Previous blog about bloglines. I found this blog, which is in favor of bloglines. Now i'm glad its useful to that person, but its not all that great! Interesting and simple hack though. I think that will be the last word from me about Bloglines now. hopefully…
Category: social-hardware
Educational blogging updated
Oh my goodness, I've been so slack its unreal.
I keep quoting bits from my blogging experienment last acdemic year, but never really published the final results.
And unfortually I never did, but I can represent what I already have. So here is the opml file and the converted html version.
Some background on the experiement,
I wanted to see how many hoops students would be willing to jump through to blog there work. A few students wrote a xml document which was handed out to the rest of the class in the summer term. The xml document was very long and overkill for a blog, but it was proposed as a blog and cv for a student through out there 2-3 years in Ravensbourne college. Work was done on it by Harry, Miles, Vanessa and Jc – All 1st year students with little to no experience of xml.
The blog was put up under cubicgarden.com and was done without any blogware. So all updates were sent to me over email where i could read them and then put them up on the site. So as you can see its quite a world away from the blog systems you see now. However I choose to make things difficult to test the barrier for entry.
In the end I moved all the blogs to blojsom under the /messaging/blogging/music video catergory. There all there for reading.
Some highlights from the experience
Students form a bond with the blog through what they write.
Vanessa complains about a kidney infection
Poil talks about the project and whole lot more
Students voice there real concerns and thoughts.
Julie vents her built up frustration
and before that
Harry bitches
kelvin tells me the truth without too much fear
Cleaning up, Bloglines vs Flock
In my post during August I looked at the service bloglines. And honestly I have been checking out bloglines over the last month, and I like it but its not for someone like me. I have flock and I use it for reading feeds plus more. Bloglines is perfect for someone who just wants to read there feeds and thats all. I thought avantgo would beable to read my bloglines and display it on my ipaq, but it wasnt to be. Actually Flock did a better job at that.
I havent yet messed with the flock *.war file yet, but i will soon because the javascript open thingy is a pain in the arse. Would also be nice to intergrate the flock css into the cubicgarden one. Obvioulsy all this isnt possible with bloglines. I will be interested in seeing what other services popup and if bloglines will stay up with the massive server and bandwidth requirements needed with every single rss feed added by a user. I mean flock works hard and eats a lot of memory and thats only one user.
London events lack of progress
Ok I've hit a brick wall it would seem.
The issue is a very simple one, Cocoon wont accept Louise's non-valid html at all. I've defined a pipeline using jtidy which is the java version of html tidy, so the html from this source should be cleaned up before its used in a xsl transformation.
This isnt happening at all, and in the end i'm getting this instead. You can clearly see the title which is valid xhtml, but as soon as it hits anything non valid it throws a 500 servelet exception.
I have two paths forward, manually rewrite louises html into a file I can use or talk to louise about writing things in standard xhtml. The last one is the most difficult, because looking at her site, its all written using the same template. I dont want to add work to louise because this should be do-able with cocoon.
Oh heres the link for the clean one I'm working on.
Gone to the Blogs
Some pictures taken with my ericsson communcam.
Gone to the blogs
Noteable points.
Met the guy behind plasticbag.org, Tom Coates
Blogging for the mainstream
What are the barriers for entry? and should there be any? specially in regards to the live journal, blogger and aol users starting to blog. Is the current blogsphere going to welcome all these extra users?
Are blogs a revolution or really a evolution?
Ground up publishing or peoples voices is the name of the game here?
Blogging outside
Are blogs much more interesting when there focusing outside the blogsphere? Is there too much self reference in the blogsphere and emphase on blogging it first?
Infustructure
Do we have the right infustructure to blog? And I dont mean network. I'm of the view blogs need to be more structured than they currently are. But without making the experience of blogging more complex than it currently is at the moment. I think the metablog Atom spec will go along way in solving this problem. Also this is key in the Semantic web vision.
Why do people read blogs?
Interesting question that no one really answered in depth.
Bookmarks in a different form
My old bookmarks havent been updated for ages, why is that i hear you ask? Well its not dynamic enough, I feel…
It needs to be like blogging I feel. Which got me thinking, why cant it be like blogging?
It can be, and it now is…A blog of bookmarks. Just need to convert all the old entries into blogs.
The london designer events calender
Its bizarre how these things happen or better still how they start happening.
I while ago I wanted to create some kind of ical service which would allow a small community of designers to share calender dates. And it kind of work except for one thing. You need more than just a webdav server to allow multiple people to change one ical file. Damm I thought, oh well move on.
But its been bugging me still, and when I met Louise Fergonson at this AIGA event. The memories started coming back.
See Louise actually manually keeps a kind of blog of upcoming events in London which designers would be interested in going to. I personally found it great and attended the Spiked gone to the blogs event because of her.
So whats the problem then? Well the problems are these.
I can not sydicate the events, which may sound pretty pettie but it means I have to return to her events page everytime I want to check.
I still have to manually copy and paste events into outlook or any other calender program I'm using.
So yes these may sound pettie, and I dont want to put down the seriously hard work Louise has put into the events page. But with a bit of xml magic, it shouldnt be a problem to create a rss feed and a icalendar.
How is this possible? Well this is in theory and quickly,
Louise's Html seems pretty messed up, it doesnt validate as xhtml as there is no doctype or things like that. So I will run it thought Cocoon's html tidy pipeline then start using xsl to filter out all the navigation and stuff, at which I should be left with only the content. Another xsl pipeline (or the same?) will turn the content into structured xml (may use ical or invent my own for now). Once its in that format I can turn it into anything I like. I am going to create rss feed to start off with then go about creating icals.
Will expalin better later, if that made no sense.
Blojsom2 installed and ready to go
Ok Blojsom2 is installed and ready to go, except one thing. I cant for the life of me get xmlrpc working from any blogging app I use. Combine this with the problems I'm having with Clite and suddenly blogging has become a lot more difficult.
Anyway got some nice snippits I found around the net which I'll drop into posts soon as I can. I cant believe its been 5 days since I last posted. Whats going on!
Slashdotters meetup updated
Ok, I cant count this meetup, the unexpected happened. I left to go to the slashdotters meetup and got to east croydon by 1800. Great I thought, what I'll do is go via New cross gate and pop up to brick lane via the east london line. Got to New cross gate, boarded the tube and the train suddely stopped. Why? The tube driver said it was down to a signal failure. Nothing new. But no it was more serious than we all thought, and while i sat there between new cross gate and surrey queys. The choas unfolded.
I only found out later when I finally got out of the tube and got a text message from my wife. Did you get to the meetup with the power cuts? What power cut, I was thinking? Everything seemed fine, only realised now I was sitting on a tube while most of the national grid in London had gone down.
The funny thing is I was having a go at my wife about americas power outage last week. Well at least it was only 30mins here not days!
The interesting thing I found thinking about Zeldman's blog, was that the mobile phone transmitters never went down once as I was able to get a gprs connection while sitting there on the tube. I never looked at my 3g phone, but I'm sure it was all fine too.
Anyway back to the meetup as such, I was lucky because the east london line power was quickly restored and I was away, while the other lines were all down. But it was pointless because no one else made it I dont think, plus the fact I got there 1 hour late. What kinda of host am I? But come on the there was bloddy power failure! in London!
Slashdotters meetup
Ok, this is it I believe. If the slashdotters meetup this Thursday doesnt pull people in, then I'm gonna start slagging off meetup and start rethinking going to them. You know what to give this the full go, I'm gonna be the host this time!
My profile: If sunny, will be sitting outside on a bench sporting a ipaq in one hand a redbull in the other 
Yellow trainers and something bright for a tshirt. If cold, look for the meetup sign or ask the bar people.
Good stuff, should do the trick.