Last week, an undergrad student here at the U of C stumbled across both weblogs.ucalgary.ca and wiki.ucalgary.ca. This student was familiar with blogging and wiki (having a LiveJournal already), and dove right in. And quickly proceeded to blow me away with what a student can/will do given a bit of trust and some supporting resources.
In the 6 days since discovering the wiki, this student has made 206 edits to pages. Created new pages. Created page templates. Categories. Shell pages for faculties, departments, and clubs. Templates for user pages. Fleshed out a very interesting user page for himself (including a couple of ideas that I will blatantly borrow for myself). In the “old” way of publishing stuff to the internet, this would have never happened, because there is no way in hell an Institution would let an undergrad edit a faculty web page. Oh, how things change when you open up a little.
Holy CRAP that’s annoying. I have Safari running on both computers pretty much 100% of the time. My Powerbook’s copy is set to use RSS, and to update feeds automatically. I’d noticed earlier this morning that my subscriptions were holding almost 30,000 items. I thought to myself “Hey, that’s cool! Usually, it corrupts and resets itself to a fresh database at around 20,000 items. I guess that problem’s been fixed somehow.”
One of the things I really love about WordPress is its always-fresh style of pulling pages directly from the database rather than generating hundreds or thousands of static pages. It makes publishing much quicker - you’re just adding a new row to the posts table - since there is no “Publishing Pages” stage, as in MovableType etc…
However, that is also the Achilles heal of WordPress - works fine as long as the load is miniscule, but if you get Slashdotted, or have a bunch of simultaneous views, the database can bog down pretty dramatically. Usually, that’s not a problem, but the threat is there.
So, Jakob Nielsen is at it again, with a list of The Top Ten Weblog Design Mistakes. Surprisingly, this blog does relatively well at avoiding the stuff he’s pointing out. I could be linking posts together better - I’ve been relying on tags/categories/“related entries” to do that automagically, since links will likely break if I change blog software sometime in the distant future. However, more explicit links would be a Good Thing™.
In the Pachyderm presentation publishing code, there is a step where it compiles the various versions of images for use in the final product - resizing as needed, wrapping in the .swf file and burning in the metadata. It uses an XML format, provided by JSwiff, to replace the freeze-dried content of a templated flash file wrapper with the dynamically defined data (image and text).
We just do a simple find-and-replace, looking for special tags that we’ve placed in the templated .swf xml version - looking for things like “{tombstoneTitleShort}” and replacing it with “My Most Excellent Photo”. Seems simple. But I just came across a case where it failed. The extended text for an image included a $ - which would be fine, but it’s a Magic Regex Character, symbolizing the end of a line of text (likewise, ^ symbolizes the beginning of a line). And, it was unescaped (and not at the end of a line), so the String.replaceAll() method was barfing appropriately. I think this is what was happening… Looked like it from the debug output, anyway…
I just poked around the Spam Karma 2 reports, and realized that for the first time, ever, it’s showing more actual approved comments than denied spam attempts. Usually, there are hundreds of spam attempts listed for every successful comment - I never see the spam attempts, except for in these reports.
But, here’s what Spam Karma 2 is telling me:
There were 33 successful comments since I last looked, and only 31 spam attempts. Normally, there would be about 100-200 spam attempts listed here. Of course, none of them would actually make it to the blog, and I wouldn’t even know about them unless I bothered to check the spam log…
For the last couple of days, I was experimenting with running Google Adsense on my blog. I’d tried it before - mostly to see how well it matched ads to content - and removed it then, too. I put it on, calling it my “iPod fund” - but felt kind of dirty. I didn’t like the feeling, but justified it in my head - figuring it wasn’t hurting anyone, and just might buy me a toy or two…
The first home game since the Flames made their dash for the Stanley Cup - the entire city has been waiting for this for a year. And the game is banished to CTV SportsNet? Why the hell isn’t the game on every single channel? Hockey Night in Canada should be doing a special event. Heck, even TSN could cover it - it’s part of the basic cable package, so would reach the whole city. CBC has decided it’s better to run Coronation Street and Canadian Antiques Road Show (from Montreal). Coronation Street? Really?
It looks like I’ll be doing a couple of campus-wide workshops on the whole weblogs/wikis/rss/etc… stuff here at the University of Calgary. I’m going to try to pace it a little better than previous rounds, so will be breaking it into separate sessions. The first session will be on weblogs and RSS, to give a tour of what this stuff is, and point people at a few places to get started - weblogs.ucalgary.ca and EduBlogs.org. I’ll follow up a couple of weeks later with a session on wikis - likely focussing on wiki.ucalgary.ca and the wikipedia.
On the left, the “Genres” selector from the iTunes Music Store for the US. On the right, the same “Genres” selector for iTMS Canada.
There’s no “TV” genre in the Canadian store. Searching for “Lost” doesn’t turn up anything related to the TV series. What gives? Some crazy licensing scheme where the Canadian networks are able to block distribution of an American show - which they already rebroadcast on Canadian airwaves?
Larry Johnson just sent an email to the NMC list with news that Blackboard and WebCT are merging. Holy. Crap. I mean - there goes any sense of competition in the LMS game. What’s left to compete? Moodle? Sakai? Something else? I really hope there is more than one Big Player left in the LMS world…
Here’s hoping the new LMS behemoth doesn’t go all Microsoft on our asses, and is able to do something innovative with their new collective girth.
