Since I have some time on my hands this morning, I am going to switch hosts. I already have another version of this site on my new host, and theoretically all I should have to do is a fresh export of the MySQL database, transfer the domain, and there should be no down time.

If you are subscribed to the feed, you should notice no difference. Please look for another successful post indicating that I have made the transfer. If you don’t see a successful post in a few days, please contact me and let me know.

Thanks for being subscribed! I hope you had a wonderful holiday!

Chris

I have been thinking about how to accomplish this one goal, to aggregate a series of feeds, but only display posts with a certain tag.

To elaborate,? using Drupal‘s aggregator function I can have a number of feeds show up on one page, the same theory behind the suprglu service. The trouble is I don’t want all the feeds from all the sources, I only want the posts tagged with a particular tag.

So if each one of my source feeds has 100 posts per week (just theorizing here), but only 5 of them have the tag “cooltag”, I would only see those five posts. That way folks could continue to blog happily on the source blogs knowing that only posts with “cooltag” would aggregate to the drupal feed block.

Just wondering if this is possible. Anyone done this?

Bill Fitzgerald sure is a nice guy! I had a great time chatting with him this morning in what turned out to be the first recorded Open Source Classroom dot com Interview! We talked about OpenAcademic which I have posted about recently. There aren’t a whole lot of details available on the inner workings of the project so I went to the source. The project centers around OpenID which particularly interests me since I have had to prune Drupal out for my kids to prevent having to enter that many user names and passwords. OpenID would solve all that, although there are still a few practical questions lingering in my head. That’s a later conversation, though. Towards the end of the interview, he even gives a potential release date!
Let me know if you like the interview and whether or not you think I should continue these!

This is the presentation that was featured in Businessweek. I just wanted to show you that the first plugin that is mentioned in the previous post works nicely. It only requires a little bracketed syntax and it filters the presentation right in with no theme nightmares. Nice!

I used this plugin. Thanks, Koen!

Two new plugins have been released via the Internet community to more easily embed Slideshare presentations into a WordPress blog.

Now, there certainly was no issue with embedding beforehand, but it required a little knowledge of the HTML button (if you’re using the Rich Text editor) and the embed code seen on each presentation’s page. It wasn’t hard beforehand, but these plugins allow for the use of a permalink instead of the embed code. This may make it a little easier for some.

I use slideshare a lot to host my presentations that I then embed into our class Moodle. Since I teach two content areas (Spanish and Latin) I have lots of presentations. The presentation below was the one mentioned in Businessweek.

Want to see all my presentations?

Via Jonathan Boutelle’s blog.

UPDATE: Embedding the presentation caused my theme to go haywire. Odd. I removed it for now.

I have figured out that I like blogging while looking at the source website. It makes for easier link insertion, content recollection, and other sundries that just have made my life easier. I noticed David is using Deepest Sender, but I didn’t find it as easy to use as Performancing.

My one simple little frustration is this. Years ago I learned that for one’s website to be successful it had to be “sticky” which means that you theoretically want users to come to your site and stay. This is why a series of links as the first thing you displayed would cause folks to route through your site as opposed to stay a while.

To that end, each time I insert a link into a blog posting, I make sure it opens in a new window. This is a pet project of mine, because I like this feature myself. Now Bloglines does this automatically, when you click a link in a blog posting being read via bloglines it forces it to open in a new window. Since I have Firefox forcing open in a new tab, my browsing/reading experience has been wonderful lately.

My problem with Performancing is that when you insert a URL there is no option to open in a new window. There also is no option to view and edit the source, so I can’t add the tags myself.

One thing I tried is to include target=_blank at the end of the URL but when I opened it in the WordPress backend, the code had been “cleaned up” for me and it stripped it away. Probably for the better.

I hope they include this in a future version. For the record, I didn’t see this in Deepest Sender either.

If they include this, I would be one happy camper. What I end up doing is publishing it as a draft and then editing the links, which almost defeats the purpose of posting this way. Here’s hoping they help me out with my little obsession!

A few days ago I posted about Dekiwiki, particularly lamenting the need for root access to install it. Aaron F, one of the bigwigs at Mindtouch, had commented on a blog posting offering help. He didn’t respond for a few days, so I posted again, frustrated. When he did respond (for the record, my original email was on 12/6, he responded on 12/12) his email read like this…

Installing DekiWIki currently is a total pain in the !@#. In fact, it can not be done without having root access, which is not provided on any shared host that I know of. We are a small team at MindTouch and have been hoping someone in the community would assist us in making the software easier to install.

Ok so he recognizes that for those of us dependant on shared hosting, DekiWiki is impossible to install. Unfortunately, Aaron articulates that it is a low priority for their team, and would be difficult to do based on their use of the mono framework (open source version of Microsoft’s .net service). So even if Bluehost would give me root access, they would have to have mono installed, which I highly doubt.

He did make an attempt to respond to Jamesen, who commented on my most recent Dekiwiki posting…

Jamesen, I’m sorry to hear you had a bad experience with one of our ‘commercial units.’ I am very surprised by this. Are you referring to DekiBox? The only dissatisfied customer that I was made aware of (and I’m not omnipotent) related to a customer thinking the device broadcasted a wireless network, gave them access to the Internet, and thought it was also an email server. I encourage you to contact us directly
“http://mindtouch.com/contact”>http://mindtouch.com/contact . Your feedback is very important to MindTouch. Alternatively, you can contact me at my direct phone number: 866 MINDTOUCH ext 1102.

For the record, I did not ignore Chris. I hope that Chris posts an update here and highlights some points I made in my email to him. I received Chris’ email, as he correctly cites, 12/6. I responded 12/12. I would have responded sooner, but I was on the road. Moreover, for the volume of email I receive daily a 6 day lag in response, imo, is really quite good.

I might strongly disagree with a six day turnaround being “quite good” especially given the offer for help as a comment. I emailed him the same day he commented. I understand being busy, I guess I am just impatient in this modern world. I assume that unless a response comes within 48 hours it will receive no response.

I called Aaron and we spoke. Partly I was curious to hear the Mindtouch side of the story in terms of no shared hosting availability and it turns out to be a market issue more than anything. It seems like the education market is not thier target. They sound like a busy company, destined for involvement in corporate wikimaking, which is not necessarily a bad thing, just a choice. I told him straight out that I do not forsee many classroom teachers using DekiWiki unless it is installed districtwide. I maintain that it is hard to compete with Wikispaces and Wetpaint.

So there, I have given Dekiwiki its due. Now it’s on to bigger and better things.

I wish OpenAcademic would hurry up.

I say that partly in jest, but partly for real. They are working on solutions that I am really looking forward to trying out. I am not savvy enough to figure out the details of OpenID, but it may be possible to link my Drupal user authentication and Moodle authentication. Obviously I would want Drupal to pull from Moodle, but not vice versa.

I should learn more. Maybe I can figure this out. We’ll see!

I have been working tirelessly to upload all my students’ info in preparation for a new semester after the upcoming holiday break.

Since we do so much work on our Moodle, and since I receive over one hundred new students each nine weeks, I need a mass upload solution to input user data. Here is how I have achieved it thus far…

(side note, I have yet to upgrade to the latest version of Ooo, which is version 2.1)

1. I have found that OpenOffice Calc works better than MS Excel for this purpose. It seems to be less fussy about beginning zeros. Some of the randomly generated numbers have one or two zeros at the beginning and Excel cuts them off before I can reformat the cell. So using MS Excel, I would have to add the requisite number of zeros to over two hundred records. OpenOffice doesn’t seem to care. Nice.

2. OpenOffice Calc also handles finding and replacing better than MS Excel. Some of the records need to be reformatted to remove certain characters, and OpenOffice Calc handles that with aces. Even if I were able to conquer problem # 1, Excel loses the battle here as well.

3. So once I get all the data in the format that Moodle wants I upload it and watch it go. One note, and this was a hard lesson to learn. As I go to SAVE AS, and select CSV, it asks for delimiters. The field delimiter has to be a comma (,) and the text delimiter has to be blank. By default, the text delimiter is a quotation mark (“) and it must be deleted. I went rounds with this program trying to figure out what the problem was, and it took me a while to figure out a text delimiter was not necessary. On top of that, once I exported as CSV, it defaulted to open as Excel, so I had to make sure I forced an open with Wordpad, since I’m on my PC.

So those lessons have been learned, and I hope they help others.

I really need to find a multiple user CSV uploader to Drupal. This is the simple reason I have not used my Drupal installation this nine weeks, because it has been remarkably time consuming to manually enter over two hundred accounts waiting for the slow connection between submissions, etc. I looked for one of these before and can recall not having any luck, although I am going to once again take up the search for it. Any help here would be appreciated.
Ultimately I won’t know how successful I have been until the kids come in and I can see how many of their usernames and passwords fail. Assuming my error rate is less than ten percent, I can add those kids on the fly. If there are less than twenty students, stretched across six classes, the average is low per class, at least I hope.

Anyway, all my uploading is done for now. It looks good, although when I changed the name of the course in Moodle, some of my boxes went away, including the most important Social Activies block, and I freaked out before I figured out I could just re-add it. So it came back, and now it’s ok.