Author Feeds in WordPress

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Reverend

Joss Winn has an excellent post all about feeds in WordPress for anyone interested in this kind of thing. One of the things I realized yesterday was that WordPress does have a feed for individual authors within a group post, I don’t know how I missed this up and until now, but I did. To quote Joss:

There is a feed for each author of the blog

http://example.com/author/joss/feed

This really changes the way I imagine group blogs now, and the ability of students and faculty to quickly republish there posts from this space into another becomes trivial, very, very cool! Luke Waltzer and I tested this out as he plans on taking 58 posts he wrote in the cac.ophony blog and re-publishing them within his own space that is coming soon, and it worked without a hitch (well, at least it did once we copied the rss.php and rss-functions.php files from FeedWordPress in wp-includes directory)! Here is the construction of the feed we pulled from: http://cac.ophony.org/author/luke/feed

The only little trick is that you have to change the “Syndication feeds show the most recent” field in Settings–>Reading from 10 to something that will catch all the posts you create in a blog, for example Luke put his up to 100 which easily got all his 58 posts out.

Posted in rss | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Dog Zombies?

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Reverend

Just because he asked for more, here’s a little something, something just for you, dog.  Sit, zombie, sit, good dog.  Here’s your bone!

Posted in fun | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Invasion of the Zombies

Posted on April 15, 2009 by Reverend

This was intended to be a comment on Bryan Alexander’s awesome post yesterday “Zombies Invade the Mainstream, Please Remain Calm.” Reading Bryan as he works through the cultural meanings of the undead is something I have been doing for years, Infocult is blogging with singleness of purpose at its very best, and is for me the gold standard for marrying the immediate cultural zeitgeist with the gothic.  And, truth be told, this post is just one example of many gems that I consume regularly without too much fanfare because he is so consistent and so damn good. But, this one is worth a raving comment and even a blog post because he works through current zombie fever that’s upon us at some length, going from Near Dark to White Zombie, and along the way pulling in Shaun of the Dead, Marx and Voltaire—it’s classic Infocult genius. Go read it.  And then if you want some zombified mediocrity, read my comment below, which was repudiated by typepad with an error message “We’re sorry, we cannot accept this data.” Zombie blogging platform? 🙂

___________________________________

Bryan,

You have outdone yourself here, from Near Dark to White Zombie! You rule, I also love the marriage of vampire and zombies you come up with when ending with White Zombie, this is an important realization, and the way the Bela Lugosi’s eyes are disembodied in White Zombie really suggests him as a sorcerer/vampire. Bravo!

And when you look at some clips from White Zombie here and here the question of the laboring zombies under the calculating capital vampires is right on. I think that is the metaphor Marx was looking for after framing capital as vampyric, labor as being zombified. Two species of the undead that are in many ways in struggle.

I was thinking about zombies as they related to slavery lately, and there is a good quote from Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys that focusing the identity of a zombie within the eyes:
‘She have eyes like zombie and you have eyes like zombie too. Why you won’t look at me.’

In fact, the Wide Sargasso Sea is an excellent reading of the implications of slavery, colonization, and post-colonial identities as in many ways zombified by structures of power and capital. Making the locus of the zombie very much within the very system, the outbreak being a larger sign some kind of dangerous self-awareness the zombies come to of their own enslavement. A moment of compassion and recognition that I have only seen in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead when the Zombie in the baseball outfit and the women on the other side of the glass in a mall store seem to have a moment of wherein they realize they are made of the same stuff.

In closing, I love the way you frame White Zombie as an alternative way to look at all this, and the common idea of the eyes as telling and symbolic opens up some very interesting threads yet again as to how we are made to see and interpret this current phenomenon.

Posted in pop culture | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

UMW Blogs’ Support Stats

Posted on April 13, 2009 by Reverend

When people ask me how much time I spend supporting UMW Blogs, I say it’s about an hour of my week, which is true. Now, to be clear, I think of support along the lines of “I lost by password” or “How do I change my theme?” and questions like that. More along the lines of basic, functional questions rather than the conceptual re-imagining for teaching and learning, which is where I spend most of my time—and rightly so. The support DTLT has had to give for the day-to-day user operations of UMW Blogs has been absolutely scalable, particularly given we now have more than 2300 users on the system…boooyah!

So, how do we do it? Well, I’m really not certain, maybe WordPress is just that easy, or maybe 2200 of the 2300 users set up a blog and then say this is far too hard and go admin a Drupal site—who knows? However, if the stats for the UMW Blogs Support pages tell a story, I think that story is that a whole lot of people are using them.

Here are the support page stats for the first full year of UMW Blogs (2007/2008):

Frequently Asked Questions (for WP 2.5x) 29,309 views

WordPress Guide (for WP 2.5x) 3,144 views

Now, check out the stats for UMW Blogs updated support pages for 2008/2009 (which is a whole new set of tutorials given the changes in the user interface from 2.5x —> 2.6x)

Frequently Asked Questions (for WP 2.6x) 82,341 views

WordPress Guide (for WP 2.6x) 1,539 views

Crazy, right? More than 82,000 hits for the FAQ this academic year alone! I am on record saying that I enjoyed writing this documentation, but never in my wildest imagination would I have guessed it would be viewed so widely and extensively.  Now I know for a fact a number of other schools are using it extensively, and that’s awesome because it was part of the plan.  But I also have to believe that a good number of people here at UMW are actually using the FAQs, which saves us a ton of time and energy on the straightforward support issues.

And to add to the support page love, last April Shannon Hauser and Joe McMahon (where am I linking to you now, Joe? You’re all over the place!—you need a stable domain, a domain of your own) added “10 Ways to Use UMW Blogs,” over the course of a year that has gotten 4,448 views.

Additionally, Andy Rush and I created a screencast blog with a whole series of screencasts about using UMW Blogs, and that site has gotten 5,802 views.

So, to re-cap, something as unsexy as documentation has gotten 126,583 views as of 11:06 this evening! I guess it doesn’t feel so boring and painful to write when you know so many people are using it, and you better believe that when we upgrade to WPMu 2.7 this Summer I will spare no expense to pimp the documentation out like it’s nobody’s business, for the people have spoken 🙂

Posted in UMW Blogs, wordpress multi-user, wpmu | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Achilles’ Heel of the Syndication Bus

Posted on April 13, 2009 by Reverend

Image of a broken heelIn a recent post about the development towards a syndication bus using WordPress Multi-User, Steven Egan brought up an excellent issue that for me remains the Achilles’ Heel for this setup: how can we syndicate comments along with posts?

Thing is when you use a tool like FeedWordPress to syndicate posts, what you cannot syndicate is comments, and while the permalink points back to the original post where the comments should be seen, there is no way to indicate on the syndicated post just how many comments there are, or reflect the recent ones in the sidebar somehow.

Steven says this in his comment on the issue:

It would be interesting to take the republishing thing and include the comments at a single location. Basically the comments happening at the original blog, rather than having it happen on multiple blogs. Even if it is just pointing to the place to join in the conversation.

What I would like is the ability for the comments to be reflected in both spaces, so that the permalink can point to the post on the course aggregation blog, for example, but once someone leave a comment there, that same comment is automatically re-published on the original post. Now this, for me, would make the whole thing perfect.

But at this point I would even settle for a little number on each post in the aggregation blog that would dynamically reflect how many comments are on the original post. Yet, this wouldn’t answer the questions of how to show recent comments in the sidebar of the aggregation blog. I’m using a workaround for this currently on UMW Blogs which basically takes all the comment feeds for the individual student blogs for a course and creates one aggregated feed of them in the sidebar (I do this BDP RSS). But this is not only laborious, but it is also far from perfect because if a student uses their blog for a variety of different classes or reasons, then comments that are not relevant to course will show up.

So, anyway, I was just recognizing a weakness in this model and wondering if there is a better way to deal with the aggregation of comments for a syndication bus like the one we are thinking through.

Image credit: Otbayley’s “Left Leg: Broken Heel Bone and Detached Achilles’ Tendon”

Posted in Mozilla Open Ed, UMW Blogs, wpmu | Tagged , , , , | 19 Comments

“Open is always outward facing”

Posted on April 13, 2009 by Reverend

Last Wednesday I had a discussion with Philipp Schmidt, Ahrash Bissell, and Dave Humphrey for the second seminar of the Mozilla Open Education course. This discussion was designed to focus on four different case studies, but unfortunately Wayne Macintosh and David Wiley couldn’t join us due to technical difficulties. So, the discussion was divided in half. Nonetheless, I hope it was a useful discussion for the participants, anyone interested can find the whole thing here (it’s in Ogg Vorbis format). There were two highlights in particular that I would like to draw attention to.

First, it was my first introduction to Dave Humphrey of Seneca College, who was an absolute pleasure to listen to and converse with (although to my chagrin I kept referring to him as David, not Dave, throughout the discussion–sorry about that!).  His class projects are brilliant, he teaches Computer Science courses wherein his students actually develop code as part of the Mozilla open source community. A re-aligning of a traditional course that makes the work his students do during a semester immediately relevant to one of the biggest–if not the biggest—open source community in the world. You can read more about his project on Mark Surman’s blog here and listen to an audio interview about the course here.

Second, Dave Humphrey said something at the end of the conversation that really resonated with me, so I am going to reproduce it below, as well as provide a link to his closing remarks which I have been mulling over for the last five days. When talking about this idea of open, Dave noted the following:

Open is always outward facing, and so I think it’s a losing battle to try and do it in an inward way. So if my goal was to convert all of my school to the same beliefs that I have about how you should teach and the way you should share, and all of that, I would never get there. So in some ways I have given up on institutional approaches to this, and I am much more focused on individual and community, and how that scales and we can connect those things.

You can hear the rest of this thread below:
Download Dave Humphrey in Mozilla Open Ed, Seminar 2

What struck me about this is the real tension that exists between institutional approaches to ideas of working out in the open and those of individuals who together might forge a community of openness both within a larger institution as well as across any institutional boundaries. A move away from thinking about the possibilities that the openness of the web brings to the future of education is not so much a process of changing the institution, but rather of fostering individual and communal in order to imagine the possibilities that lay fallow all around us. This is the very reason why I love the blogosphere and find it impossible to stop posting here. If I did, I’d become increasingly cut-off from a life-blood of vibrant thought that moves far beyond the confines of my institution—and if I were limited to the current mood of my institution I’d probably have a loaded gun to my head.

I’ve often considered the work I have been doing at UMW as a way to change the institution, working to help the university realize the power and possibility of opening up to the world, and thinking about how the mission of a public university might re-imagine itself given the radical changes in the means and methods of publishing and sharing.  Yet, institutions seem designed to disappoint, and the idea of such an overarching goal for imposing a vision of what open is on others who may disagree is just as problematic as institutions closing down on openness out of fear of engaging in public discourse that makes the work happening at any given campus increasingly transparent and relevant. What Dave’s thoughts made me seriously consider (something I have desperately needed these days) is that what is at the heart of the work we all are doing is not about changing institutions, because if it were I would currently be paralyzed. It’s about communing and sharing openly with others both within and beyond our institutions—a push that limited to, or dependent upon, something like UMW Blogs or any other one tool, but rather on a series of personal commitments to thinking openly and honestly about what the future of education is and how we might take some meaningful steps in that direction.

So, to that end, I’ll link to one more audio excerpt from this discussion wherein I define a DTLT project that moves in this direction of the individual as the site for re-imagining the future of education as part of a community.  For the next year I will be committed to “A Domain of One’s Own,” an idea that is not focused on the logic of the institutional infrastructure, but rather then individual’s own cheap and simple space to both aggregate to and create from.

Download Excerpt from Seminar 2 on “A Domain of One’s Own”

Posted in Mozilla Open Ed, open education | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Spider-man 1967 Episode 2

Posted on April 12, 2009 by Reverend

The kids and I have already watched it at least five times. This one is special to me because it features my favorite Spider-man villains: Lizard (albeit a bastardized telling) and Electro. Not to be missed!

Posted in video | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Because I hate Sean Connery….

Posted on April 10, 2009 by Reverend

Image of Sean Connery in Zardoz (1974)

….I really want to see Zardoz (1974). I mean what kind of loser runs around in a red loincloth with a hippie ponytail for 90 minutes? So, for all you Connery Bond fans, this is the single best argument for why Roger Moore is by far the great Bond—he never stooped to such levels of utter debasement. Get more of Connery’s flesh from the trailer (which I might add is quite trippy and appealing).

Hat tip for video: Tim Hauser

Posted in movies | Tagged , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

UMW’s Faculty Academy: the (Un)Common University

Posted on April 9, 2009 by Reverend

It’s that time again, and the bava is gonna start up its annual marketing campaign for Faculty Academy, which is without question the best conference bang for your buck ’cause it’s absolutely free!  Not only can you catch some of the most innovative work in educational technologies happening anywhere in higher ed, but you can also engage a wide-range of faculty from just about every discipline on their particular projects. Moreover, we were fortunate enough to land a stellar line-up of invited speakers: James Boyle, Laura Blankenship, and Cole Camplese. The theme this year is The (Un)Common University, which is very much premised on the future of openness in higher ed. And for those of you interested in the wide-range of work happening on UMW Blogs, this conference provides a perfect opportunity to hear how this educational publishing platform has helped us re-imagine ideas of openness for a public, liberal arts university like Mary Washington.

So, save the dates: May 13th & 14th at the University of Mary Washington. And be sure to register here soon, because depending on demand we might need a bigger boat 🙂

Finally, special kudos to Martha Burtis for organizing a killer line-up and designing the best Faculty Academy site yet.  She rocks!

Posted in faculty academy | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

The un-education of a technologist

Posted on April 7, 2009 by Reverend

Brian Lamb graciously let me tag along for a publication he was asked to do for the Spanish journal Revista de Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento (RUSC), and without hesitation I jumped aboard. I may have ultimately been more hindrance than help, but I was pretty impressed that the folks at RUSC published our work because it’s quite possibly the most un-article article I have read. In fact, it’s quite literally a series of loosely-joined blog posts that point to examples of work being done that’s innovative, cheap, and pretty damn impressive. Ranging from Stephen Downes and George Siemens Connectivism course to Jon Beasley-Murray’s Murder, Madness, Mayhem to the apple of my eye UMW Blogs (you know who wrote that section). My personal favorite section is Brian’s introduction, it’s Lamb at his most painfully insightful, melancholic, and chaotic—all the while never letting go of the visionary possibilities that undergird hope.

What was cool was that it was translated into Spanish, so that my first EdTech “journal article” (and quite possibly my last) is actually not officially published in English. So, while I may have my issues at home, don’t think for a second I’m not big in Europe! The coolest thing about the article for me is that it was able to feature work from my favorite people like Serena Epstein’s brilliantly framed domain of her own and Brad Efford’s Internment Rap. That’s what it is all about. Research be damned, I want to talk about people.

For those of you, like me, who can’t read Spanish all that well, here’s the working site we used to create the article. I organized it in the same way as the journal, the only real difference is that all the links in the article posts are basically end notes in the journal, oh yeah, and the blog site has the added benefit of embedded media and online linkage. I also threw in some bonus posts on the English version, like the Guerilla EdTech and Cloning Innovation. Kinda like the special features on the Criterion Edition of your favorite film.

Posted in experimenting | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments