Blog Posts

Flock updated to 0.5.11

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.

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Drupal to Elgg Migration?

Another 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.

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IT'S NOT A VIRUS, PEOPLE!

The local evening news had a special virus warning tonight. Not especially unusual - they occasionally warn people about a Big Windows Virus that went around the week before. But Nirmala began the segment “This is the first virus to infect Apple’s Oh Ess Ecks… It’s spread through the ‘I-Chat’ instant messaging application… Be sure antivirus software is installed and up to date…” (I-Chat was in big letters on the side of the screen)

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Adium: iChat Pro?

I’d tried Adium before, looking for a usable multi-protocol chat client so I could talk to my contacts on AIM/.Mac as well as ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk. I only have one or two contacts on each non-AIM protocol, so don’t want to be running separate apps for each. Adium was cool, but quirky, and it never “clicked” for me. It was annoying, with the silly duck icon, quacking alerts, etc. so I reverted to iChat (after trying Fire again - I swore by Fire before iChat was released).

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EduGlu Early Whiteboard

I just grabbed a whiteboard for a couple minutes to start fleshing some stuff out for EduGlu. Here’s a quick and dirty whiteboard photo. It’s pretty rough, very incomplete, and barely legible. But, in the spirit of doing the whole shebang Out In The Open, here it is.. If only the SMART Boards we have laying around here were hooked up…

EduGu Whiteboard

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Clarification on EduGlu

It’s awesome that people are talking about, and referencing, and critiquing EduGlu. Keep the conversations going! I do need to clarify a couple of things about it, though…

  • EduGlu is not mine. It wasn’t my idea. It isn’t my project. The concept is a logical/natural extension of lots of other interesting projects in the area (and may be better implemented directly in any one of those, rather than building something new). This incarnation of the concept(s) grew out of a series of great discussions over a few days in Vancouver, by dozens of other folks (educators, geeks, researchers, academics, administrators…) and each discussion wound up converging toward this EduGlu idea, and away from the school-as-blog-host model.
  • It is currently just a thought exercise to frame discussions, and to help figure out what the requirements and issues are. The EduForge.org site for the project was set up explicitly to make it not “mine” but “ours” - anyone is free to contribute in any way they are willing and/or able. That includes toying around with the thought exercise.
  • EduGlu isn’t simply an aggregator. I think that’s part of what it has to do, but it’s the less interesting part. It’s really a way of thinking about the aggregation. Of running queries against the aggregated data to create custom, on-the-fly views of the data. It’s not simply about storing a bunch of RSS and providing an interface to view it. It’s about organizing that information in a meaningful way, in the context of an existing academic setting. Feeds will belong to individuals, who are associated with institutions, classes and cohorts (to start with, anarchy can reign later). Being able to set up “smart folders” or saved queries or whatnot will help individuals begin to make sense of all of this aggregated stuff.
  • In the initial stages of thinking about this, it’s important to not focus on implementation. I’m tempted to say “hey! I could do this in [insert platform here] pretty quickly!” - but then I begin by being constrained by the capabilities/limitations/metaphors of [insert platform here]. Once the concepts of this beast have been fleshed out by connecting a bunch of neurons, then it’s safe to start thinking about implementation.

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Deepest Sender

I hadn’t heard of this one before, but I stumbled across Deepest Sender while poking through the Firefox extensons database. It’s a XUL app, so should run nice and fast. At first blush, it looks like a pretty handy way to quickly post stuff. It took maybe 10 seconds to configure to point at my WordPress blog here.

The editing interface only appears to let you select one category, though, but nicely handles keyboard input to select a category quickly.

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Firefox with Mouse Gestures

I’ve been waffling back and forth between Safari and Firefox over the last few months. The flexibility of Firefox keeps drawing me close, like a moth to a flame, only to be burned because it doesn’t “feel” right. Safari does. I’ve been slowly adding Themes and Extensions to make Firefox start to look/behave better, and it’s close. Darned close.

The thing that might push it over the threshold for me was the addition of the All-in-One Mouse Gestures extension, which combines a bunch of stuff (including Mouse Gestures) into one nice package. In Safari (and every other Cocoa app on my system) I’ve been using CocoaGestures to add powerful mouse gestures to tasks like tab switching, closing tabs, etc… But on Firefox, I had to keep reverting to the keyboard (or moving the mouse to select a tab - much more efficient to just flick the mouse and have that motion translated…) Heck, I haven’t even found a keyboard combo to switch tabs in Firefox yet…

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