EduGlu Sandbox

RSS From CommentPress in SL, originally uploaded by NMC Second Life.

I'm still waiting to see the example that fully demonstrates its potential, but I think CommentPress (a very slick WordPress theme/hack from The Future of the Book) is going to end up being absolutely killer in higher education. Jim Groom blogged on its affordances some time ago, describing it as a "revolutionary nested comment functionality that re-imagines the space wherein you can have threaded conversations alongside the text to brilliantly capture the actual unfolding of a stream of textual ideas in-line."

Now, Alan Levine of the NMC, who used CommentPress to great effect on the Evolution of Communication whitepaper brings joyous tidings that WordPress Multi-User is now able to support the theme. We have been making rapid process on our own WordPress hosting service lately, and I can now confidently announce we are moving up the date of launch to late June, 2012.

And since I consume Grand Text Auto in my RSS newsreader, I had no idea they were already there... I shouldn't be surprised.

The main organization I work with uses Confluence as its internal wiki platform (and possibly for blogs too, we’ll see how that progresses). I have never been in love with it as a platform but on the principle that with social software, who is using it is often more important than what they are using, I’m trying to get behind it.

But it is frustrating the heck out of me for a number of reasons. We’ve CAS‘ified Confluence, which is great for single sign-on, but it means that any ‘protected’ space now requires authentication to get the RSS feed. And honestly, a wiki without RSS feeds is a non-starter for me.

Enter Google Reader. I made the switch about a year ago and now it is fairly entrenched in my workflow. Except…Google Reader doesn’t do authenticated feeds. So now I’m faced with either switching RSS readers again (ugh) or getting daily wiki updates via email (are you serious? At least Greader could support the email-to-RSS feature like Bloglines used to, and no, the Gmail to RSS hack wouldn’t work in this case).

Frustrating. Added to that, Confluence as a blogging platform leaves a bit to be desired, and to deal it’s inelegant posting workflow (10 clicks compared to my 1 or 2 now) I am trying out some XML-RPC based clients (because it does, at least, support that through a plugin). Hence, really, the reason for this post, to see if the ScribeFire (formally Performancing) plugin for Firefox will do the trick and provide a simply, free way of posting between both my WP blog and Confluence. Wish me luck. So far the experience hasn’t been stellar, with a memory leak and other bugs plaguing what should be a simple process. - SWL

Tags: google, greader, HTTP authentication sucks