The latest installment of Digital Web Magazine kicks off a series of articles on information architecture with an piece entitled Practical Usability Testing.

Joshua Porter has a nice look at past and recent trends in how we consume information on the web, in an article entitled The Evolution of Information Grazing. (Via Digital Web Magazine.)

Derek Morrison over at Auricle has a great analysis of the WebCT/Blackboard merger and what it means for the products and the institutions that use them.

The release of MT 3.2 brought with it a new plugin that let’s you easily choose and apply various themes to your blog. With help from Mike Austin and the folks from TSG, we’ve installed the StyleCatcher plugin. Here’s how to set it up.

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Zoomify is a pretty slick application that allows you to serve “fast, high-res images in flash”. These images can be zoomed in upon, and if you have the “Enterprise” version as we do, the images can be “annotated” with circles, arrows, labels, and more.

Recently I noticed that Wes, in a fantastic example of synergy in action, got Python upgraded on zoo so that it’s now possible to convert images into the necessary format from within a UNIX environment. This opens up some options that we hadn’t had before, such as being able to process images uploaded via a web interface, and provide web initiated batch processing of images.

Today we’ll look at how to get images converted to the “Zoomify” format, using a free, open source Python script. In short, we’ll be covering:

• Installing the ZoomifyImage package
• Using a PHP “wrapper” with ZoomifyImage to convert a directory of images

• Using a PHP script to easily inspect the processed images

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This fellow has a fascinating description of how he used del.icio.us in his first year Computers & Writing course. (Via Collin Vs. Blog.)

The Problem: Podcasting is not as easy as it could be in MovableType. Unlike some other publishing systems, MT does not automatically create enclosures from material in posts. There may be a good reason for this, but it means that we can’t just use our MT blog as a podcasting platform out of the box.

Some time ago, we installed a plugin for MovableType that would allow us to create podcasts from MT blogs. The plugin gave us a Template Tag, and use required a few steps, including editing the xml index templates. It’s a good plugin, but the process is rather cumbersome, as most folks aren’t even comfortable editing html, not to mention navigating an xml file full of template tags. As more people become interested in using this medium to distrubute their content, we need a more straight forward method for setting this up.

The Solution: “Burn” the feed with FeedBurner. All you need to know is the url for your blog. Here it is in a few easy steps:

1. Go to your blog home page, and copy the URL out of the address bar (i.e. your.blog.uvm.edu/).
   
2. Go to feedburner.com, and paste in the link below where it says “Type Your Blog or Feed Address Here to Get Started“
   
3. Check the box next to “I am a podcaster!“, and click the “Next>>” button.
   
4. On the next screen, you don’t need to change anything, so click on the “Next>>” button.
   
5. Edit the feed information as you’d like it to appear when you send it to people, and fill out the account information to create a new account. When you’ve filled out all of the fields, click the “Activate Feed>>” button.

That’s it! The link you are provided with is the one you can send to people, and subscribe to in your favorite feed reader, or audio program.

Over on Micro Persuasion, there’s a link to a post by Pascal Van Hecke on managing draft blog postings. It called to mind a intriguing meme-like post a while back by Jeffery Veen: Drafts: What’s in your folder of shame?