EduGlu Sandbox

This is awesome, found it via Dan Coleman’s Open Culture blog, and it is just amazing how insane people can be (if it isn’t a fake, but I tend to agree with Dan that this is the real deal). Sometimes I love humanity, and the minute and half video below is why. Despite the bill of goods the Age of Enlightenment sold us, reason has no place in the greatest of human genius! And what was that Adam Smith said about self interest?

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So, to pick up on parts 1 and 2, part 3 is an examination of some of the uses and possibilities of feed-driven architecture for dealing with the varying ways we might understand a portfolio, which—as Stephen Downes notes here—is in the midst of a pretty significant transformation. A change premised on re-imagining the portfolio as not so much a static receptacle for work completed, but a dynamic space for both reflection and presentation of an on-going development, or “portfolio-ing” as Alan Levine’s comment points out. This shift parallels the way many are approaching their actual work in this field (and many others, something Jon Udell calls professional blogging) as part of an ongoing, networked conversation about process and collaboration, rather than some isolated, fixed product.

An RSS-Driven Departmental Portfolio Review Project

All of which makes me think about the project Professor Sarah Allen and I have been working on for her Writing Process course. Each member of the class was asked to create their own blog and post various papers and revisions to the blog as a kind of digital notebook in which they would publish the work for peer review and feedback (all of which fed back into the course blog, a now “classic” course aggregated model for using blogs at UMW). The class was focused on process, and part of the approach was to understand writing as a dynamic, unfolding art form that must be labored over with numerous revisions, iterations and approaches.

During this year’s Tech Fellows program Sarah and I came up with an RSS-driven framework for delivering the “final” version of a English majors essays to a secure space so that faculty could conduct a blind review for assessment purposes. The samples would come from a select group of English courses (Sarah’s Writing Process course being the test case). Traditionally this was handled through a BlackBoard drop box, wherein the essays were uploaded without students names and then reviewed by faculty. To do this they would have to download the papers, print them out, comment on them, than convene with other members of the review committee to discuss the them.

The thought Sarah and I had was there’s has gotta be a better way to streamline this portfolio review process. So, what we did was rather simple, Sarah had all her students writing in their own blog throughout the course of the semester, and publish their revised essays as they finished them. Once a student considered an essay to be a final version, they tagged it with “final paper.” We got the sitewide RSS feed for every post tagged with “final version” and fed them into a blog called ELC Assessment.† The assessment blog is now populated with final, anonymous essays that the department review committee can comment upon from anywhere and have a distributed discussion about the writing, better yet it is all easily protected so that only English, Linguistics and Communication faculty can access it (we left the example open, because it’s a proof of concept).

UMW Lablogs

UMW Biology professor Steve Gallik provides yet another example of how an RSS-driven infrastructure can make things a whole lot easier, and provide students with a practical portfolio of their lab work. I posted about this project earlier this academic year and Steve and I will be presenting it at the EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference. This was a grand experiment, and I think it has some serious possibilities for thinking about managing a scientific portfolio of experimentations and labs.

In short, Steve Gallik developed an entire suite of online laboratory resources wherein students can record the results of their experiments, something he terms an Online Laboratory Suite. Well, if that’s not impressive enough, Andy Rush and Steve Gallik conceptualized a way to take the experiment results for each student and create a RSS feed for it. When each student signs up for an account on Steve’s Online laboratory Suite, they are immediately sent an RSS feed that they place within a spam-blog plugin like FeedWordPress on their own blog, choose the category to publish it to, and before you know it they have an aggregated, feed-driven lab notebook (or a LabLog) of their work that automatically updates as they complete their online labs.

What I like about this project is how clearly it suggest that whether or not you can program your own laboratory software like Steve Gallik, having a publishing platform that is framed around syndication effects everyone. If we do have online lab software being used by a department, isn’t it about time we expected to have an RSS feed for student work? Steve’s LabLogs represents a powerful model for thinking about how students can easily re-publish their own labs into a format they can control, re-publish, and re-purpose as they see fit.

The Macaulay Honors College E-Portfolios Using WPMu

Joe Ugoretz, who is the Director of Technology and Learning at The Macaulay Honors College (part of the CUNY system), has been pushing the envelope in terms of the small pieces loosely joined approach to integrating technology into teaching and learning. Joe, with the agile help of Jeff Drouin, has been using open source CMSs, wikis, and blogs to great effect during his first yearat Macaulay. After a few brief e-mail exchanges with Joe about using WPMu as an e-portfolio system, he invited me up to talk his crack cadre of graduate student Tech Fellows about the small pieces loosely joined approach to educational technology. And as always, I focused on the work UMW has been doing with WPMu in particular.

It was great fun for me, in particular because I started out in this field as a tech fellow at the CUNY Honors College almost four years ago. So going back talking about this stuff was pretty cool, and I could warn them to resist getting too deep into blogs and wikis lest they get hooked and never finish their dissertation, only to find they have become a fanatical, raving EdTech lunatic

So I recently discovered that Joe has decided to pull the trigger on a WPMu driven portfolio project, and it is alrady up and running, you can read more about it on his blog here and see the actual site here. How cool! Joe is an impressive guy, and he is not afraid to experiment with these powerful, open source publishing platforms, which at CUNY means a lot. To quote Jon Udell talking about UMW two years ago, Joe has really put the Macauly Honors College in the catbird seat when it comes to instructional technologies. He is not afraid to experiment with a wide array of open web and open source tools, and he understands the importance of deploying them rapidly and always already as beta to see how they will fare. That is the pace you need to keep currently, and it is why most of the rest of CUNY is screeching to a devastating standstill when it comes to instructional technologies (Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute’s Blogs@Baruch being the other brilliant exception, thanks to Mikhail Gershovich and Luke Waltzer).

Moreover, Macaulay has a manageable incoming class of 300 students every year, all of which are distributed amongst seven different senior colleges of CUNY (I think it’s seven?). A small college loosely joined that may prove an extremely powerful example of how these tools might bring a de-centralized learning community into some kind of online focus. Needless to say, I love Joe’s style and I’ll be watching the Macauly Eportfolio project closely over the next year.

OK, that’s enough about e-portfolios, now it’s time to get ready for Faculty Academy, miles to go before I sleep.

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† We got the feed for this tag by first using sitewide categories feeds for WPMu where all the posts were categorized as “final paper,” but the MuTags RSS feed extension—which you have to pay $50 for—will prove the better option, for students can just tag their posts as final paper (or what ever) and you get a sitewide feed for the tag without the sitewide categories feed hack which can get ugly. Once you have the sitewide RSS feed for this tag, just activate the FeedWordPress plugin and it will automatically re-publish any post within the WPMu environment tagged “final paper.” What’s nice about the FeedWordPress plugin is that it will sync all changes to a previously published post. Also, you have options to not include post author, you can prevent a linkback to original post, as well as the ability to place all feeds for a certain tag into a specific category of the assessment blog (so all of Sarah’s class papers will be placed in the category “Writing Process”). Groovy! —or should I say Groomy?

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Stephen Downes already linked to it, so this may be irrelevant, nonetheless if you missed Mike Caulfield’s post about Monica Hesse’s article in the Washington Post, be sure to check it out, it is awesome. Without question one of the best deconstructions I have yet to read of how the traditional nodes (or is it modes?) of authority attack all kinds of web-based information as amateur and unreliable which often leads to a conflating of their established positions of authority with truth. His analysis and research centers around a quote in Monica Hesse’s article from Abraham Lincoln, “Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg,” that establishes the conceit of her critique of the current state of online research and amateur culture. His precise “unraveling” of this argument is awesome.

Authority isn’t truth, and this reading offers a phenomenal example of how all too often those self-appointed defenders of “truth” are the one’s we should be worried about. Behind their righteous vision of reality there lies motives for power and control. Boy is it nice to have Mike back on the blog feeding gems like this to his fellow amateurs.

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Show ID: 60545


Start at: 3/28/2008 5:06 am PST


Embed: http://www.ustream.tv/s2lw0z9w2N,s4FklmKeJBw.usc

Description: Topics associated with all aspects of Amateur Astronomy,

PREVIOUS SHOW was Sunday 27th January 2008 @ 19-30hrs GMT
Phil Harrington talks live and delivers his presentation, "Urban StarGazer" See first pre-recorded clip to view

LAST SHOW,Was Sat 23r

Luke Waltzer over at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College, CUNY just turned me on to an awesome use of a WordPress blog in a course. Professor Zoë Sheehan Saldaña of the Fine and Performing Arts Department has her students sharing the resources they find online by way of a class blog. More than that, each student designed an animated, flash-based header for the blog as an assignment, so the actual class blog is now also a dynamic portfolio of the work the students are doing. What an awesome intersection of uses of this online space: sharing resources, publishing platform, collaborating on projects, and a class art gallery.

Click on the image above to be taken to the class blog, and click the refresh button to view the 20 flash-based headers designed by the students in the class.

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I love you commenters. You make the blog go round.

Following up on the last “story” post about an old electric guitar, Cole alertly noticed I’ve been playing around with my writing both here and in my flickr stream with some extended personal yarns (David’s Chair. Seeing the Door). Yes, its my blog and I can switch my topics, though I am not sure any more what is on topic or off topics.

Especially in my flickr stuff, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to weaving more thoughtful (or at least intended that way) text than just a caption or, as I remarked in my recent talks, enough of these hastily posted photos where the only context is a title like “IMG10253.JPG”. There is some curiously interesting, for me, energy with not just including a picture as an illustration but weaving words and images into some combination, making the images communicate words and the words maybe communicate pictures.

So I am wondering its fine and self-fulfilling to do these personal stories, how do I extend this writing style (if there is really one) into other topics? This remains to be seen.

Or maybe I am just bored about writing things about spammers, ed tech, WordPress, or PHP.

Nope. Those are still topics I like.

But a bloggers writing ought to be always evolving unless one begins to drink to much of their own self hype.

And even more, as my own sister comments (which is both weird and neat to have family members reading my rants), I completely forgot a side segment of the Telecaster story. Having given up my one true love guitar, I did purchase a cheapie, a Fender Mustang:

photo credit: jensonbigcat

Mine was uglier, black with some candy-ass starburst pattern. The tremolo bar was funky.

But it was no blonde Telecaster.

Anyhow, before I left Baltimore for by big western journey to Arizona (yet another series of stories), my last night was a party with the old friends, steamed crabs and beer of course.. and I decided to do my own Pete Townsend and smash that crummy guitar on a rock in my back yard.

Somewhere there are analog photos of this, some mullet head kid smashing a guitar. It was a moment indeed, thanks sis for pulling it out of the dust bin.

D'Arcy Norman posted a photo:

after taking the time to scatter the photographs and mementos for the previous shot, I cleaned them up to give to Evan. And wound up liking this shot so much better than the original version I was trying for.

LiveBlog of Matt Mullenweg's Keynote --

Streamed at http://ustream.tv/channel/nv08 (at least some of it)

Note: This liveblog is rough -- just notes, no editing

Beginning blog platforms --
Open Diary -- 1998
LiveJournal -- 1999

5 years ago -- based on B2

Over 7 million downloads

MM on what Bloggers want -- "Bloggers hierarchy of needs"

1. Expression
The most important tab on the WP blog is the Presentation tab -- allows people to change the theme

A lot of successful web 2.0 companies are successful because they protect users from spam communication

2. Public -- privacy is important, but publically available should be the default -- things that make it easier to connect/follow can have an exponential effect on growth/readership

3. Validation -- check stats to get a sense of readership

4. Form Dictates Writing wrt blogs

Exhortations:
1. Remove the Friction -- make the software 100% invisible
Prediction: volume of posting will blow away all predictions --

4 million pages created on WP.com every month

Wikipedia has 2.1 million pages

Not a shortage of information -- need to filter --

"Two Public Service Announcements"

Achilles Heel of Web 2.0 is spam

FaceBook spam

Content used to be most valuable thing -- attention now the most valuable thing

Exhortation #3 (I missed 2 -- whoops) -- Kill the megabrands

"Matt's Third Law of Social Media -- Unfiltered interaction is worthless at scale -- ie, it doesn't work

Used YouTube example of recommended content

1st generation social networks about creating connections

2nd generation (Web 2.0): people congregating around social objects: Youtube -- Videos; Flickr -- Photos; etc.

Data needs to be filtered to add value to the experience of social networking/social media

Transition to Open Source

Ask Not What Your Software Can Do For You

How to impact OS without coding:
Documentation
Taste of Freedom -- the tools we use in our lives are better than "enterprise" solutions --

Mentions 4 freedoms of social software: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

What matters is that we get the data architectures running systems running on open standards

A wiki for every bill: see who made what changes, and when

Create Open Source alternatives that are better

The spam problem has been the bane of openly available “web 2.0″ sites since, well, forever. Everyone universally hates spam. Everyone, universally, wants to see it go away. Why is it still a problem?

Wait. Not everyone wants it to go away. There are two groups of people who benefit from spam.

• spammers
• google

Of course spammers won’t stop - they have a money factory running, and are locked in an arms race against the global online community in an effort to game ever larger lumps of cash from Google.

Google says they want it to stop. They came up with a wonderful solution that would have stopped spam in its tracks - the only downside was that the solution would have destroyed the network effects of the web by negating links. Baby? Meet bathwater. Meet half-assed “solution” that lets Google say “hey! we tried! Really we did!”

But, why did Google stop at a half-assed solution? Why not go fully-assed? Because they benefit from spam. Every time some moron stupidly clicks on a spam factory’s Google ads, Google gets a cut, and they happily send cash to the spammer.

The evil spam roaches inflict their spam on the various “web 2.0″ resources - anything that has an open form intended to foster dialogue and conversation - this spam gets indexed by Google, who then send the roaches a cut of all proceeds from the ads on those spam factory websites.

Anyone else see a conflict of interest here?

There is an easy solution.

Google: to stop the spam, you have to stop paying the spammers.

How to do that? Well, I’m not a multi-bajillion-dollar company stuffed to the rafters with PhDs or anything, but how about this for a start:

If someone reports a website as a spam factory, their adsense revenue goes into an escrow-like state until it can be shown to NOT be spam. They don’t lose any money if they’re legit, but they have the opportunity to lose their revenue if they are shown to be evil spam roaches. What to do with the revenue seized from verified spam factory adsense accounts? Google can’t keep it - it just maintains the conflict of interest. They should donate it all to the EFF or something similar.

Photo credits:

• Google sign
• Phat wad of cash
• Spam truck
• Web 2.0 Tag Cloud
• Roaches

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It all started with a post on Stephen’s blog about WordPress.Com As OpenCourseWare. That took me to EduGlu, with a very nice diagram of an Open Content and Open Learning environment (seems to be a good diagram of a PLE as well).
Joining EduGlu was fine, trying to add my blog and then to make a comment on the feedback page was a bit more fiddly - and I made a bit of a mess. It’s useful having lots of shared editing buttons. Until drongoes like me make a mistake. (You can’t see it without logging in!)
What had really interested me, though, was the idea of using WordPress for OpenCourseware (or, indeed, any form of Courseware!) Stephen’s post, and the subsequent links to Jim Grooms BavaTuesday (at least, I think it’s his; hard to tell!) answered a question I’ve had for ages. How to use RSS to create posts in a WordPress blog as you can with Elgg. (It was one of the selling points of Elgg for me). I’d not realised that I need to have a spammers mentality. I rather liked Stephen’s reworking of Spam …

Self Propelled Academic Messages

Oh, and David Wiley’s course looks pretty useful too! (I think that it’s a rework of the material on Utah State’s Open Courseware that I pointed students to before)

Listen to this podcast

Introductory Notes

These are some thoughts in progress -- I’ve been thinking these things through for probably the last few years, but things have been getting more interesting of late.

Some of the blog posts that have helped shape my thinking here include:
http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/464
http://www.chrislott.org/2008/02/17/confused-about-the-blog-uproar/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044813.php
http://www.funnymonkey.com/mini-edu-rss
http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/02/16/on-eduglu-part-1-background/
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010236.html -- this is from Tony Hirst, who has an almost overwhelming amount of great information regarding remixing content on his blog.
I've also been thinking about the work Scott Wilson has been doing with FeedForward.

Toward the end of this post, I fall short of the needed conversation when I talk about the Course and Learner sections. There’s more to be said here -- a lot more -- but the poor souls who actually persevere to that point in the post will probably agree that I’ve said enough by then already.

An Open Content and Open Learning environment

External Repository -- in this context, an external repository is a place where content is stored. In many ways, the external repository is an artificial construct that doesn’t need to exist. The single most important argument in favor of the external repository is that the external repo can provide a level of credibility that less “official” sources of information lack. For example, a piece of information coming from the MIT’s OpenCourseware will have more credibility than a YouTube video.

These external repositories, however, need to expose their content via rss/atom, or web services, something that many of them do not do. With that said, it would also be nice to see the major OCW repositories use less pdf’s to allow for easier modification.

On a technical note, Tony Hirst pointed to a Mediawiki plugin that exposes full Mediawiki articles as rss feeds. This extends Mediawiki’s flexibility by allowing Mediawiki content to be imported via rss feeds.

Planning Repository -- the planning repos are the staging grounds of course preparation. Planning repositories will import selected courses from a variety of external repositories. While a limited number of people might have access to an external repository, more people can have access to a planning repository. Within the planning repository, users can edit existing courses, add links, text, images, etc. Then, users can select individual pieces of different courses, and re-organize them into a new course. By definition, planning repositories should be messy. They are workspaces, and should be viewed as a place where people go from draft versions to more polished versions of course materials.

For example: a history department creates an departmental planning repository. Initially, they import a variety of courses from different external repositories. Then, instructors add content as needed. Once they have finished adding content, they select the lessons/material they want for their course. So, an instructor teaching a course on the Rise of Modernism could incorporate material from a course on WWI. Once the instructors have selected and organized their lessons, they export them into their courses.

On the technical side, the planning repository could be a Drupal site built using the FeedAPI. I described how to do this here, and revisited the idea here. Alan Levine (in the comments here) and Jared Stein and Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn (in the comments here ) ask about how to select individual pieces of content for inclusion in a course. Once you have imported content into a Drupal site, you can use Views Bookmarks, Nodequeue, or node references (part of CCK) for doing exactly that.

Once the individual lessons have been selected and organized into a course, they can be exposed via an rss feed.

Mediawiki would also make an excellent planning repository by using XFeed to aggregate external content and the WikiArticle Feeds Extension (linked to above) to generate rss feeds for curriculum.

However, here is another wrinkle: every school is already producing curriculum. Teachers generate curriculum for all of their classes. If a school used a planning repository to coordinate curriculum planning, they could export the polished curriculum to a web site that could become an external repository. In this way, schools generate their curriculum maps and provide open content as part of their ongoing course planning and development process.These planning repositories becoming external repositories would have one enormous advantage over existing content repositories: they would be fully open, with all content within them accessible via rss feeds. For all schools currently undergoing accreditation reviews, how much time are you spending collecting up curricular materials? If you build your curriculum as described in this post, you have all your curriculum ready to hand, and categorized via tags.

It’s worth noting that the technology to do this exists now, and can be built entirely using open source tools.

It’s also worth noting that, using Drupal, you can clone an entire site -- configuration, content, and even user accounts -- and move that site with minimal effort. It’s what we’ve been doing with DrupalEd for nearly a year, and with less sophisticated class sites since September of 2005.

Courses -- In this context, courses are blog based tools, and could be delivered via a tool like Wordpressor Drupal. Curricular material could be imported; Jim has shown how to do this, D’Arcy has shown how to do this , and the aggregation examples I linked to earlier show how to do this.

The feeds of learners taking the course could be added to a blogroll, or, in the case of Drupal, could be imported directly into the site. With OpenID becoming more prevalent, students could either be site members, or be granted access via their OpenID. This flexibility would allow learners to interact with the course using their preferred tools, and, if they wanted, using their pre-established online identity.

Learners -- In this context, learners are just about anyone. You don’t need to be a student to be a learner, although, for obvious reasons, most schools probably wouldn’t allow open enrollment in their courses.

For me, the interesting piece of this has to with the potential for a true PLE. While I’m not particularly enamored of the whole notion of the PLE (I see it as more of a construct than a piece of technology, and something that is better achieved via innate curiosity than lines of code, but that’s another conversation), this system of open learning solves one of the main problems inherent in most PLE implementations: how to get course content out of the course and into the PLE. In this situation, that’s not an issue, as learners use their chosen tools to contribute in their courses. As they are doing the work from their platform, they retain control of their work in a way that just isn’t possible using proprietary LMS’s, or even open source LMS’s like Moodle.

Next Steps

The next steps could include any/all of the following:

• A school, or a group of teachers, banding together to create course materials in a planning repository. Dan Meyer has called for something along these lines a while back.
• More teachers using a blog-based approach to delivering content. The WPMU work that Jim helped spearhead shows one way of doing this; and the folks at BYU have illustrated another way of doing this.
• Existing Open Content repositories could actually expose their content via rss feeds. If this happened, one of the enornous barriers to actually using the open content that has been published to date would be removed.

These thoughts are incomplete -- what's missing? What needs closer examination? What else needs to be considered here?

My oft repeated line this year is something about most enjoying the net based things that happen totally without provocation, plan, just spontaneous connectedness. I am sure that its maybe 3% of the general population that can really experience this with wide eyed excited wonder, and I am fortunate to know some of the best among that percentage.

I was setting down to shoot down some emals, perhaps edit those audios I need to publish soon, like yesterday, and as the habit goes, I said, “I’ll just check twitter quickly, just a minute to scroll.” And there, in the 5 seconds ago, I saw Jen was linking to a ustream.tv channel she was broadcasting on. I’d not done hardly any ustreaming since my trip to Australia, and said, hey, I wonder how it works if you have multiple people broadcasting?

So I flipped on my channel and we could pretty much talk back and forth, and she was relaying chats from ?? Alec Couros and/or Rob Wall?? So without knowing what else to do on camera, I reached for my prop, and brought Fresa on screen:

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D'Arcy Norman posted a photo:

a motorized solar system mobile that we put on Evan's bedroom ceiling. it's not really to scale - that would have been really cool, but a bit hard to find the planets...

Let me join the Jim Groom Kum-Ba-Ya I Love WordPress Chorus. In this least year, I’ve rolled out 3 NMC web sites that are published via WordPress, with each one going deeper into the bowels of the templates and just more jazzed how I can bend them to my will, casting CSS, PHP, plugins, MySQL to do my bidding. This is unlike drupal, where after a year I am still trying to figure out just how the heck it works and manages information. Its still a grey murky, opaque blue gumdrop box. I am trying to summon the drupal love, and it aint happening.

But WordPress, you make me sing. In this blog post that portends to be a monster one of length, I am going to dissect a new site I worked in gory technical detail.

On each of these sites, I have started with a standard template and slowly ripped the guts apart. So far, in the stable, is the NMC Campus Observer which began as the Blix template. Then there is NMC Virtual Worlds a child of the Orange 2.0 Theme, and one where I learned to create multiple page templates, use custom fields to spawn content specific sidebars, and rolling my own database queries to get posts I really wanted. Our podcast site, NMC Conversations is probably the least modded, a few tweaks of the redoable theme.

Now the thing I also love about WordPress is there are many levels of creativity you can operate at. You can simply blog, never tinker with the templates, and easily switch out themes like a new pair of socks. That’s great; it means you are focused on the content. Or you can get way down into the guts of the engine. Now I don’t do much with widgets- I think the concept is great for many bloggers as it offers a nice amount of flexibility on what you slap on your sidebar… but in my case, I find them horribly limited and boxed in.. cause I know I can easily script my way to something better. Or you can somewhere in between- add your own graphics header, toss some specific text or web javascript code in the sidebar.

So as I get closer to the details, I remind you the stuff I am talking about is what you can do with your own code on a hosted server; while the WordPress.com service is fabulous (I used it myself this year), its simplicity comes at a price of severe lack of template tinkering. You really cannot do much there.

BEFORE:

The site I am going to talk about is the NMC Pachyderm Services web site, which replaces a static HTML tabled encrusted, hand code the navigation links” Pachyderm.org web site, which was not all that bad, but once you go to database driven template sites, it just hurts to hand code an HTML site.

AFTER:

So I am going to talk alot about the mangling I did in the templates along with some plugins I deploy (and tweak too). I should say I go about waist deep into the CSS and full body dive into the PHP code of the templates. And for some of these sites, I make a bend away from the standard format of blog as reverse chronological series of “posts”. I make web sites, not blogs.

Some of this stuff may get nitty gritty in detail, but I am intrigued to see if I can document all the little pieces that came together for this site. To be honest, these really develop organically, and sometimes change/evolve with more content dumped in.

(more…)

This mockup site is working pretty well, but there are a few minor-ish issues remaining before it's ready for prime time (i.e., Northern Voice)

• tags in aggregated items need to be honoured - it's not cool for the Yahoo! autotagging to clobber tags, as that makes things like class- or project-based tagging of blog posts impossible
• better, and more refined Views for workflow management - just the newest stuff in my group(s), etc...
• a date-based interface to allow refinement of views based on day/week/month/year. Is a calendar overkill?
• expose OPML export of feeds for a group
• expose OPML import of feeds for a user
• streamline the blocks more - it's pretty cluttered and noisy now
• make it purty

I decided to move my blog hosting back onto the North side of the border. There were a couple of reasons, but by far the largest was the ongoing poor server performance I’ve been having at Dreamhost. It seemed like there was nothing I could do to improve performance, or at the least reduce bottlenecks. Enough was enough, and it was time to move. CanadianWebHosting.com has some good prices - a touch more expensive than Dreamhost, and not with the insane (i.e., infinite and imaginary) limits on bandwidth and drive space. It felt like Dreamhost was overextended, at least on the server I was on. Whereas my old Dreamhost server had typical loads (as indicated by top) around 50, my CanadianWebHosting server has a more sane 0.1 average. In initial testing, dynamically generated page loads went from 20-60 seconds down to 400ms or so. I can live with that, especially with static page caching enabled so most accesses should be almost instantaneous.

The other factor was repatriating my hosting back onto Canuck soil. There are a couple of sub-factors here. First, the Patriot Act and DMCA scare the hell out of me. It’s not like I’m writing anything that could invoke either, but just having them hanging over me felt uncomfortable. Although CSIS can strongarm access to any server in the country anyway, it’s not a legislated standard operating procedure.

Subfactor 1.2: a slight move toward local hosting. Sure, CanadianWebHosting.com is located in Richmond, which isn’t exactly “local”, but that’s a full 2000 km north of Dreamhost’s LA datacentre. And it’s kinda nice knowing at least my data is able to live in Lotusland.

CanadianWebHosting (B) is just a scootch closer to home (C) than Dreamhost’s LA datacentre (A).

I feel a little bad, having recommended Dreamhost so highly, and being at least partially responsible for a few people moving onto it. Hopefully, they’re happy with the service - when it worked for me, Dreamhost was really great. It’s just that I somehow hit the ceiling, and it was much lower than it should have been.

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this is talking about "social media" but is not a bad diagram of a really messy PLE