Playing with Technology

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~Arthur C. Clarke

  • Another candidate for the kayak

    D’Arcy mentioned BlogBridge as another way to deal with the flood of information coming from RSS and blogs. I thought it should be called out in case someone wanted to give it a look.

  • i.t site overhaul

    One of the things I’m responsible for and love doing is the i.t site. Right now it looks a lot like my static site. Maybe that’s becuse I used my static site as a template. The look is really just the old Wooster homepage with the code updated to XHTML 1.0 Transitional and styled with CSS. I made sure everything validates and that was pretty much it. It’s kind of boring. So Janet asked me to overhaul it and add some additional sections. I decided to try some of the CSS magic I’m learning from A List Apart. You can take a look at the proof of concept.

    So what am I doing? First I’m using the three column layout from A List Apart. This layout has all three columns being the same height. Then I added CSS based tabs which I found at the Kalsey Consulting Group. The tabs aren’t overly styled but the design does have the nice advantage that the sublists show up under the main tabbed list. It still needs some work so if you have ideas let me know.

  • Flock

    ,

    I’m using Flock to write this post. Flock is trying to be the killer app I referred to in my last post. It integrates with flickr, Technorati, del.icio.us, Shadow, will let you post to your blog from the browser, and much more. If you haven’t heard of it. Give it a look.

    PS- It has a built-in spell checker which I must say is very cool.

  • Riding the rapids of social software

    Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the pace at which social software is developing? I sure do.

    Just this week Bryan Alexander started a little e-mail exchange by asking if anyone on his list had heard of coComment!. Of course I hadn’t so I headed over to check it out and proceeded to sign up. In the middle of that process I saw a post about Stickam in my RSS reader and checked it out. It looked cool so I asked Bryan if he had heard about it and he hadn’t. Such is the way of social software.

    So now I have an account at flickr, del.icio.us, coComment!, google, Technorati, TagCloud, am subscribed to about 30 RSS feeds and get about 150+ e-mails a day. This is nothing compared with the volume of mail and text someone like Bryan has to deal with everyday. I described my state of being as riding down a class five rapids in a barrel.

    So how do we deal with this onslaught of information? RSS was supposed to be a tool to help manage the flow but for me it has only increased it. Bryan said it seems like there is a “current of centralism” in Web 2.0 and pointed to D’Arcy Norman’s site and sxore. My experience is not unique and I am waiting for the killer app to organize and control the torrent. Until that time I will continue my bumpy ride in the constant beta flow that is social software.

  • Web content management

    We had a discussion today about Web content management. This discussion involved David Waldron (CITO), John Hopkins (Associate Vice President for College Relations and Marketing), Janet Russell (Director of Instructional Technology), Peter James (Director of Web Services), and myself. What is at issue is a way to allow faculty, students, and student organizations to create and manage a website without the need for learning HTML. There were a couple of options that were discussed: Dreamweaver/Contribute and a Web based content management system (WCMS) using a database to store content (Mambo for example).

    Neither solution seems to be a clear winner. Dreamweaver is very expensive and would require a lot of training to allow people to create nice looking websites. A WCMS would allow for easy content creation and updating but would lack flexibilty in styling. Nothing was decided and further discussions will be held, but a decision must be made by April.

    A good source for a discussion of the issues can be found at Shorewalker.com.

Sometimes I’m an Instructional Technologist and sometimes I’m a Mathematician, but I’m crazy all the time.

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