I spent some time this afternoon poking around in the database that runs UCalgaryBlogs.ca to see if I could get a better sense of how it’s growing. Turns out, it’s growing MUCH faster than I thought it was (and I thought it was growing pretty darned fast).
It’s still pretty small scale, compared with giants like WordPress.com and Edublogs.org, but the growth looks pretty much exponential. I’m glad we’ve got lots of room to scale this puppy. And that campus IT isn’t upset with growing demands on database resources.
I’m going to be hanging out less on Twitter. I’m not deleting my account or anything rash, but won’t be accessing it from my desktop or laptop. Only from the iPod, where the drain on the battery will keep the nonstop twitterreloading in check.
I got tired of the noise, and the urge to check in on the noise. It’s silly, and distracting.
I’m going to be posting Asides more often on my blog - posts that don’t get published in the main feed, because they may or may not be relevant to whatever this blog is about.
Taking a photograph is more about capturing light than documenting a subject.
A simple bottle of pilsner, when placed in the bright morning light, comes alive with refractions, reflections, and shadows. It doesn’t hurt that the bottle is so beautifully designed in a clean and strong 50’s aesthetic with thick green glass and a stylized painted label.
It’s a little strange this year. I haven’t had to struggle to get a daily shot yet. Hope I’m not jinxing it…
I’m actually really happy with the project’s photos so far, and it’s fun to see the recurring themes both within the first month, and compared to the first month of 2008. About the same number of photos of the Bow River in Bowmont. Photos of coffee/muffin breakfast taken on almost the same day of the year. It’s kind of cool to see constants, and how they change over time.
I’ve been using Drupal to power websites for several years now, since 4.6 was the latest and greatest. One of the constant, ongoing, relentless complaints from our users has been that Drupal is (or seems) too complicated. It seems hard to use. It takes some care and feeding to initially set up a site. For example, when installing Drupal and creating a site, there is no option to have a rich text WYSIWYG editor, out of the box. Sure, übergeeks would rather gnaw off their paws than use a rich text editor, but Real Live Humans™ need them. They need to be able to edit text visually, and to upload and embed media, without having to follow recipes or read through pages of instructions.
Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 21st century and shattering the wall between users and producers. The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.
So the National Film Board of Canada has flung open the vault to make many national treasures freely available online. Wow. This is such an amazing set of resources, covering the entire range of Canadian culture. Films that helped define who we are.
The WordCampEd Vancouver 2009 website was just moved from a PBWiki site to a shiny new WordPress site. It was odd not using WordPress to power the website for a WordPress-related event, but initially I thought it made more sense to just use a free, low-friction service like PBWiki.
But, now we’ve got a WordPress site, configured to behave kinda wiki-like. Anyone can login (either by creating an account or by using OpenID). Once logged in, you can edit any of the pages, including Sessions, Attendees, Logistics, etc… You can also create new pages (although new pages may need to be “approved” before going live).
The evil spammers have websites listing blogs that are ripe targets for their filthy spam, so it’s only fair that we also share ways to successfully beat them back into submission. I’ve been using Akismet pretty much exclusively on my blog since switching back to WordPress. It’s been pretty good, but sometimes goes into “large-bore sieve mode” and lets in gobs of nastiness. I’d tried Mollom, and while it’s interesting, it didn’t have much luck against the particular flavours of spiced ham that get thrown at my blog.
I’m working on my third year in a photo-a-day photography project, and there are days when it’s pretty near impossible to think of something to shoot. On days like that, you need an assignment - someone to give you a topic or subject, and you go hunting for (or staging) a photo to meet the assignment.
I thought it would be prudent to test the plugins, mu-plugins and themes I run at ucalgaryblogs.ca on the latest prerelease snapshot of WordPress Multiuser 2.7, to check for any incompatibilities or strangenesses. I grabbed the .zip archive from the SVN repository, dropped it onto my desktop, and installed a new site. I then grabbed the contents of my mu-plugins and plugins directories, and a subset of the themes that are used. After farting around repairing some file permission errors (caused by FTPing the files from the server to my desktop under a different user than apache runs under…) it looks like everything Just Works™.
