I’ve been wondering about this…

I am looking at Project Honeypot, which attempts to catch spammers and harvesters (bots) by the IP address as they visit your site and prevent them before they see any content. It looks tempting to utilize as a web geek, since I get loads of comment spam and even contact form spam.

Perusing the WordPress plugins database, I found the http:BL WordPress plugin to make it easy to implement Project Honeypot.

I signed up really quickly, FireFTP’d the plugin (nice and small) to both my WordPress install I use with my kids and this blog.

What I am wondering about is that this means if you visit my site, your IP address will be checked against a database. I did not enable logging, so I am not going to see everyone’s IP. It only checks them against the database that renews every 14 days.

Is this a privacy thing? Or is this type of protection permissable given the amazingly rough Spam attacks I’ve been getting?

I think I downloaded and burned this in record time.

Quoting Steve Dembo…

Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher in Santa Cruz, has modestly shared a brilliant avenue for introducing graphing to high school students.

I went out and taped ten events. They were simple. I walked down two flights of stairs. I ran up a hill. I drove my car. Each event was exactly fifteen seconds long.

I put a handout on every student’s desk with a graph ready for each event.

I played each event and then paused the video. I asked questions like, “When the clock started, was I up high or down low?”

You get the idea. Not only does he share how he did the lesson, but he shares the videos themselves, along with handouts and instructions. Want to take it offline? He also shares an ISO that you can burn to a DVD. So if you teach graphing at all, you can grab this resource and be using it on Monday.

Dan Meyer is a heck of a guy. Go look at these stories for yourself!

dy/dan » Blog Archive » Graphing Stories

Doug Belshaw said it so well, I am just going to repost what he said and add my full fledged support!

You will remember that a worldwide group network of teachers, including myself, got together at the start of this year to communicate, collaborate and work together to explore the next generation of teaching and learning. This network, brought together by Chris Craft is called NextGen Teachers. The next stage has started – we’ve got a social network, and we want you to join in! Read on…

The problem that any group or network of teachers face is time. As full-time teachers or educational professionals this is one luxury we do not have. Consequently, our communications and collaborations have been somewhat sporadic. What has kept going throughout, however, and has served as a touchstone for our nascent collection of renegade educators is NextGenTeachers.com. This site pulls in posts made on a variety of member blogs to create a ‘river of news’. Anything we post on our blogs with the tag nextgenteachers shows up over there. If you haven’t subscribed to that RSS feed, I’d do so now!

Now, using the excellent ning.com, we’ve got a social network which we’d like YOU to join. Almost 500 people subscribe to this blog, and I want every single one of you to go over there, sign up and get involved!

We’d like to see useful YouTube videos uploaded, pictures of conferences, your classroom and diagrams from Flickr added, discussions on possible projects and collaborations in the forum section, and so on. So, get involved and connect with like-minded people around the world!

Here’s to the resurgence of NextGenTeachers! Thanks, Doug!

It’s no secret I am a huge fan of Bluehost. I know some other folks are dreaming, but I have heard horror stories of late, so I will stay where I am. I happened across the bluehost site and noticed that they had upgraded their service. It now reads like this…

This is exciting news, since I was already using all my six addon domain names, remember, I have way too many domain names (hat tip to Aaron for constantly mentioning this

One note, I had to call to get the upgrade, so if you are using Bluehost (Steve, Doug, Jeff) you might need to call or online chat as well. The guy I spoke with handled the upgrade in moments and was happy to do it!

Just another example of why I love this service! If you’re looking for hosting, I do have an affiliate link that helps me cover the cost of the hosting, you can see it on the right sidebar of this blog. The links above are not affiliated, in the interest of disclosure.

Some time ago I was given a registration for FlashMeeting. It seems like a competitor for Elluminate, but without so many bells and whistles. Quite simply, it offers meeting space where everyone has video, only one person broadcasts at one time, and it records the meeting for instant web playback. While Elluminate works in Java, Flashmeeting (wait for it) is entirely Flash based.

I was able to enter the demo room and play around with no problem. Video broadcast fine, audio came through easily. And since it’s flash based, it’s cross platform (as is Ellumiante’s Java, just thought it worth pointing out).

So, since I have a registration, I can “book” meetings. I am thinking of creating a test meeting, anyone up for a quick meeting today at 2:45 pm Eastern time? Comment if you are available and I will make sure you get the “ticket” for entry.

As I understand it, attendees do not have to register, only me, so it should be easy.

I’ve had the login for some time, but had forgotten about it. Thanks to Miguel and Silvia for sparking me to rethink this great tool!

FlashMeeting