I just realized that there was no “University of Calgary” group on Flickr, so I created one.
This should be an interesting way for students, faculty, staff and alumni to share photos about the U of C.
Please feel free to join the group and add any photos you’d like to share.
Read MoreThis is one of those things that, as a parent, sends an icy shiver down my spine. An unfathomable loss to a young family - their 6-year-old daughter dying suddenly of bacterial meningitis. They’ve taken to blogging as a form of therapy, and/or an expression of love for their recently departed daughter.
I can’t even imagine how much strength it must take to survive such a loss, let alone to work through the grieving process out in the open.
Read MoreIt started out as a simple photo collection mission. Shawn is in Hong Kong, and asked if I had any pictures of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue that was erected on campus in memory of the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989. I didn’t have any photos handy, but wanted to take a couple.
It’s weird how walking around campus with a camera in hand makes you see things slightly differently. I’ve been on campus since 1987 (with a short hiatus when I was working downtown), and never realized that much of the drabbery around here is really kind of interesting. It’s not a beautiful campus like UBC or Stanford or anything, but it’s interesting in its own pragmatic way.
Read MoreI was bugging Boris with some emails today to ask about Drupal’s support for structured blogging. I was asking if Drupal would be getting something like the WordPress Structured Blogging plugin, which provides templates for authoring various microformats.
It wasn’t until after he responded that I realized how silly my question was. Drupal doesn’t need the plugin, because support for custom formats and authoring templates is baked into the DNA of Drupal. Even for non-coders, anyone can make up new formats (and templates) on the fly using the flexinode module. And several other formats are already available as prepackaged modules (events, reviews, etc…)
Read MoreScott Leslie mentioned that he thought EduGlu was a bit of a misleading name for this conceptual educational RSS mix workflow application, and he’s totally right.
The *Glu projects are primarily about aggregation. Merging a bunch of different feeds into a single stream. At first blush, that’s what EduGlu is sort of about, too, but it is also about doing much more with the aggregated data. It may have a “default” view on the data that mimics the *Glu merged River of News, but it will also need to be able to generate alternate views of the data based on identity, context, and relationships with other content and concepts. Sounds muddy, because it is.
Read MoreDavid emailed me this afternoon asking about the possibility of listing posts in a WordPress blog that belonged in a given set of categories. So, you could list all posts that belong in both “Category A” and “Category B”. Ironically, Ultimate Tag Warrior offers something like this for combinations of tags, but the native WordPress category interface doesn’t seem to do it. Some way of viewing /category/CategoryA+CategoryB should do the trick.
I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon, and it’s really starting to bug me. There must be a way to do this. Lazyweb, can you help me (and David)?
Read MoreThis is welcome news indeed! Greg Ritter has returned from his long, long silence, and has begun blogging again! I’m guessing Greg found it easier to go underwater during the whole Bb IPO and WebCT shindigs, but now that those things have been dealt with maybe he’ll be able to blog more often.
Excellent news, Greg. I’d been keeping your old blog in my subscriptions Just In Case™ and have already subscribed to your new one.
Read MorePaul just sent me a link to a cool sounding (but unfinished) project called code4lib session snatcher. It sounds like it’s a pet project of a systems librarian who was working on some code on a flight to the code4lib conference. The code is intended to act as a presentation recorder for the S5 presentation system, recording both slide timings and audio, and (presumably) packaging both up for playback after the fact.
Read MoreMore faves. It’s Family Day. What else to do than poke around Flickr for inspiration?
Sounds like a pretty minor bump, with Flock going from 0.5.x to 0.5.11, but some really cool new features made it in. The Flickr browser topbar rocks. I mean, wow. That sucker is sweet. And a built-in Technorati info display topbar, to get a quick 10,000’ overview of a site as defined by external links. Very handy. They also updated the blog editor to use a local copy of TinyMCE, and it looks pretty darned nice (Categories aren’t sorted, though, and no Category search is implemented, making it a PITA to select one of my 304 categories for a new post…) and is FAST since it’s local. Feels like a native app. I thought it was a XUL thing at first, until I read the change log.
Read MoreAnother thinking-out-loud topic here… I’m re-evaluating weblogs.ucalgary.ca - what’s worked, what hasn’t, what could be done differently. It’s best to take a long, hard look at it before it really takes off. There are a bunch of users in it now, but a critical evaluation of it is pretty important before we get into the hundreds of users level… I’m also colouring evaluation in light of the PLE/EduGlu concepts being rolled around. Perhaps the need to have a communal blog hosting service on campus is less important, or unnecessary, if that function is pushed into an aggregator service where it should be, rather than in the hosting side of things.
Read MoreThanks to a tip-off from James, I generated a quasi-reasonable facsimile of myself as I’d look in the Simpsons. The book wasn’t optional…