Don MacAskill has some insightful commentary on why we should be liberal in our linkage.

“The real, true power of the web is just that - it’s a web. Everything can be interconnected, and learning about or researching a subject can be vastly easier online than anywhere else. Using hyperlinks is the very reason content belongs online. If you don’t hyperlink your content, why on earth do you have it online?”

It’s a brief post - definitely worth the read of you put any content online.

Student and TechCAT extraordinaire Katie Chang has been documenting her semester abroad in Ireland on her blog. My favorite post? Her description of getting to class in the rain, and the walk back counting twelve (12!) broken and discarded umbrellas. What an experience!

For more examples of blogging in and about a foreign country, check out last spring’s cultural exchange trip to Japan. The list of participants on the side leads to numerous depictions of the trip as told (and photographed!) by the students themselves on their own blogs.

Like what you see? You might also be interested in Dr. Paul Martin’s Canadian Studies course, The Great White North, and the links along the side of it going to posts from student blogs.

After the recent release of Share Your Opml, I’ve finally shared mine. For the moment, at least, it looks like I am in the top 100 “Most Prolific Subscribers” (in other words, those with the most feeds), coming in at #93 with almost 400 feeds. I’m not sure yet if this is a good or a bad omen, although I am comfortable with the number of feeds in my feed reader, and I am nowhere close to the 8000+ mark held by the #1 spot.

Aside from the “My List is Bigger Than Your List” contest , the service has a number of other interesting features. The “Subscriptions Like Mine” gives a ranked list of people who have similar collections. I also like being able to look through my list and see who else is subscribed to certain feeds. For example, by clicking on the asterisk (*) I can see who else is subscribed to The Shifted Librarian blog.

I should note that I find the “River Of Links” - that is, one long list of alphabetically sorted links - format a bit hard to absorb. If you agree, you can always see my OPML file as a grouped set of links, similar to how they ar arranged in my feed reader.

It also looks like the site is running on WordPress - something that I’ve been thinking about as a way to better manage the UVM blogroll, which is badly in need of a fixer-upper.

What’s on your list?

It’s been a bit quiet around here lately … too quiet. So quiet that I think I’ve been on the verge of becoming a Bad Blogger. This has partly to do with the fact that I am now posting to the CTL blog, so some posts that would have been going here are, and will be, showing up there.

However, at the risk of becoming even less focused, I’ve recently started a new blog project. It’s actually more of a podcast/screencast project, and despite the cheesy name, I’m hoping to use it as a place to store, categorize, and disseminate instructional material. As always, comments, suggestions, and criticisms are welcome. Enjoy!

One of MovableType’s “missing features” is the ability to password protect blogs, and individual entries. Here’s how to password protect a “sub-blog” using domain level (i.e. UVM NetID) restriction by creating a template file with htaccess information.
(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

Last week, Stef asked me if I had some general guidelines for doing a wp install at UVM (on zoo).

1. Get a MySQL account.
2. Download WordPress.
3. Unzip the package you downloaded.
4. Open up wp-config-sample.php and fill in your database details (as provided via step 1). Save and rename the file to wp-config.php.
5. Upload all the files to the appropriate location in your public_html (i.e. you might create a “public_html/blog/” directory and upload all the files into there)
6. Run the installation file. Relative to where you uploaded the files, it’ll be in wp-admin/install.php.

That’s usually about it for the install - technically, you’re ready to go. Note most of the above steps are straight from the WP “5 Minute Installation“. I haven’t actually done an install in a little while, but for the most part the process shoudn’t be too different. Read on for further customization & configuration options. (more…)

A while back I ran into some problems with WP not sending emails due to the way mail() is sometimes called under safe mode.

Apparently (this may have been resolved by now - I was running 1.5.x i believe), you can’t pass mail() the optional 5th parameter when running under safe mode.

Here’s a little more info on how to address that.

If you have multiple authors in WordPress, they cannot edit each others posts unless they are on a greater level than the other person. To make it so that authors promoted to the same level can edit each other’s posts:

1. Open /wp-includes/functions-post.php
2. Go to line 356 (should put you in the function usercaneditpost, or something like that), and set the first part of the conditional to look something like this: ($userid == $postauthordata->ID)

This may have been resolved by now - I believe the last time I did this I was using v1.5.x.