I just took a few minutes to install a fresh copy of Drupal 4.6.5 along with the Aggregator2 module, which provides Glu functionality to Drupal. You can provide a bunch of feeds, and it sucks them in as if they are native content to that instance of Drupal. It tries to assign taxonomy/categories based on the data in the RSS feed, and provides some interfaces to view the feeds and items. I set up a prototype on my desktop box (so it might not be running all the time, and may disappear if my new box ever shows up), but it’s there to play with. I’ve pre-seeded it with my blog, flickr, and del.icio.us feeds, and took the liberty of adding the same for another couple of folks (Brian and Alan) to see how it handles multiple users adding data.
More faves. I couldn’t use the cool new Ruby-powered favinator because it somehow conflicts with the CSS on my blog, and I haven’t had a chance to debug wtf is acting up there. Regardless, here they are. Links to individual photos on the Flickr page for this snapshot…
I’m involved with an ePortfolio project with our Faculty of Education - aimed at getting student teachers to build a series of high quality, interactive, personalized portfolios outlining their development as professionals. It’s more about the journey (self reflection, writing, documenting) than the destination (the final website) so we were looking for tools that wouldn’t require technical know-how in order for the students to produce interesting products. When the project got off the ground (in the fall of 2005), there wasn’t really any off-the-shelf product that fit the bill, so we started to implement an instance of Pachyderm so the students could start authoring in it.
Sami went out last night to take some pictures around Campus. And was accosted by an undercover cop who demanded to know why he was taking pictures of a public place. He had to show ID, his information was recorded (including his driver’s license - how is that a required piece of ID when you’re not, say, driving?), along with several other questions about why he was there in the first place. He was asked to show the pictures he had taken. Then it was suggested that if he wants to take pictures of a public place, which was build with our tax dollars, that he needs to apply for permission, in writing, before that is allowed.
This 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.
It 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.
I 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…)
Scott Lesliementioned 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.
David 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)?
This 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.
Paul 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.
