Blog Posts

trying the latest wp-mollom

I just upgraded to wp-mollom 0.6.0 and it has a bunch of additions and fixes. If anyone has problems with it, please let me know asap.

I met the walrus

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to find where I heard a specific sentence about peace and peacefulness. I’m pretty sure it was triggered by this lost interview with John Lennon, although the exact quote isn’t in it. Either way, it’s a very powerful presentation of a student’s illicit interview with Lennon in 1969.

What is worth knowing?

In my last post, I wrote about page 61 in Teaching as a Subversive Activity - where Postman and Weingartner asked the readers to contribute their questions to help shape an inquiry-based education, in response to their initial question “What is worth knowing?”

And now, I’m wondering… If you’re reading this…

What is worth knowing to you? What are the important questions? What are the unimportant questions that should still be asked?

inquiry as a subversive activity

I’ve been reading Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (more info), and I’m finding myself extremely drawn into it. It’s the kind of book that I may have read as an undergrad, but just wasn’t ready for. It’s the kind of book where you need to be ready to really engage with it before it makes sense. And it’s the kind of book that has me rethinking pretty much everything, and seeing new patterns everywhere. The book was written before I was born, and published only a few months before I was. But it feels so intrinsically relevant and important today - maybe moreso now than in 1969.

mollom just got punted

Mollom’s been doing a simply outstanding job of blocking spam lately, after the warm-up period. Unfortunately, it appears to be doing a bang-up job of blocking legitimate, breathing humans who are trying (and failing) to comment. I’m moving antispam back to Akismet for awhile, and am hoping it’s just a growing pain for Mollom - I really like the system and design, but can’t have valid people frustrated when they try to post comments. For now, it’s back to moderating comments through Akismet…

Network vs. Machine

Cole wrote a post about how his Twitter network helped him solve a problem. His blog suddenly decided to stop accepting comments, and he wasn’t sure how that happened, or how to fix it. I was just going to post this as a comment on his blog, but, well, it’s still not accepting comments ;-) (and I apologize if this post comes across as snarky - not intended to - it’s just a pre-caffeinated response to a blog, first thing in the morning…)

WPMU Tweakage for ucalgaryblogs.ca - Part 1

I said I’d share what I’ve done in setting up ucalgaryblogs.ca, and instead of waiting for The Mother of All Blog Posts, I’m going to break it up into a few parts. In Part 1, I’ll talk about some of the mu-plugins I added. Some are really cool, some are just shiny…

Basically, start with a fresh copy of WordPress Multiuser. I’m running 2.6 on ucalgaryblogs.ca. Then, add the following bits into the wp-content/mu-plugins directory.

Pimping the WPMU for ucalgaryblogs.ca

I’ve been slowly tweaking the WPMU install that drives ucalgaryblogs.ca - it’s not quite ready for prime time, but it’s darned close.

It’s now got:

• multiple blogs per user, and multiple users per blog
• subdomain hosting for each blog (i.e., myblog.ucalgaryblogs.ca)
• domain mapping - want to use your own custom domain? want myblog.com to point to the blog you’ve got at myblog.ucalgaryblogs.ca? there’s a setting for that, and then you just have to tell me what domain you want me to tell the webserver to respond to.
• multilingual admin interface. English. French. Spanish. Chinese. Klingon. Well, I still haven’t found the Klingon.po file for WordPress, but once I do… shakesfist
• over 100 themes, most of which are customizable. Want a photoblog? Got it covered. Newsletter? Done. Research project? Sure thing.
• 500MB of upload space quota per user. This could be increased if needed.
• Sitewide tag cloud and archives - want to find out who else is writing about mitochondrial RNA? Just hit the tag…
• Blog directory listing all blogs in the system (currently, some test blogs, and the UC Dinos Football Blog! WOOHOO!)
• A handy-dandy blog manager bar at the top of all pages - if you’re logged in, it gives you easy access to anything you want to do. If you’re not logged in, it gives you an easy place to login from, from any page on the ucalgaryblogs.ca service.
• Lots of other great WordPress goodies, like podcast serving, editing from your iPhone or iPod Touch, great visual editor for posts (with spel chekker, too!) and collaborative blogs with multiple authors.

But, there are still a few things on my todo list before I consider it fully ready for prime time:

Postman - Teaching as a Subversive Activity

I’m working through Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman. I hadn’t read it before, and am seriously kicking myself for that. Some quick notes and quotes from the first couple of chapters. Keep in mind that this book was written in 1968, published in 1969, and reads as though it was crafted in 2008.

3 problems that require schools to remake themselves into training centers for subversion:

Communications Revolution or Media Change:

geotagging in Aperture with Maperture

I’ve been geotagging many of my photos on Flickr, but it’s always bugged me that the geolocation metadata was not available in my Aperture library - geotagging only happened after posting photographs to Flickr, and that metadata was essentially lost from my library.

That just changed. Now I’m using the awesome new Aperture geotagging plugin Maperture, adding latitude and longitude data directly within Aperture before uploading to Flickr etc… That means I get to keep my metadata.

3100km

I passed the 3100km mark on the ride home this afternoon. 3100km ridden on my bike so far in 2008. Seems like a strange milestone - but I’ve now ridden more as of August 12 2008 than I did in all of 2007.

I thought I pretty much maxed out riding last year. But I started riding earlier this year, and have taken a slightly longer route along the Bowmont Natural Pathway to avoid some street riding. And I have ridden almost every single day since mid-January (except for maybe a couple of sick days and miscellaneous days missed due to travel etc…). If I can keep up the pace, I should be able to hit 4-5000km by the end of the year. That’s a LOT of carbon saved…

one week with mollom

I switched to mollom for antispam on my blog one week ago, using the wp-mollom plugin. I wanted to give it a week so it’d get a fair shake, and figured anything had to do better than Akismet and SK2 were doing on my blog.

There was an initial warming up period for the first couple of days - I didn’t realize this, but apparently my blog attracts a particular dialect of spam that is different from what had been seen by mollom before. After teaching it about these silly spammers (most appear to be based in eastern Europe, and use fragments of text from my own blog posts and comments to appear legit) mollom started to do pretty well.