOSX days when I was hooked on Maelstrom.
Sketch Fighter 4000 is a strange hybrid game. It’s basically an old-school game, a combination of Asteroids, Space Castle, Defender, etc… But, it’s rendered as if it’s being sketched in ink on paper. When you shoot things, they blow up, leaving scorch marks on the paper. Or are they eraser smudge marks?
There’s a webcam on the top of Sulphur Mountain in Banff. It’s an HD webcam - the first I’ve seen - and it’s running 24/7/365. I’ve been running a script to grab every image for the last week (they only update every 5 minutes, so it’s not that much data), and I periodically convert the stills into a timelapse movie.
I just took a look at the timelapse for November 29, which was a pretty nice day here in Calgary. Turns out it was nice and clear in Banff as well. One thing that keeps surprising me (even though I’ve lived here all my life) is just how much darkness we get. I’ve trimmed the timelapse to just contain daylight hours, since well over half of the movie would have been black. Come ON Dec. 21…
The cold snap meant I accumulated faves of tropical places even faster over the last couple of weeks. Some other cool photos in there, too. But mostly tropical stuff.
