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SXSW...

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SXSW /interactive/panelsAm in Austin for SXSX (South by Southwest) Today's panels look very good. Last night I had dinner with Mike Sloan, the organizer of the panel that I'll be taking part in on Sunday.

Am now in a session being conducted by Mike Werbach, SXSW /interactive/panels

WiFi is just the tip of the iceberg. We're in the midst of a fundamental transformation of wireless communication, which has the potential to foster massive innovation, revitalize the technology industry, and dramatically lower barriers to connectivity everywhere. This presentation will provide an overview of the technological, business, and policy implications of this revolution, which challenges basic assumptions about wireless technology, interference, and regulation.

Will be nice to spend some time thinking about technology and how people can use it to communicate and share their work... more later...

Edit CSS Mozilla/Firefox Plug-in

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Russell Beattie NotebookRussell Beattie points to a very nice Mozilla/Firefox extension...

It allows you to edit your web page's CSS in the left sidebar and watch the change in realtime in the browser pane.

I installed this on Firefox and it works very well. Just call it from the Sidebar submenu and the CSS of the page that is currrently in the browser window shows up in a pane to the left. Start to edit the CSS and see the changes instantly. This is great for experimenting on the fly.

Opera Browser...

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Opera's Small-Screen Rendering(tm)

The Opera web browser for Smartphones and PDA's is really amazing. Just about any page I have pulled up on it looks good and is readable. Much more useful than the default browser that came with my Nokia 3650.

The Windows version of the Opera browser has a very nice feature that will preview any web page as it would show up on the Opera handheld browser. For example, the image to the right is how this site looks on my Nokia 3650.

Moveable Type Spam Vulnerability

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movabletype.org: News

The "Email this to a friend" functionality in the mt-send-entry.cgi script is vulnerable to being used by spammers to send spam messages. In principle, all "email this to a friend" programs are vulnerable to being used by spammers, because they allow the user to specify a To: address and a message body. But in practice, MT's implementation of this is not as robust as it should be, and a new version is available below.

This fix is already included in all versions of MT 2.64 downloaded from today on.

More About Advance Template Building with TypePad

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TypePad Education Weblog Portal: TypePad as Template Builder for MT Sites Al Delgado asked for more information about template exporting from TypePad to Movable Type. The Typepad help section explains this pretty well... Note: I believe access to the help area is limited to Typepad members... Also note that it is available to those that have purchased a TypePad Pro account.

Q: What are Advanced Template Sets?

A: Advanced Template Sets are templates that can be customized through direct editing of HTML, CSS and TypePad template tags. Advanced Template Sets are created when existing template sets built by the TypePad Template Builder are converted. Only TypePad Pro users have access to Advanced Template Sets.

There also an entry that gives step by step instructions for creating advanced template sets. Again, I believe access to TypePad help section entries is limited to TypePad members...

Mastering the Tools...

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Weblogg-ed Vol.2: Using Weblogs in Education Will Richardson points to a response by Seb Fiedler to Liz Lawley's experiments with MT as a CMS for one of her courses. I found Seb's point about mastering easily transferable tools (Examples include MovableType, Manila, Typepad... ) to be very similar to my own thinking.

I would rather spend my time mastering skills for the use of personal Webpublishing technologies than working my way through one of the industry packages that I will never be able to afford for any small scale project I might be interested in. Personal Webpublishing is about the empowerment of the individual and small teams... what do you personally get from mastering WebCT, BlackBoard, etc.? Will they travel with you? Will you be able to use them for your own interests once you have left your R1 institution?