General

P2P … For Citations

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

Happened to come across this from a very short post on Copyfight — great blog by the way … CiteULike is an online service that allows users to quickly and easily share, organize, and maintain academic papers. A really great idea that could actually work. From their front page:

When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there’s no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There’s no need to install any special software. Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer. You can share you library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about.

Might be worth a look … I really like the tagging they have going on.

Quick RSS Resources

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

Just a quick post to bring a few RSS overviews to light for my colleagues from the IIP … we met last week to talk about how moving to a content management/publishing system would help them transform their overall web presence and bring them to the bleeding edge in content publishing in the Higher Ed space … the concept of RSS as a research sharing tool is yet to really hit the mainstream, but as more and more people are introduced to the whole publishing/syndication/subscription model of the web, we’ll begin to see pockets of Research Centers and Institutes adopt it all. At least one can hope!

I wanted to drop a post in for the members of the IIP to read a little about the history of RSS and to see first hand how it works so they can draw their own conclusions to how it would be best utilized. First of all, here are two quick sites that review the history of RSS, the first is from the Dive into Mark blog space and the second takes a much more linear historical perspective from gotee.net … both good overviews. Here are a list of links to major milestones in web syndication dating back to the Netscape Publishing Program in 1999. Here is an additional resource just in, Quick Start Guide to RSS for Educators, from Will Richardson. Finally, here is a link to The Evolution of RSS … another good read.

Once you’ve read up on the history, it may make sense to get a bloglines account (or other free service) and subscribe to a few feeds. They have a fairly complete directory. Also, when you visit sites that have feeds, just look for the RSS or XML mark, control click (or on a PC, right click) it and select copy URL … use that to add it to your bloglines and you’ll be subscribed. Once you get a solid listing of subscriptions you should begin to notice your web surfing habits changing a bit.

At any rate, there are a few resources. If there are others, please leave comments.

Update to WordPress 1.5

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

This morning I decided it was important that I update this space from WordPress 1.2.2 to 1.5 … the system looks great under the hood, but it blew all of my customization up. I’ll have to figure out the tabs that I worked on last night, fix the random banners, get my creative commons license back in and all sorts of other stuff. I hope it was worth it!

Update

I’ve gotten most of the site moved over to WP 1.5 and I am very happy. I still haven’t been able to get my random banners working again, but other than that I seem to be in business. Two things I am working on is getting the navigation links to show up on all pages and my background color of my page is slightly different than all my existing banner images … the difference is driving me crazy. Anyone know that value and where to set it? At any rate, this version is worth the upgrade … there really are some nice features.

Random Headers: Followup

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

I noticed that D’Arcy Norman posted a little thing about how he setup some rotating banners based on my site … thanks! It isn’t like I invented the stuff but hey, I appreciate the nod! Since then, I’ve had a couple of people ask how its done. Here’s the simple way … first, install the Random Files plugin and put a bunch of headers into a directory and point to it. Then drop this code into your index.php file (if you are using the kubrick style) for WordPress by finding the #header style directive and changing it to:

#header {
background: url(“< ?php echo random_file('/images/random', 'jpg gif png jpeg'); ?>“) no-repeat bottom center;

That assumes you have a directory called “random” in your images directory … that’s really it … oh, you might want to take a bunch of good pictures to make it worth while … not sure I’ve done that, but I’m doing what I’m doing. Thanks to Elliot Black for helping me get it rolling!

After its all said and done, watch your traffic explode as you sit there and reload your own blog 20 times to see it work!

The “Life Poster” or What I did on Vacation

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

I just saw this little idea over at Mike Matas‘ blog this morning … a “Life Poster” as he calls it. An absolutely great idea! I can imagine a few great things to do with this … my daughter’s first (or second, or third) year, a poster of my in-progress vacation, or something a little more academic … some sort of team-based visual progress report perhaps. Endless opportunities. Mike is kind enough to show off the finished product and provide instructions. I will be making one today.

Banner Rotation

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

Thanks to some help from around the web, I finally got my headers to rotate … While on vacation I have been snapping photos and wanted a quick way to throw some stuff into rotation. At first I was doing by hand, but that’s crazy. A quick plugin and some spiffy php code and wham, I have rotating banners! I’ve taken all the pictures and will keep adding new ones during the trip.

They Can’t All Be Winners …

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

Coming into the New Year, I have been thinking a lot about the fact that I tend to wait quite a while between posts so I can make them all “winners.” Now that I have my new setup running, I’ll be posting more short things, simple ideas, pointers to articles, and some other quicker hitting items. I guess what I am saying is that I am not going to be trying to make every post a magical occurrence — they simply all can’t be winners. I have a lot of things going through my head right now and want to get them out here … that’s the reason I started this space in the first place.

So, I’ll be posting a lot more in the coming days and weeks … please drop some comments, just realize they are moderated to help curb the tide of spam I get.

WordPress on HigherWeb Followup

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Its done … the big move from blogger.com to the WordPress system is complete. I used the blogger to wordpress script and it all seemed to work. The shitty part is that comments don’t move with it. That’s a real big problem — not for this blog, but for my IST 110 Class Blog Space. I have hundreds of comments from students in that space and I have no idea of how to get them off there. I need help!

As far as this new blog space goes, I will continue to do the usual teaching and learning with technology thing here. I am still waiting for my domain name to transfer … that’s a real pain in the ass by the way. So for now, I hope people are finding their way over here from the old higherweb/blog space nd are now getting their rss and xml feeds from the new site. In the coming months I have all sorts of stuff going on that I’ll be writing about … so drop by.

I am also installing the same WordPress hack to push podcasts through here. I’ve been doing quite a bit of that over at the fromthebasement.org site and will be doing more audio blogging and podcasting over here as well. That will also be available via the RSS. So, do yourself a favor and subscribe … and as always, please leave comments!