“The unpredictable is what unites the ‘high’ and ‘low’ in art and entertainment”

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Reverend

Ed Grant, author of the blog Media Funhouse, has written a couple of posts over the last few months about Jerry Lewis’s retirement from his legendary Labor Day Telethon. And while I don’t consider myself much of a Jerry Lewis fan, it is in posts like this that the Media Funhouse blog blows my mind. It gets me rooting for Lewis, something I rarely if ever do, and points out the ways in which an entire generation of entertainment and showbiz is disappearing with little or no fanfare right before our eyes (not onlike analog TV). More and more we are left with controlled, half-baked predictability in our art and entertainment. While reading the Media Funhouse blog tonight I came across a parenthetical statement from this post written about the sublime unpredictability of Jerry Lewis’s Telethon that really resonated for me:

(If any of you haven’t yet detected “the common thread” in everything discussed in a positive fashion on this blog and on the Funhouse TV show, it’s that the unpredictable is what unites the “high” and “low” in art and entertainment. It’s what makes things interesting….)

I love this notion that the unpredictable is what bridges high and low in art and entertainment—this sense of being surprised, shocked or blown away outside of any formula. A moment where everyone is smacked out of their orbit for a second or two. And what strikes me is that there has to be an element of openness and willingness to let go in order to allow for something wild, and possibly magical, to happen—but at the same time it doesn’t mean it will, and that is kinda cool too.

Posted in art | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Bioshock Infinite

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Reverend

Mikhail Gershovich turned me onto the trailer for BioShock Infinite the other day, and I haven’t gotten this excited about the narrative implications of a game since the first BioShock, or even Half-Life 2 (which I talked about here). Where else can you see labelled dead capitalists and experience a bloody socialist revolution  as a Pinkerton goon? The implications of such a vision are even remarkable during our moment wherein such an alternative history of labor politics in the US couldn’t feel more fantastical. For me, the evolution of video game narrative (particularly in the first-person shooter which is my favorite genre) is one of the most amazing things to witness its attention to film, design, writing, and space—deeply influenced by the history of cinematic technique but still only in its infancy in terms of imagining itself. If you are fascinated by the emergence of video game narrative and have 15 minutes, the following preview is well worth a watch.

Posted in video games | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Cookies for Comments: another Spam Solution for UMW Blogs

Posted on August 6, 2011 by Reverend

Given I still haven’t got the error for TypePad AntiSpam fixed on UMW Blogs, but after a recommendation from the WordPress forum legend @andre_r I installed the spam fighting plugin Cookies for Comments, and so far I am blown away by how well it’s been working. It has been running on the site since Wednesday and the spam dam is holding strong. I am not entirely surprised because Donncha (of WPMu fame) is behind this one. It seems like this plugin works through setting cookies and checking a cookie that has been set. And for added protection you can set some code in .htaccess to kill the spam before they even get to your site—which I have running on UMW Blogs. It has seemed amazingly effective. On any given week the main UMW Blogs blog gets anywhere from 2000 to 3000 spams, this week so far (it has been 4 days) we got 40-50. That is mind blowing to me.

I’m not sure if there’s going to be some major spam wormhole that opens up one day soon and UMW Blogs is covered with millions of festering spams—it is kind of a nightmare vision I’ve been having on and off for years—but as of now I am blown away by just how strong Cookies for Comments has help up against the spam apocalypse. Anyone out there have any issues with Cookies for Comments I might want to know about? If so, let me know, if not, then all the better 🙂

Posted in plugins, spam, WordPress, wpmu | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

DTLT Today: “Hey MOOCie!”

Posted on August 6, 2011 by Reverend

Today’s DTLT Today episode explored the recent explosion of Massive Open Online Courses (a.k.a. MOOCs). 2011 is quickly becoming the Year of the MOOC qs more and more universities like the University of Illinois, Georgia Tech, and Stanford are experimenting with the format. I’m more and more excited about the potential of MOOCs these days, and while not a silver bullet for higher ed by any means—the have certainly provided UMW (and DTLT specifically) some really powerful ways to both energize our group while at the same pushing us to continue to innovate beyond the LMS. Andy Rush, Tim Owens and I explore the explosion of MOOC in this 15 minute episode. What’s more, it’s become apparent to me that I could put together a full load of interactive, open, and online courses this Fall—and in order to get a better sense of the various ways to run a MOOC I am planning on participating in a number of them with a keen eye on how they foster interaction.

Posted in DTLT Today | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Adding TinyMCE to WordPress User Profile Pages

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Reverend

The framework built in WordPress for the literary journal Shenandoah is all but done. I will be blogging the cocneptual approach to the framework and how we did it soon, but first I have to entice the genius Martha Burtis to blog how she did some of her awesome WP coding kungfu–and actually paying her what I owe her might help that along 🙂

One of the many cool things about Shenandoah is that it’s using WordPress Multi-Site, so each of the issues will be in one network while at the same time each issue can have an entirely unique design, layout, admin space, specified authors, admins, etc. What’s more, we made it so that each author of a work in any given issue of Shenandoah is actually an author in the WordPress system. Which means every author has a user profile page where they can add their bio and photo. Eventually we can (and will) allow each author to submit their own bio, image, and work all at once online. A workflow that is already built-in, but that we are easing into with the contributors. What’s nice about this is that each author will have a consistent bio, photo, and limited control over cleaning up their own work. What’s more, this setup allows us to list all the work any given author posted in Shenandoah across multiple issues.

All that to say I was searching around today for a way to put the TinyMCE visual editor into the text field for the author bio on the WordPress user profile page. Which is important given italics for various publications and links would have to be hand coded in HTML otherwise I figured there would be a plugin for this that worked out-of-the-box (and there very well may be—and I just missed it) but I couldn’t find one. So I started exploring other folks hacks to do this. I tried Kevin Leary’s hack to the functions.php file here, but that kept bringing Shenandoah down (I am using WP version 3.2.1 running multi-site). After looking a bit more I found this hack to the user-edit.php file that worked a charm. It was based on this informative post about how WordPress deals with TinyMCE, which might be useful to some who want to experiment further with such a hack—or even write a plugin.

I did the first two changes but didn’t do the third because I really didn’t need anything fancy in terms of embedding or HTML.

Posted in WordPress, wpmu | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

DTLT Today: The UMW Blogs Upgrade Show

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Reverend

I can’t begin to tell you how much fun it has been having Tim Owens at DTLT rocking the joint. He’s been experimenting madly with Andy Rush‘s Wirecast/Live Boradcast setup, a.k.a “the kit,” and it’s evermore apparent we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do with the live broadcasts during the ds106 Summer of Oblivion.

We’ve done nine episodes of DTLT Today so far, and it has been a ton of fun—which makes all the difference. With very little overhead, a loose approach, and not more than a rough idea of the topic we’ll be discussing it seems to challenge us to get to the point and keep the discussion moving. And the fact that the show can be no longer than 15 minutes is one of my favorite aspects of the whole thing, I like how limitations can help focus a format. What’s more, the shows are usually born of something broached while chatting in the office earlier that day.

And while there is a nonchalance to the whole thing, Timmmmyboy has been doing some really awesome stuff with the Live broadcasts. For example, we can bring tweets directly into the live broadcasts if they include @dtlttoday —a pretty cool live commentary using tools people are already on. And Tim gives the play-by-play for how he did this here. Additionally, Tim has been using the iPad to remotely control the different shots for each broadcast. For example, we had 8 shots for today’s broadcast, each with a different background image, lower third, intro, outro, etc. All of these were controlled at the touch of a button on an iPad (see how he did it here). No fumbling around, just smooth, live TV brought to you thanks to some elegant hacks by Timmmmmyboy. Also, it’s cool how quickly we are getting the live broadcast format down while at the same time innovating in the space, sharing out what we do, and having fun. Tim Owens has made DTLT a lot stronger, we love this guy!

Anyway, here is today’s live broadcast covering the recent upgrade to UMW Blogs.

DTLT just finished a major upgrade to UMW Blogs and a ton of plugins and themes. Join Jim and Tim as they talk about some of the new themes, plugins, and features of 3.2 that Mary Washington is taking advantage of with UMW Blogs.

Show Notes

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UMW Blogs Upgraded to WordPress 3.2.1

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Reverend

Image credit: darek.zon’s “Blue Sky”

Yesterday UMW Blogs was upgraded to the latest version of WordPress (3.2.1), and it was surprisingly seamless. Why surprising? Well, we hadn’t updated since December 2010 and we had more that 69 plugins and themes that were waiting to be upgraded over the last few months, and I thought this would be the time when we finally paid for our sin of theme and plugin gluttony. But, we didn’t—so far we’ve escaped relatively unscathed and laid a couple of  workhorse plugins over the years to rest, a couple of which had far outlived their time. Here is the shortlist of mu-plugins we killed (I will be posting the longer list of plugins and themes we let go as we continue the culling process all this week and next). It is WordPress time at DTLT!

Userthemes is gone. When dsader created Userthemes it was the only way to edit and customize individual themes on a WPMu install without manually copying and re-creating existing themes and then add custom hacks. With the 3.2.1 WP Multi-Site setup this is built into the network admin space. I am loving the uber admin network center.

Anarchy Media Player has been retired. It pained me to do it, but we had to. The instances of AMP shortcode still needs to be converted throughout the site to convert YouTube embeds (working on that) but in the meantime this plugin was a drag on the system and hadn’t been updated since 2008—kinda surprised it worked for so long after it was killed. My very special zombie plugin. And still haven’t found a media plugin as versatile, but with embedding YouTUbe videos in WP as easy as copying and pasting a URl in the visual editor, how could I rationalize this plugin anymore?

MU Multi-Site Manager has also been retired, and I am sad to see it go. This is the pluginw e used to get Longwood Blogs, Faculty Academy, and other WPMu sites that were hosted within UMW Blogs. Interestingly enough, deleting the plugin doesn’t effect the existing networks within networks at all. This week I will be experimenting with James John Jacoby’s Multi-Network plugin as a replacement. And I am planning on testing it as I try and bring the precursor to UMW Blogs (ELS Blogs) into the UMW Blogs fold.

Akismet was also retired on UMW Blogs, but that had nothing to do with functionality and everything to do with money. They wanted $750 a month for a site as big and active as UMW Blogs and we just couldn’t afford it (more details in my previous post here) so we are going with TypePad AntisSpam, so far so good. And I will be crossing my fingers because without a good spam filter we are kinda finished.

Finally, anyone have any recommendations for plugins that they love and think we should play around with in UWm Blogs?

Posted in UMW Blogs, WordPress, wordpress multi-user, wpmu | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

TypePad AntiSpam on UMW Blogs

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Reverend


Image credit: Dok1’s “Spam”

After about 3 years with Akismet on UMW Blogs we switched over to TypePad Antispam so that UMW would no longer be breaking the new licensing for Akismet—under which we would be paying $750 a month for this spam filter on a multi-site installation with 5000+ blogs (actually that quote was for 4000+ blogs back in December 2010). We were more than willing to pay something for Akismet, but the $750 figure was too rich for our blood. I understand no free lunch and all—the liberterian mantra—but that quote seemed rather extreme. I know others have tried to work out something with Akismet, and I’m not sure where that went, but I can’t see how small public colleges like mine where the WordPress blogging platform is an experiment and an afterthought can come up with $10,000 a year for spam protection. We operate on a shoe-string budget and pay less than what Akismet wanted for spam filtering to host and backup all of UMW Blogs. The sad thing is that anyone who has run a large blogging system knows that without a good spam filter the system would be crippled to the point of uselessness. We ultimately stayed on Akismet for the Spring semester because we didn’t have an alternative lined-up and really couldn’t get off Akismet before the new semester started. Luckily no one at Akismet was interested in calling us out and making us pay—and Matt seemed rather cool about looking the other way, but all the same I felt like I was doing something wrong. It was uncomfortable and I wanted out of Akismet as soon as possible.

Midway through last semester I was turned on to TypePad’s AntiSpam option for WordPress, which like Akismet was also developed by Matt Mullenweg, in fact the two seem closely related—save that one is free and one isn’t 😉 We’ve now been on Typepad’s Antispam for 12 hours now, and all is good so far save one issue we are running into. Whenever anyone posts a comment on a blog the comment takes, but in the interim this error message shows up:

Warning: stripslashes() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/TypePadAntiSpam.php on line 226

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/TypePadAntiSpam.php:226) in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/subscribe-to-comments.php on line 817

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/TypePadAntiSpam.php:226) in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 934

I don’t think the Subscribe to Comments error is the cause because I deactivated that plugin and the other two errors still showed up—though I might be wrong. Anyone have any ideas how we might get around this? I also posted this same query in the WordPress MUltiSite forum to see what’s what. If get an answer there I will post it here and vice versa.

Either way, it is a huge relief to be done with Akismet, and I am more than confident we can get rid of this error and see how TypePad’s AntiSpam solution works for us. It may not be a silver bullet, but that’s allright because I am all about the pewter!

Also, my next post will be about how smoothly the upgrade went for UMW Blgos to WP 3.2.1—it was very, very nice.

Posted in UMW Blogs, WordPress, wordpress multi-user, wpmu | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

Jaws Mashup

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Reverend

Derek Whitaker, an internaut in Martha Burtis’s first Summer session ds106, did a memorable sound mashup using the film Jaws in this post here. And given it’s Shark Week—one of the most infuriating, sensationalized, and riveting weeks of U.S. television—-I figured I would share Derek’s awesome work here:

Great White by dwhitake

Posted in digital storytelling | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Why we loved Molly

Posted on July 28, 2011 by Reverend

Posted in digital storytelling | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments