Via Anne Z., “Two Days with Drupal,” about her experiences with starting to work with Drupal. I don’t know if I’m going to use Drupal or not this spring for my online teaching, but with some of the weird glitches I’ve had with emuonline as of late, I think I need to figure out some kind of alternative to that.
HBD, Wired
So, WIRED is turning 15 this month. Happy Birthday, and it makes me feel kinda old, actually.
Rex Sorgatz at Fimoculous.com (the link is above) has a nice write-up about the first issue. Here’s a highlight couple of paragraphs for me:
Peeling back those matte pages now, one can’t help falling victim to a bit of nostalgia for this town crier of the proto-digital era. There was no logical reason that this magazine should even have existed in 1993. Clinton/Gore had just been sworn in, and no one was talking about the “Information Superhighway” yet. Words like baud and Usenet and ISDN hadn’t even been surrendered to the dustbin of digital history.
Need more historical perspective? There weren’t even any URLs in the first issues of Wired! The World Wide Web barely existed, and there was no Mosaic browser on which to view it anyway.
Ah, memories….
I’ve subscribed to Wired off and on for many years now. It went through a phase there during the “dot com” bubble where it was trying to be a business magazine, and it definitely lost its edge. I started taking it again about a year and a half ago, and I guess I have very mixed feelings. I have yet to read the January issue, for example, but the one on Manga was pretty good. It all just goes to show you that institutions/publications/etc. can’t remain “the cutting edge” forever.
More geeky than necessary post about WordPress
From Weblog Tools Collection, “Extending WordPress Beyond the Blog.” I don’t have the time/brain power right now to figure this out, but since I’m going to be contemplating some way of redoing my online teaching for the spring and I’m interested in trying to make it work with WordPress, these links about making WP into a CMS might come in handy later.
Check out picnik
Okay, okay, after this I’m going to get down to bizniz, I really am, but I found via Stephen Down’s site this very cool online image editing tool called picnik. This is the sort of thing that is going to solve some very common problems I have in classes where I have students make simple (and even kind of complicated) web sites. Teaching basics of Photoshop (which is all I know, btw) isn’t that big of a deal, but it is another layer of computer geek stuff, not to mention that most students don’t have easy access to this pricey software.
Picnik solves this problem– or at least it will probably solve about 85% of the problems my students have with images. Basically, it allows you to do a boatload of editing of images, it will allow you to edit images from services like Flickr or Facebook of Picasa or the desktop of your computer, it is cross-platform, and it is stupid-easy to use. There’s a premium version, but I created this image (out of this original Flickr pict) with the free one in about 2 minutes. Try it out.
Okay, now I gotta work and exercise and shop.
I don’t speak drupal…
… but I know a lot of people in the computers and writing community do. So I thought I’d pass along this link to the Drupal Cook Book | Nancy’s Information Site. I have no idea if it is any good or not, but I do know it exists, and I might be looking at it more closely when (or if) I get time. I’ve been thinking lately that some of the options that drupal offers might make it worth it for me to abandon emuonline (the local tool for online teaching) in favor of something I run myself, either something like drupal or something like moodle. We shall see….
Links to lots of software
Via Stephen’s Web, I came across the site “Software Essentials for the Modern Educator.” I think “essential” is a bit of a stretch (I have never found it “essential” to have a software that can edit perl scripts or python) and it is very windoze-centric, but a useful list nonetheless.
Google not happy one little bit about Microsquish/Yahoo deal
This looks like it could get quite a bit more interesting before any sort of deal is actually made:
“Yahoo! and the future of the Internet,” from the Official Google Blog.
Update:
Microsquish responds. I tried to read it, but then I remembered why I didn’t want to go to law school after all.
Cell phone novels?
Via CCE, I came across this NYT piece, “Thumbs race as Japan’s best sellers go cellular.” Basically, there is an increasingly popular phenomenon in Japan, mostly among women, of both reading and writing novels on cell phones. Here’s a quote:
One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors.
After cellphone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover book last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007, according to a closely watched list by Tohan, a major book distributor.
Jeez, and I can barely send a text message on my phone….
Microsquish to buy Yahoo
I just heard it on NPR; here’s a link to a blurb in the NYT. Basically, Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo and is making an offer that they are basically not going to be able to refuse. The idea is to compete against Google.
I don’t know much about this sort of thing, but would this even be legal in terms of anti-trust laws?
Does anyone know anything about Scrivener?
I was talking on the phone the other day with an old friend of mine and in the course of our meandering conversation, her mentioned/recommended Scrivener, an Apple only software that is a word processor that is designed for “writers” with all kinds of compelling-looking features. You can try it 30 days for free and it’s only $40 after that, so I will probably monkey around with it anyway. But I’m sort of curious if anyone reading this message now has played around with it themselves.
The main question I have in my own mind is this: is this software that will help me be more efficient/”write better,” or is this software that will help me procrastinate/goof off?