I hadn’t visited an iTunes U site for awhile, so this may not be new. I just checked out the Berkeley iTunes U to see what they’re doing with it, and notice the shiny “Subscribe” button when viewing a topic. I don’t remember that being there before, when I was poking around in the Stanford iTunes U. Berkeley’s using it to let folks subscribe to audio on topics like Global Affairs, as well as individual courses. Hey! That’s podcasting! If only I knew of anyone that could use something like this…
I just realized that it’s been approximately 5 years since I started “blogging” - shortly after the untimely demise of The Company Who Shall Not Be Named (March, 2001), I started dabbling with weblog software. First, I played with a copy of a blog app that was included on my Dad’s MacAddict CD-ROM, then I played with Blosxom. The first year’s worth of posts were either intensely personal, or intensely boring (or both) and have long since evaporated into the ether. The oldest surviving post on this blog is just shy of 4 years old.
My various online bits are now living at Dreamhost. It took only a few minutes to install my stuff, copy over the files, and get up and running. It’s taken a bit longer to have DNS changes propagate, but I think that process is pretty much over now. Wordpress seems pretty happy there, and I’ve installed copies of Drupal, Mediawiki and Lace (the cool ajax chat app), as well as a Quicktime streaming server and Jabber server. The last two were autoinstalls, so I just flicked them on to see what they did. Actually, everything but Lace could have been automatically installed, with subdomains and databases created automatically, but I opted to do the manual install because I already have copies of the apps configured.
I’ve been trying to figure out a workable solution for a couple of months, and have come up with nothing more than some hacks and approximations of what is needed.
Here’s a use case:
User “A” (let’s call her “Amy”) writes a blog post. She wants it to be readable by her professor (let’s call her “Betty”) and one other student (let’s call her “Carmen”).
But, she doesn’t want the post to be readable by the rest of the class, by students in other classes, nor by the unwashed masses stumbling across a post via Google.
While Writely is cool, it deals with online documents. You can import/export, but the document lives online. That’s cool for many uses, but scares some people.
I just found a link to AjaxWrite (via Tangled up in Purple) - it’s a javascript based word processor that appears to be compatible with MS Word. You open and save documents on your local hard drive - not in the Internet Cloud.
Basically, it’s just a copy of Word that lives in a browser window, meaning you don’t have to install it anywhere. Stick your .doc files on a USB thumbdrive (perhaps with a copy of Portable Firefox) and you’ve got a portable word processor that you can take anywhere, regardless of how a “guest” computer is configured… (actually, if you want portable word processors, there are some options for native applications as well)
This is one of the coolest things from the world of musicians with respect to IP and copyright. Some of the biggest names in Canadian music just put their feet down to tell the Big Labels not to be evil.
The colophon, listing the various bits that get twiddled to run my blog, has been woefully out of date. I get periodic emails about the various plugins I use, especially the latest Podpress plugin, so I thought it’d be a good idea to automate the process of updating the list. Enter the bdp_setup plugin by Bryan Palmer at ozpolitics.info.
The colophon is now automatically generated, and guaranteed to stay up to date for as long as I’m using Wordpress to run my blog…
For some of our projects here at the TLC, we need to be able to manage identity information - traditionally, user accounts, groups, roles, etc… We’re taking a bit of time to think about a better way of implementing this, and how to use a flexible, distributed identity model.
I’ve been going through some web searches to find out what others are doing. The “version numbers” are loosely based on Dick Hardt’s descriptions (with apologies to him if I’ve misinterpreted what he was trying to say).
I’m playing with a pre-Cardinal (the next Big Release) build of Flock, and man is it nice! They’ve replaced the blog editor, and it’s the best blog editor I’ve used. Very nice. The blog manager topbar appears to have disappeared, but I assume it’s just being tweaked and will return before the Big Release.
My only gripe is that category selection still sucks - no way to easily find one of my 331 categories in a list sorted by primary key of the category database record. Some sorting/searching/filtering/text-auto-complete interface would be waaay more effective. Oh, and the selected category didn’t get applied anyway. I’ll go in through the Wordpress web UI to fix it…
The book is definitely on top of my nonfiction reading list (my fiction reading, on the bus ride commute, is currently another Gregory Benford book I’m deliberately reading out of sequence…)
One of the great comments on my BCEdOnline2006 Unkeynote Debriefing included a link to a wiki page by Chris Corrigan on Open Space Technology - a set of ideas, practices and guidelines for conducting “open space” meetings. Very cool stuff, and it resonated quite well with what we got to do as part of Northern Voice 2006 - specifically the Social Software Salon and the Edublogger Hootenanny. I finally had a chance to go through the linked wiki page, and it’s chock full of goodness. I don’t think it has to go as far down the kumbaya spectrum as Chris describes - even just the arrangement of the chairs sends a powerful message and sets expectations.
