Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
At long last my wife has given up on Outlook and Internet explorer. So I set her laptop up with Opera, Mozilla and Neos Jabber client. And shes loving the calendar in Mozilla 1.5, she loves the idea you can actually share calendars and see others.
So now I really need to sort out a webdav server so I can actually get our calendars working in each others clients. Saw this after a short search. Oh spotted this too…Yum
Serving more as a note for myself. I really need to make changes to blojsom because the new features are something else. If I do a upgrade on my blog I will do one on the interaction blog too. so fear not my students. Webbased blogging is coming to you all soon…
Plus a load of permas to check out sometime soon from my feeds…
Blog on Blogs- excellent educational example of weblog use (ebnWL News)
Blogtalk 2004 – July 2004
Who needs a phone? Infosync
Can You Sell More WiFi With Content? (Techdirt Corporate Intelligence
Flicked through my feeds today, and found Slashdot had banned me from accessing there feeds. Which is odd because my aggeragater goes and gets feeds only once every hour unless its told by the feed to get it quicker than that – example being the bbc feeds. Anyway, didnt think much of it till I poped into my bloglines account, which has also been banned. Now I know bloglines only gets feeds a minimum of once a hour no matter what.
Your Headline Reader Has Been Banned
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.
You May Only Load Headlines Every 30 Minutes
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.
In 72 Hours, Your Ban Will Be Lifted
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.
Do Not Bother Contacting Us For 72 Hours
Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.
So what is up with slashdot? Did anyone else get simular messages to me? If there so worried about bandwidth they should consider the standards complient layout.
Just checked over the students bloglines aggeragater. And they are actually using it which is great news. I just need to sort out there blogs now. At the same time I found some other good feeds while searching for the interaction one.
Also found news.com's rss feeds which is very useful. And at the same time I've updated my own bloglines account so it will be the same as my feeds. Lots of work early in the morning…!
I was reading this on wired.com the other day and a good heads up on the state of play for personal publishing.
I had never heard of Wallop, but to be fair to microsoft it looks really good and backing it though the instant messager door is a good move. This is exactly what we've been trying to do with blogs and instant messager for a while now. Give students flexablitiy but depth when they publish. And theres little wrong with bundling already well known features into one packages, this is what makes apple popular. But on the other hand you know as well as I do, its going to be all propitery and propitery plus propitery does not equal fun at all. As wired says, it would be great to see Microsoft adding effort to the Atom spec.
At the same time though, some companys like Nokia are not so sure about user generated content. Sony Ericsson and Nokia have both launched initiatives to encourage people to use their multimedia handsets — one to take and share images, the other to just watch.
Seems criminal that Nokia are not embracing the personal publishing idea, well it will be there lost in the end when sonyericsson, microsoft, apple, etc will dominate in this area. Maybe Nokia's Ngage says it all…
Taken from Creative Commons
Last week, British lawmakers passed a new bill to add electronic publications (including websites) as documents stored in national archives. This new law augments existing laws that cover all printed materials produced in the UK since 1911
Now thats excellent news, because it will not be optional and the grey area of archiving will change. Lets hope those overbloated CMS can handle archiving too. Theres seriously no better time to make the change to XML.
Bill McCoy wrote a fetcher to drive blojsom from an IMAP server
Sounds like a great idea, but I still need to figure out abstract authentication for blojsom otherwise things like this mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. That also reminds me I need to check out blauth at some point, maybe I'll give it a going over while I'm waiting for my plane to berlin Friday – Saturday morning.
Miles setup a jabber server in college about a week ago. In the effort to keep CNDI together even though CNDI has been split into 5 seperate pieces by higher management.
So far things are looking good. Me, Miles and Dave were using it for a while before Lisa and Kate were introduced to it. Then Adam and Kevin, now Alex and Hamid. Only a few more to convence then the whole team will be online.
But damm I have reservations, I dont know how useful it will be overall. See I love instant messaging I find it so so useful but I dont know if others will be happy about it. The first time Miles wrote the email talking about the jabber server I wrote a reply asking why he was doing it, and I thought his views were that im was a waste of time.
He replied saying yes his views havent changed but he was willing to try it out. Now thats the spirit!
I've switched from myjabber to neos because it has a H323 client built in to it along side the jabber client. Also it seems smoother in operation compared to myjabber. Anyway, I tried out the h323 client using my ipaq's SJphone H323 client and it works like a dream. Just asks if you want to accept the call from the ip address and what ever information is available. It also supports a gateway, so I should beable to dial up a normal land line phone from my desktop machine at some point in the future.
Which begged the question of how do I start a session with someone if there not a jabber user? Worked it out, its simple. Click play in the media panel and you can then put in any address you like, including a ip address.. Yet to try it but it should work fine. The other thing I was going to say was that I've successfully registered with our gatekeeper. So ip addresses should be a thing of the past when we set it up propely.
See now if Apple iCrapAV would support standards, we would all be able to talk using the same technology. But oh no, apple have to reinvent the wheel. They wouldnt even adopt something like sip.
Anyhow before I went off on one. Kevin's going to look at the gatekeeper settings so we can all dial up each other without the dynamic ip problem.
What’s my plan of action? Hummm i'm faced with 3 different choices.
Ideally there would be a blogging server in college which students could use without too much help. So I could try and convince miles that this would be a good idea and that this would be a test run for next year maybe?
Problems I foresee, is the college libal for anything put on the blog? According to the blog layer I met a while back the answer is no but its not been proven in court yet.
2nd option is to set them up on my own server at home. This would be trival to do, but should I is more the question? hey would I be liable? Would I have to guarantee some level of quality. See what would happen if my line goes down or server needs restarting? Would they expect 24/7 service?
Plus would 12 students blogs effect my bandwidth?
Last option, would be to use a 3rd party blogging service like blogger.com, livejournal, etc. Which would all be down to the students to maintain and administrate.
I would need to reckonmend one or more of the services to make sure I could aggergate the content into a class news feed. Maybe flock or cocoon for logic.
Anyway this 3rd option does make things a lot easier but I would need to also read the end user policy/agreement to make sure everythings clean.
This year the group is very diverse and a blog is a sure starting point for all of them. It will be interesting if it will bring them together as they all seem very disjointed with one another at the moment, which is good as there seems to be very few deers.
Been thinking about this once again, and reality has started to shows its face again.
First up, I think the grabbing of louise ferguson's events page, would be too much work for small gain. So until she changes the format of the page so the content is seprated from the style there is little I can do. Its just too messy and theres too much inconsistency for me to write a xsl to transform the page into useable content.
I have however been thinking of other ways of doing what louise has done.
I first thought of creating a blog for events. Sounds perfect right? You know you have the calendar already there, the ability to search via category's, etc, etc. But there was a major problem which came up when I started thinking deeper. When you write a blog that is the date of the blog, just like this one is actually being written at 2am in the morning on Sunday 5th October. But if you wanted to blog a event, the event would have had to have happened. Which is no good because no one would then know about it till the day! Not much good you would say.
So i need to be able to change the actual date of the blog to certain specified date. Sounds easy enough, and maybe it is but not without some serious hacksawing of a blog server. The other way would be to touch the blog on the filesystem. But who would want to do that and who would allow people from outside to do such a thing. The last option I thought about was using the metablog mechanism. See usually theres a small amount of meta posted hence
#Thu Aug 21 13:44:45 BST 2003 blog-entry-author=ianforrester
Now if I could work out how to add – blog-event-date=20031027 which obvioulsy means 27th October 2003 and get the blog server to read that as the post date. We would be cooking!
So even thought the last idea would be fantastic, I'm forced to think about another solution because I want to start putting events up for my students soon. And of course for those interested in whats on in London.
So I've been looking at the ical format from two points of view.
I'm using Mozilia's Calendar and exporting the events as ical rdf and xml then putting them on my webdav server. The other view point i'm looking at it from is the ical spec. which is large and quite scarey in some parts, but its for the non xml version which is a problem but gives me a good idea of names and whats possible. Heres a example of a event i'm going to in 2 weeks time.
The completely xml version and The rdf xml version. So whats my next step, well I can easily write a pipeline in cocoon which will pick up all ical's in that directory and using xsl pull out the title and arrange them by there event date. so you would agree that is a good start for now. If i get time tomorrow I'll do it, but I know I got a few other tasks to do before this.