Blogging

Hammersley on TypePad...

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Guardian Unlimited | Online | Battle of the blog builders The standout feature is the template maker. Users can design their blog without knowing, or seeing, any HTML code whatsoever and with a very great range of control.

Other features include real-time statistics, posting by email, and automatic creation of Friend of a Friend data - instantly taking an experimental standard and taking it to the mainstream.

This looks very interesting. I have teachers who want to use MovableType, and would gladly pay to have it hosted...

Weblog Presentation

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Tonight I am making a presentation to a group about weblogs...

Background and Perspective

Weblogs: A History and Perspective... by Rebecca Blood

Understanding Weblogs, O'Reilly Net Article

Blogging Goes Corporate, Wired Article

Trent Lott Gets Bloggered, Online Journalism Review:

Weblog Software:

The Microcontent News Blogging Software Roundup

 

RSS:
Rich Site Summary, Resource Description Framework ( RDF ) Site Summary, Real Simple Syndicaton....

What is RSS?

Making an RSS Feed

 

News Aggregators

NetNewsWire

Newscrawler

Newsisfree

Syndic8

 

Sample Weblog Sites

Megnut

Zeldman

Vagabonding

Scripting News

Douglas Rushkoff

Dan Gillmor

NY Times News Headlines

Ms. Leake's Classroom

Will Richardson

Joe Luft

 

Jon Udell: High-tech PR in the age of blogs

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RSS holds the promise of becoming a key part of a company's media relations strategy and execution. [PR Tactics: Using RSS for corporate communications]

In short, I don't want you to pitch things to me. And I don't want your clients to pitch things to me either, at least not directly. I do, very much, want them to speak in their own authentic voices, about the technologies and products and services that inspire their passion, to everyone who might have a reason to care. I want your clients to explain what they do, how they think, and why their efforts matter. And so, of course -- and more importantly -- do current and prospective customers. [Jon's Radio]

Part of a series of pieces of how weblogs can be used to share information with customers. A good example of this is how Macromedia allowed several of their community mangager create weblogs associated with their product line.

The firm needed a way to quickly respond to questions developers might have as they use the new products... [Wired]

As Jon Udell mentions I don't want brochures and press releases, I want to hear the people who develop products and services talk about them and share their passion and knowledge. Same goes for the classroom too...

 

Another Day, Another MT Plug-In: OtherBlog...

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MT Plugin Directory: OtherBlog
Author: David Raynes
Description: Plug-in based way of including posts/info from other blogs on the same installation.

Just installed this one today and now we can route the excerpt of the most recent recommend book from the media specialist's weblog to the front page of the school web site. Plan to use this one to route art work from the art teacher's weblog to the front page.

Also discovered two others that are very useful. MTGrid adds tags to make tables or containers from data inside of MT. When used with Kevin Shays' Collect plugin the allow you to create a page of thumbnail images form your posts. I still need to figure out which category tags I need to use to pull out individual categories, but you can see an example on Ms. Avidan's classroom site.

Stepan Riha is the author of MTGrid and was very gracious in helping me to get MTGrid working.

More Movable Type...

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I've been spending some time leaning more about the cabibilities of Movable Type. I have been working with Lynne Leake of Buckman Elementary helping her design her classroom web page. Initially I showed her Movable Type and what some other teachers had done with it. Her initial reaction was positive, but she wanted more. She wanted a web page that wasn't just a list of posts, but rather a template that posts would flow into.

With a bit of digging around on the Movable Type support forum, I have been learning all about category tags and how to include and exclude posts. Our first crack at Lynne's page is now up. We plan to use the same template with a few other teachers in the next few days.

Winksite: The Mobile Site Builder (tm)

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WINKsite offers individuals and businesses a no-hassle approach to joining the wireless generation. In minutes, you can build a site for the Mobile Internet outfitted with handy user-oriented services including personalized mobile chat, surveys, profile, journal, rant/rave, agenda, guestbook, links, email and more.[by way of...Smart Mobs]

I played this a bit today. Am thinking it could be useful for high school teachers. A lot of there students have mobile phones... :-)

NPR Report on Weblogs and the War

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NPR : News By Web Log NPR's Laura Sydell reports that the war in Iraq has generated increased interest in blogs, short for weblogs. Blogging is the web-based practice of keeping an ever-updated personal account of some subject. Bloggers have become archivists, culling information they feel is not being presented in mainstream media and providing links to foreign news sources.

Weblogs as Project Managment Tools

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InfoWorld: Publishing a project Weblog: March 28, 2003: By Jon Udell: Web services There's a subject near and dear to my heart! A couple of years ago I predicted[2] that Weblogs would emerge within the enterprise as a great way to manage project communication. I'm even more bullish on the concept today. If you're managing an IT project, you are by definition a communication hub. Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative.

Another good article by Jon Udell on using weblogs to mangage projects.

Publishing at Buckman...

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Helen Nolen's Principal Weblog at Buckman School Have had a lot of movement these past few weeks at Buckman.

We have updated Movable Type to version 2.63. In addition I finally figured out how to get ImageMagick to work with OS X and now teachers can easily upload images and create thumbnails. Movable Type does this very easily as long as ImageMagick is installed.

The principal has started to keep a weblog that is linked off the school web page. She is becoming familiar with the technology and likes the ability to easily post information. Now we are working on an outreach program to let her families know she is publishing... Tonight we presented to the PTA group.

Several teachers have come on board and are working to put up images and words about their classroom work. In particular Lynne Leake and her intern Kathryn Hillesland are utilizing Moveable Type to not only publish a classroom weblog, but also are creating a seperate weblog devoted to student work. This site is highlighted on the main classroom page via an RSS plugin.

Barbara Lüscher is using a similar technique to embedd the RSS feed of her homework weblog on her main classroom weblog.

More work to do to enable photo galleries and other tools, but it has been a good week.

an outbreak of blog comments spam...

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We have a spammer, ladies and gentlemen, and they're going after bloggers. Virtuelvis, Masukomi, Beerblog, Bingwalker, Falcon's Eye, Mentalspace, Uppity Negro, Library Planet, Bill Kearney and Dale Keiger have all encountered the same company spamming their blog comments in the past day: Zipcodeworld.com.

The comment invariably reads "nice article, keep up the good work. lookup zip code" and Bill says the IP is 203.106.151.137 - keep an eye out, folks, and ban that IP.

[Ben Hammersley.com]

The above post by Ben Hammersley pointed out a feature of Movable Type that I was unfamiliar with: IP Banning... Under the Blog Config area of Movable Type, one can enter the IP number of a host you which to ban from entering comments. One other thing I am noticing is that the address I use on several of my weblogs is starting to be spammed. I got a piece of mail this morning which was addressed to that particular address and noticed that Al Delgado was also listed as an addressee. A bit too much of an coincidence...