The “Performancing” folks just released a plugin for Firefox that provides a fully featured weblog editor, ala Flock. I’m trying it out now - it appears to talk to WordPress OK (well, if this made it to the blog, that is).
It appears to have a decent WYSIWYG editor, but the image embedding doodad doesn’t seem to have an upload utility - so I think you have to manually upload an image and then paste the URL into the image widget. Not fatal, but an “easy” improvement to the plugin. (I know, “easy” is oversimplifying it, since the plugin is aimed at being platform agnostic, so you’d have to have special cases for WP, MT, Blogger, etc…)
Thanks to a tip/nudge from Cole, I’ve added a way to subscribe to just the podcasts from this blog, with a super happy fun link that triggers iTunes directly (and a less super happy fun one that just gives the URL so you can copy/paste to other podcatchers).
Links are in the sidebar of the blog, or through the wondrous powers of command+C command+V, right in this post.
I’d installed Spam_blacklist back in October, but we’d been getting the occasional spam attack since then, lately every single weekend. So I just dug into the Mediawiki config, and realized that Spam_blacklist never got properly configured on my server, meaning it was essentially running wide open. Crap. What a waste of time that was. Paul and I have removed dozens/hundreds of spams over the last few weeks, and I was assuming Spam_blacklist was enabled properly. Oops.
I won! Most Beautiful!? Never thought I’d be saying I won a beauty contest…
Thanks to everyone who voted at this year’s Edublog Awards - this blog was voted the “Most beautiful/best designed edublog.” I was pretty surprised - there were some great nominees, and I’ve found lots of (new to me) blogs to follow.
That’s pretty cool. However, I can’t take the credit - I’m really just assembling various off-the-shelf pieces. Massive kudos have to be sent to Michael Heilemann from Binary Bonsai for designing the totally kick-ass K2 theme for Wordpress.
This has me a little nervous. I sure hope Joshua/Yahoo! have decent backups…
There were over 700 bookmarks in there this morning. Now it’s saying my account is empty. Man, that would suck. Definitely the major downside of using an offsite bookmark manager…
It seems like del.icio.us was more stable before Yahoo! got involved. Maybe this is just a big Moving Of Servers from Joshua’s basement to the Yahoo datacentre?
It’s been a couple of weeks since the last Flickr Faves post, and I’ve gone through another set of 36 favorites on Flickr. Some interesting shots of cool places, events, and even some old software…
If that kind of thing turns your crank, head on over to the Subscribe page, where you’ll be provided with links to the RSS and Atom feeds, as well as a handy dandy email subscription form.
In the last post, I mentioned how the banner images I have on this site are photos I’ve taken at various stages and places of my life. Yes, I took each and every one of them myself.
Then, I realized that all documentation about these photos remains in my head. Which isn’t exactly a permanent or reliable memory store. So, I went and created a first draft of a page describing the images. I’ll update it as I remember more - I’ll have to pull exact dates from iPhoto’s library…
This page lists all of the images that are being used in the banner area of this weblog. I’m using a script to automatically and randomly select one of the images each time a page is loaded (but that may behave differently, depending on browser or caching). They are listed in chronological order, in the order they were added to the rotation pool - not the order they were taken.
This blog is published under a creative commons license (specifically, the non-commercial use, with attribution license) - chosen to let folks rip/mix/burn whatever they found useful. I really believe that type of sharing is important.
Regardless, I was a bit surprised to find this obvious homage to my blog design (well, to K2 and my tweaks), which closely mimics my blog’s current appearance - right down to recycling each and every one many of my blog banner images (which have been removed since I posted this).
In the background thinking/planning for our own “ePortfolios” project (man, I hate that “e”) we realized that many/most of the off-the-shelf portfolio packages were really just simple fill-in-the-blanks templates. Not really a portfolio, at all. Essentially a simple dossier. A collection of standardized data about a person, with no real creative input required or allowed.
A portfolio (e- or otherwise) is about as far from a simple templated dossier as I can imagine. Ok. Flying monkeys with laser guns on their heads would be farther, but you get the point. Portfolios are a process of creative expression. Of reflecting on what you’ve done, how you did it, and hopefully, where you’d like to go. Every person’s portfolio should be different. Different content, different presentation, different context. Things that a dossier just can’t capture. Dossiers are good for comparing batches of nearly-identical things, and helping to highlight differences between them. I imagine a hiring committee sitting at a big table with a stack of 500 of these templated dossiers, sorting them by some criterion to get to the Right Person To Hire.
