EduGlu Sandbox

• Update from the Ministry of Love (Harper's)
  
  "...he is a journalist who worked for a broadcaster that the Bush regime despises: al Jazeera. That was plenty of reason to seize and torture him."
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So though I took the criticisms of Stephen Downes and others seriously, ultimately I concluded that the potential impact of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education was too powerful for me to ignore. David Wiley has a number of good posts up lately with pointers to the huzzahs, the critiques, and the alternatives, and I would urge you to look them over and give serious thought to whether you care to add your name to the document.

David also has provided a couple web banners, for those of you who share my evident passion for advocacy via remote-hosted images -- if only it had some javascript to slow down my page-load speeds even more!

Speaking of which, the Northern Voice banners have been available for some time, offering a number of options how to show your love for The Moose. As you may have noticed, I chose the biggest and most obtrusive option for my homepage...

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