I’m torn on whether to split the Links posts from the main feed. Is it too noisy? Do the Links posts drown out the “real” posts? Does that matter?
I’m really just pulling the daily links here to make a single place for me to search stuff - posts, links, etc… - so I suppose there’s no real reason to have the Links posts also going out on the main feed for the blog. Asides are already completely separate (don’t show on main page, don’t show in main feed, having a separate feed just for them) so it’d be pretty easy to set Link posts up to do the same.
I’ve been running a copy of the excellent Feed2JS RSS feed embedder script on one of our servers for a few years(!) now. It’s a great way to embed any RSS feed onto any web page. The problem is that it’s a little too attractive to some of the more leecherly and unsavoury members of teh intarwebs. I occasionally take a peek at who’s using the script, and have found SEO tweakers, gambling sites, porn sites, warez, etc… all using it to aggregate their stuff together. That’s fine, but download your own copy rather than stuffing my server’s logs and cache directories with your crap.
I’ve switched themes on my blog. Again. And, once more, I just yanked an off-the-shelf theme and slightly tweaked the CSS to make it do what I want.
Before (left), using the excellent Journalist theme, and after (right) using the Magazine Basic theme:
They’re both good, so why switch? I was messing around with Magazine Basic for a blog at the Teaching & Learning Centre, where we needed a more magazine or newspaper feel to it. And was struck by how much I liked the theme. I like that it’s very clean, but polished. It only shows excerpts for the last few articles on the front page, and will show small versions of images if they’re available for a post. I like that it’s not purely river-of-posts - there’s no “Older Posts” link on the front page. Once things trickle off the front, they’re accessed via the category and tag pages. No humans use the “Older Posts” stuff, and googlebot has a full index of the site, so that design was redundant clutter anyway. I like that full posts aren’t on the front page - that means more posts are visible at a glance, and most people won’t even notice because they’re coming from Google (directly to a post anyway) or RSS.
Jim’s recent post including the drive-in intermission clip made me think about the last time I watched a movie in a drive-in. It was 1980, and my family packed into the Olds Custom Cruiser station wagon to head out to the Corral Drive-In. My sister and I got to stretch out in the back of the car to watch the movie in comfort. We’d do that pretty regularly. I remember back when the sound came from a box that fit onto the window of the car - before they got all fancy with their own mini radio stations for the audio.
I followed Jim’s instructions to get UCalgaryBlogs.ca converted from using a single database (as is the default) to using multiple databases (17 separate databases now) via the premium.wpmudev.org Multi-DB code to prevent growing pains. The single database config is good for getting up and running, but with 300 blogs in the system, table explosion was causing grief on the shared MySQL database server - there were almost 3000 tables, which was making the automated backup script complain a bit.
Rob Cottingham gave the second keynote presentation at Northern Voice 2009 (following a great presentation by Nora Young, who delivered a live-performance radio show that wonderfully got the conference rolling)
Here's Rob's keynote. This is one of the reasons I love Northern Voice - I haven't been to another conference that had a standup comic routine as a keynote, and have it so fully and faithfully capture the spirit and set the tone for the entire conference. Nearly every other presenter tied their session somehow back to Rob's keynote.
(you might need to view the post to see the video - I have no idea if it will survive RSSification)
The Reverend just posted a link to a great video produced by EDUCAUSE, which is basically a discussion between Jim Groom and Gardner Campbell on edupunk. It’s well worth viewing. I’m going to be passing it around here on campus.
I just tried logging into ucalgaryblogs.ca using a test user account, and was surprised to see a strange item in the admin bar at the top of the page:
I was curious, so I clicked it.
mwah? Those are site-admin items, being displayed to a non-admin user. I was actually able to click the “Admin Message” item to set that, even though the logged in user wasn’t an admin. Scary. Luckily, nobody’s noticed the extra menu yet - or if they have, they’ve behaved.
I’m not going to write up a summary/reflection/whatever post. It was a blast as always. And, as always, the best part was hanging out friends - old and new. I’m wishing I’d taken more photos of that part, but here’s the only recap I’ll be posting.
Facebook recently revised the terms of service for their website. They have a right to do so. I have a right not to like the new terms. Here’s the snippet that put the last nail in the Facebook-as-content-application coffin for me:
Licenses
You are solely responsible for the User Content that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.
I just pushed the latest version of the WP-Sentry plugin out to general use on UCalgaryBlogs.ca - any site can now enable it to have the ability to create groups and to set the audience for posts and pages. A site admin can create groups and put members of the site into any number of groups - which can also be hierarchically arranged - and then the members can decide who should be allowed to see the posts that they publish.
I’ve been looking at various options for student response systems - primarily clickers - and have been quite frustrated at how that market is set up. I wouldn’t be able to recommend use of those, in good conscience, given the recurring costs. It also seems a little strange to compel students to buy a specific piece of hardware to perform the task, when they (almost) all have laptops and/or smartphones in their hands anyway.
I followed 
