I’m heading down to San Franshisky for a couple of days to take part in the Pachyderm Project Year 2 Wrap-Up meetings/training/gathering at SFMOMA. I’ll be sitting in meetings during the day, trying to take a photo or two of the area in between, and working on some projects with deadlines this week during the remaining hours. Should be interesting. I’ll likely be blogging during the event, and will post what I can to Flickr.
Read MoreI grabbed a copy of Joomla the other day, to play around with another option for a CMS to use for projects at the Learning Commons. Some early thoughts:
/content/view/14/2/ - and that’s with the “search engine friendly” option turned on - it’s even worse without that. There’s a spot for a “Title Alias” - but it doesn’t seem to get used as the Post Slug does in WordPress, or the Path does in Drupal. Maybe there’s another bit to twiddle for that to kick in…I’ll have more thoughts over the next few days - I’m setting up an instance for a demo on Friday. Right now, Drupal feels more “fluid” but Joomla feels more “newspaper-ish”. If that makes sense.
Read MoreJust installing Mambo for a demo of various CMS options to the team tomorrow. The Mambo 4.5.2.3 installer borked while creating a table, choking on a missing default value for “rating_sum”.
Easy fix. Line 221 of mambo/installation/sql/mambo.sql is dealing with setting up the content_rating table. Modify the sql thusly:
`rating_sum` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
Aside from that silly sql bug, the Mambo installer is pretty slick. I’ll likely blog my early thoughts of it as a CMS, after I’ve played with it for awhile…
Read MoreI wanted to update my Archives page to display the total tag count, but didn’t see a built-in method in Ultimate Tag Warrior to do that. So, here’s the recipe I followed - mimicking how the other methods are set up, in case the changes get rolled into the main distro…
In ultimate-tag-warrior.php:
function UTW_ShowUniqueTagCount() {
global $utw;
echo $utw->GetUniqueTagCount();
}
In ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php:
function GetUniqueTagCount() {
global $wpdb, $tabletags;
$sql = "select count(*) from $tabletags";
return $wpdb->get_var($sql);
}
And, in K2’s page-archives.php (or anywhere you want the count to show up):
This morning, I saw that James Farmers’ Edublogs service is being banned in Australia. Censored. Blocked. Verboten. It irked me, and has been bugging me all day. Now, Brian just posted about it, and I realize I need to publicly demonstrate some form of outrage at this. It’s not enough to quietly grumble, or to simply comment on James’ blog post.
Censorship is inherently evil. The goal of censorship, by definition, is to prevent access to, or dissemination of information. Some might say it is a necessary evil, but I’d respond that it’s a very slippery slope, and that it’s far too easy to slide down past a point of no return.
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I got a new TruePower battery for my 2.5 year old 3G iPod last week. It took a grand total of 20 minutes to install, and after charging the battery, my iPod is performing better than it did the day I bought it.
I’ve gone entire work-days (including commute to/from the office) with about a third of the battery life left. It never went that long when the iPod was new. I no longer have to worry about my battery recharge cycle (don’t forget to charge it when you get into the office, or it will be dead when you go home. don’t forget to leave it in the dock all night at home, or it will be dead in the morning. etc… very liberating).
Read MoreI get occasional emails asking me about what plugins I use to run this blog. I don’t mind answering them coughAlecahem but having an up-to-date colophon might be helpful, too.
I just copied the table from the WordPress plugin manager, trimmed out the “Action” column, and pasted it into the colophon for this blog. I’ve noticed that some plugins provide incorrect or incomplete URLs to the plugin description/download page. I’ll find/fix the links when I get a chance. And no, I’m not turning the colophon into a wiki ;-)
Read MoreI gave a presentation/workshop this morning introducing 20 folks to wiki. “Collaborative Publishing with Wiki”. The session went really well, I think, and there have already been edits by some attendees on the U of C wiki (and perhaps on Wikipedia as well).
Here’s an interactive Quicktime version of the presentation. I didn’t record audio - I really need to record the full session. If you view it, imagine me talking about stuff, and making things really interesting and clear. It’s another modified-Lessigian-style presentation, so no bullet points, and some of the slides may not make too much sense without me talking. If a slide looks odd, imagine something interesting or pithy, and click the mouse to go to the next one…
Read MorePatrick just came by to ask me about my experience with GoDaddy, so I was telling him about the great deal - 25 GB of bandwidth per month and 500MB of disk space. Patrick looked at me quizzically and said “No, that’s not right… It’s 250GB and 5GB.”
Wha? So, I check my GoDaddy account, and they’ve increased the hosting account limits! It is now 250GB of bandwidth per month, and 5GB of disk space. For $5CDN/month.
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I’ve been playing with Google Analytics since I saw Tim Bray mention it last week. It looks like Google bought the Urchin webserver stats cruncher, rolled into their Adsense service, and are offering it for free. Although it seems rather tilted towards optimizing Adsense revenue, it’s also quite useful for non-Adsense usage.
I’ve been letting it chew for a week to see what kind of data it came up with, and am really impressed with the reports it provides. My only real beefs are that the data is delayed (-1/2 star) - by sometimes a day or more - and that it borks in Safari (-1/2 star). And, the interface seems really complicated (-1 star) - I keep forgetting where the various reports live. Are they visible under “Executive” mode? “Webmaster”? “Marketer”? And, some of the terminology used to describe the reports is a bit non-intuitive. Maybe not if you’re an Adsense geek, but for a regular web-head, I keep thinking “uh, what does this report tell me - they do provide nice paragraphs under each report to give the gist of it, though.
Read MoreStephen Downes posted a link to a Salon article on Community-based economy.
It strikes me that moving away from a market-driven economy (in whatever form that may take) would solve or at least alleviate many of the things that bug me about Modern Life. The omnipresent advertising. The insane bubble-and-burst stock market. TV being so dumbed down as to make the vast majority of it useless, or IQ-decreasing, or worse. The need to “monetize” everything. The resistance to making difficult yet necessary decisions (like, say, avoiding the Peak Oil crisis, for example).
Read MoreOur office space is being renovated/downsized to make room for a new bioinformatics lab. All of the construction/cleanup/setup on our side of the floor was supposed to be done over the weekend, but it wasn’t. And they’ve already started demolition of the area I was in last week. So… Until they finally get around to correctly setting up my area, I’m homeless at work. I’m poaching an ethernet line from a nearby cube today, with the iPod cranked waaay up to drown out the noise of movers and furniture-setter-uppers. If I didn’t have stuff that I promised would be done today, I’d just write off the day as “downtime” and head home. No chance of working from home with Evan home (and awake).
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