Tag: blogging

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Screen Shot 2015-03-10 at 09.38.01
Mobile Photos — From my phone via mail

 

Like anyone with any sense I read Alan Levine’s blog religiously. It has given me more ideas to think about and play around with than any other site on the Internet.

The other day I read Share Images By Email to SPLOT Collector (this post is now well down the post list as Alan blogs like a manic).

I was very interested in this, as I’d loved posterous until it was abandoned. One of the main things I liked about posterous was the posting by email facility. This allowed me to publish photos from my phone even with a terrible connection. I first noticed this on holiday in Galloway when I didn’t see a signal all week. I did keep my posterous updated with photos because the mail app on my phone magically seemed to be able to find a signal when I was asleep and send the photos over. I’d got it in the back of my mind to replicate this behavior with WordPress sometime, Alan’s post gave me the details of how to and the impetus to do it.

I’ve already got a reclaimhosting account for quickly setting up things to play with. It took me a quick 5 minutes to install wordPress, set the theme to the one Alan recommended (Fukasawa by Anders Norén), add the Jetpac plugin to handle mail, another plugin (Auto Thumbnailer) to automatically use images as featured images and add a css tweak. All following Alan’s instructions.

This had me covered for the main features of posterous, post via email and handling images in a pretty way.
As I wanted to post multiple images I also turned on the ‘Tiled Galleries’ and Image Galley Carousel provided by Jetpac and tweaked the CSS
a bit more for that. Another couple of minutes.

The system seems to be working just the way I wanted and yesterday I added a couple more features. Posterous had an interesting feature that allowed you to automatically forward whatever you posted to other services. I had a quick search for a WordPress plugin to do this but ended up at ifttt.com. There I found: Post WordPress Featured Image to Flickr. This just deals with the first image, but a quick test proves it works. I’ll probably explore posting all the images later.

While I was on ifttt I also notice Instagram photo to WordPress blog so have thrown this into my mix. I can now post to Instagram, have that picture added to the blog and also sent on its way to flickr.

Screen Shot 2015-03-10 at 10.22.52

Apart for the sheer fun of doing this, it also fit in quite well with the POSSIE, own your own space agenda.

Alan’s SPLOT | Smallest Possible Learning Open Tools project is fascinating.

Smallest/Simplest * Possible/Portable * Open/Online * Learning/Living * Tool/Technology

About | SPLOT

Update: forgot to add the link to the blog: Mobile Photos — From my phone via mail

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A couple of weeks ago I kicked of a blogging bootcamp as part of my day job. The idea is to help folk through getting started with class blogging. Each week for 10 weeks there are, technical tasks, discussions and blogging challenges which participating classes (or teachers) can choose to do.

My thinking is based on my own experience in a few online classes/MOOCs and, of course ds106. The bit I really wanted to do was aggregate the participants blogs back to the bootcamp blog. Hopefully this would lead to some connections and community.

I had hoped as part of the progress with glow blogs we would by now have had a plugin in place that would help with this. Unfortunately this has not happened yet.

My next though was to set up a blog outside glow, install the necessary plugin (FeedWordPress probably) and aggregate the posts there. This aggregation could be brought back to the bootcamp blog as an RSS feed.

I ended up going for much less work. I use Inoreader as my RSS reader. It has the rather nice feature when you can get an RSS feed for any of your folders of feeds. This is how it works.

After participants make their first post, they send me a link. We are asking them to categorize their posts bootcamp so I use the feed for that. For example Wemyss Bay Primary P6, their bootcamp category is:

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/in/primary6wbps/category/bootcamp/

So the RSS feed will be

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/in/primary6wbps/category/bootcamp/feed

I add that to my Inoreader and put it in the BootCamp folder:

inoreader screeshot

From the Folder Settings menu I can then get a link to the aggregated RSS feed and a page that aggregates all the posts too.

Back on the bootcamp blog I’ve added a RSS widget to the sidebar using this feed. This displays the last 20 posts from participants on the blog.

rss widget on bootcamp blog

I’d prefer to show more of the participants post on the main section of the blog but I believe this is a further wee story that shows how nice this sort of technique could be. If we get a suitable plugin in glow blogs, we could run all sots of ‘events’ and learning experiences by just aggregating participating class or school blogs through a ‘mothership’ blog.

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ard-reflection

Ten years ago today I made my first post on this blog. 882 post (plus this one) for a total of over a quarter of a million words. I’d posted to blogs before this one, but this one stuck.

You would think, by this time, I’d have some sort of plan going, but no, this blog continues to be pretty haphazard without a real sense of audience or single purpose.

It does provide me with a thinking tool and scrapbook which I continue to enjoy and that is still enough for me.

The blog has been the starting point for all sort of online and offline experiences. I’ve dallied with other online spaces and playgrounds, but keep coming back here.

The blog itself has moved and changes: starting as a sub weblog of my school/class site using pivot; it moved to this domain and got a change of name when I left school; got upgraded to pivotx; and then moved to WordPress. I still think of it as the same place.

Along the way, I’ve broken links, lost images and comments, but still have a reasonable portfolio of my ramblings and technological roaming.

The image with this post is to remind me to try and reflect rather than ramble;-)

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My last post was review of my 2014 on Flickr, this is a quick list of some of my other online lives in 2014:

John’s World Wide Wall Display, this blog

57 blog post here this year. My favourite is probably RSS Serendipity. 57 compares to about a 87 post average over the last 10 years.

  • 2005 – 91
  • 2006 – 205
  • 2007 – 135
  • 2008 – 55
  • 2009 – 45
  • 2010 – 49
  • 2011 – 83
  • 2012 – 92
  • 2013 – 63
  • 2014 – 57

106 drop in

Another 20 blog posts on my DS106 blog. Can’t choose a favourite there, my 106 posts have an even smaller potential audience than here, but I love them more for that!

I also knitted a few webpages linked to DS106, DS106 GiF TV is by far the most interesting and fun (if somewhat incomprehensible ).

Ds 106 gif tv Skull

Pinboard, link collection

1561 pinboard links Pinboard: bookmarks for johnjohnston my delicious replacement, a lovely service.

JJ GiFs

103 gifs posted to tumblr jjgifs, March with 22 gifs was the busiest, not sure what I was thinking of…

Two of my gifs were featured on the Tumblr radar, skewing my stats somewhat and making my tumblr output the most popular of my online publications by a long way. It was quite amusing watching the likes pile on, as far as I can see the radar is pretty random but this many likes cheered me up at the start of 2014.

Tumblr Stats 26 010 2014

Youtube

17 Youtube videos posted: YouTube John Johnston the most popular with 340 views was Journey into DS106 tdc762 most of the rest were ds106 inspired too.

Vimeo

6 Videos posted to vimeo, I think of vimeo as a bit more seriously than youtube. 4 out of 6 of these were for the day job.

Edutalk

We produced a fair number of podcasts over on Edutalk this year, it is a great experience, we have had some lovely conversations and learnt a lot talking to all sorts of folk. Lots of interesting plans and possibilities for 2015.

New Spaces and Places

I’ve used a few new services in 2014: Known, What do I Know?; Fargo (I started playing with Fargo in 2013, and have blogged about it a few times); other software from Dave Winer and Smallest Federated Wiki, which I am only just beginning to get a clue about.

I also set up home in a ~tilde club: totallynuclear.club/~troutcolor where I’ve also set up a River4, another RSS application from Davie Winer.

All of these places are really interesting and I hope to be digging into them more later on. I’ll post some basic information soon.

Twitter, Instagram and places I might have forgotten

I’ve not gather stats for these places, but I tweeted a far bit and posted quite a few pictures to instagram. I am sure I’ve posted other things in other places too….

2015

This will bring the 10th birthday of this blog in February, as usually I post an unstructured pile of stuff lacking overall focus or any hope of a plan. This might not make this a great blog, but I continue to enjoy the process.

Previous Years

I’ve just added a page to the blog that lists All Posts, made it easy to find other end of year reviews, not a lot of consistency of approach:

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@audreywatters :

Despite all the pushes to “bring Twitter to the classroom” and calls to have Twitter “replace traditional professional development,” I’m less and less convinced that’s a good idea — or at least, I’m more and more convinced that we should not rely solely on Twitter as the site for online PD or for online educator community. Both can and do exist online — PD and community — but I’d wager the best place to find both remain on educators’ blogs. I wonder if, in fact, “the future of professional development” might be a “return to blogging.”

via Is Twitter the Best Option for Online Professional Development? from the Hack Education blog.

That would be a nice development in 2015. I’ve blogged a lot about twitter and while it continues to be a good tool, I’d go along with the questioning of best. I suspect our professional standards are looking for a bit more depth too?

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flickr photo by krystian_o Attribution License

43/365 by krystian_o Attribution License

TL:DR I’ve just migrated my blog, please let me know if you find broken things and I’ll try and fix them.

In the midst of the glowblogs migration project I am involved in professional I’ve been working on a wee migration of my own. For the past nine years I’ve been blogging using pivot (later pivotx) this weekend I’ve moved to WordPress.

Why?

I started using pivot back in 2004 as my class blog mainy because it did not need a database on the website and then that cost a bit more. I stuck to it as I found it easy to theme, and adapt for various classroom projects. It seemed fairly natural to use the same system myself.

Pivotx seems to be changing but quite slowly, the promise of pivot 4 was from 2012.

I’ve been attracted to several interesting WordPress technologies and plugins and now use it for edutalk, ScotEduBlogs and my ds106 blog. The feedwordpress plugin is of especial interest.

A wish to eat my own dog food given I am promoting WordPress for glow.

How

Originally I though of turning the whole site/domain to WordPress, to include my ds106 blog: 106 drop in, but that looked a wee bit to tricky at the moment. I also have a bunch of straightforward html pages and experiments which I want to leave in place. Also there are a few challenges to moving the pivot posts to WordPress that seemed enough for now.

There is not a simple pivotx imported for wordpress, I found Migrating your blog from PivotX to WordPress | filmvanalledag which looked as if it was a near fit, but missed out tags and comments. I’ve also been using disqus comments for my blog but wanted to move to standard ones without losing disqus.

That filmvanalledag post gave me a great start with example.org/?feed=rss&c=*&n=10000 I used this to download the rss feed for all of my posts (>800).

I decided that the RSS import would lose all my tags and comments so went for another approach. I have a bit of experience with kludging together a standard WordPress import from other things. This is probably of little interest to anyone but myself, but briefly I use SuperCard to creat a simple pseudo database of the rss add in the missing keywords by downloading them directly from the database and then manipulate it into a wordpress friendly format, for example getting the tag list like this:

uid,"tag","contenttype",target_uid
2533,"assessment_is_for_learning","entry",1132
2535,"blogging","entry",1133
2537,"scotedublogs","entry",1135
2536,"newyear","entry",1135

Directly from the database and turning it into:

<category domain="post_tag" nicename="glowscotland"><![CDATA[glowscotland]]></category>
<category domain="post_tag" nicename="glowscot"><![CDATA[glowscot]]></category>
<category domain="post_tag" nicename="blogging"><![CDATA[blogging]]></category>
<category domain="post_tag" nicename="wordpress"><![CDATA[wordpress]]></category>
<category domain="category" nicename="wwwd"><![CDATA[wwwd]]></category>
<category domain="category" nicename="jj"><![CDATA[jj]]></category>

For each post.

I tested the import of my export on a local version of wordpress and also worked out some htaccess stuff.
My old blog links were like this: http://johnjohnston.info/blog/?e=2462 and wordpress expects this http://johnjohnston.info/blog/?p=2462.

It took me a fair bit of googling and testing to get something that worked, although not quite correctly, http://johnjohnston.info/?e=2464 once I turned on pretty links goes to http://johnjohnston.info/blag/what-is-openness/?e=2464, not removing the ?e=2464, ?p=2464 works properly. Once tested I created a new WordPress on the site, at /blag, set it up, did a little more testing and have just moved it to /blog after changing the urls in the General Settings Screen.

The other main problem was that I was using disqus for my comments on the old blog and being a packrat I did not want to leave them behind. So I’ve added a bit of logic to this new blog where older posts will display the disqus form and any comments but going forward I’ll use the standard WordPress ones. I can’t see any way to import the old disqus comments into WordPress at this point.

There are more things to fix, and I’ll try to pick these up as I go along. After that I’ll be looking to play around with some wordpress plugins and the like.

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One of the biggest frustrations working on the glow projects is the limits it places on open communication. I was expecting to be able to blog ideas and thoughts as I progressed through the blog migration. It turns out that this might have lead to procurement and legal difficulties.

A Very Excited Puppy by edanley Attribution License

I am delighted and excited that the blog migration project, which is what I’ve been spending the majority of my time on since January, is at a point where we can discuss our plans.

After a lot of work and investigation it has been decided that the best way to go forward with the blogging service is to continue to use WordPress for Glow Blogs. This might have seemed to be a no brainer, but we had to be sure we would not run into possible procurement challenges by assuming WordPress was the only solution.

How We Got Here and Why It Is Taking So Long

Current blogs hooked into sharepoint, use a very old version of WordPress.
There has been a lot of investigation on how the old blogs worked and were knitted into the sharepoint system of ‘Old Glow’ we now have a good understanding of the technical architecture and best way to move forward.

Things That Need to Be Done

Authentication, Blog Creation, User Management.

The new blogs will need to authenticate to the new RM Unify project. Blog creation is current done in the ‘Old Glow’ sharepoint portal. The new service will need to include an independent system for creating blogs. Likewise the old system used the old portal for user management, a new system will have to be created inside the WordPress platform. We anticipate that there are many opportunities for improving the blog creating and user management in the new system. We will also, hopefully avoid the problem of being tightly coupled to another service which should make future development of the blogs less problematic than it has been in the past.

We Have a Plan

We now have a full-time WordPress developer in the glow team who will have the role of overseeing the technical aspects of the blog project. We have procured the services of Code for The People to manage the migration process and upgrade to a more recent version of WordPress.

  1. Move: existing 2.9.2 blogs to new home, development of new authentication, blog creation and User management. This will reduce risk of any problems that might arise from trying to move directly to a new and up to date WordPress setup.
  2. Upgrade: to more recent version of WP We will, again to reduce risk, upgrade in stages. This should not be visible to end users.
  3. Improve: Phase Three…

The benefits of the new blog system should become apparent quite quickly.
Firstly here are many features of more recent versions of WordPress that will improve the system without any development. A better editor, better mobile experience, better handling of media.

Going forward into stage three, there should be an opportunity for a wider range of themes and plugins and the development of a system for requesting in installation of these.

We should be able to make pupil profile improvements. For example the creation of the profile blogs current take many many steps. It takes me about an hour to take a class through creation. We should be able to improve that, and perhaps other types of blogs site, by providing a wizard that is build into the system. We have the chance to develop a better system for producing the p7 & S3 profiles.

Aggregation, this could make the following and commenting on pupil profiles by staff much more efficient. Teachers could potentially have a page where they would see any new activity by any group of pupils they interact with.

There Is Always Some Risk

There are few possible risks which may result in extending the planned short freeze on the platform. If these push our migration date past Oct 3 the current blogs will not be accessible. Our current estimates are that we will meet our deadlines.

  • There is a potential period of blogs having a procedural content freeze or outage for a few days in the Summer. Possibly another content freeze in September or October. We will do our best to keep users informed about this. We have not yet identified length of these periods.
  • Things go wrong, exceptionally big project
  • I’d guess this is one of the biggest WordPress setups in the world, we are moving from version 2.9.2 to 3.9 or later this is a challenge.
  • There will be a great deal of testing of all stages in the migration, we will be starting the testing early to maximise benefit while minimising risk to delivery dates.
  • There are a lot of different aspects of Procurement that are hard to fathom before the exercise is complete. It is difficult to estimate times we have still to finalise the procurement of the hosting for the blogging system.

Class Sets, will not be ready for switchover time. RM unify does not currently have a way for the blogs to gather class and curricular groups to help with adding users to a blog and assigning them roles. We will develop interim solutions to assigning roles to multiple users (probably pasting in a list of usernames). This will hopefully be short term and be replaced by a more robust solution when class sets information is available in glow generally.

I managed to avoid ‘blog with two tails’ as the title of this post, but could not the puppy pictures;-)

Although this feels at times as if it is a long drawn out process, it has been (and is being) made enjoyable for me by working with (or mainly watching the the work carried out by) a great team of folk on the blog project. The first time I’ve worked with a Project Manager, Business Analyst, Technical Architect, Tester or Developers in a formal setting has been one of the best things in my secondment so far.

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I’ve written here about FeedWordPress quite a few times and if you have spoken to me about technology for learning I’ve probably mentioned it to you too. FeedWordPress is a WordPress plugin that lets you aggregate, on the one blog, many blogs (or other sources that provide RSS).

FeedWordPress is used extensively on DS106 (Which I probably talk about far to much for my co-workers comfort) and we now use it on ScotEduBlogs to aggregate over 100 Scottish educational blogs.

I’ve posted about how I think this would be a great tool for learning in schools, allowing pupils to work in there own spaces but pull project related content from multiple sources together.

I’ve just found a wonderful example of this in use (somewhat more interesting than ScotEdublogs and easier to grasp than ds106)

This site allows 20 students to record botanical findings, they do so by posting to their own blogs. The results are aggregated on to Field Botany | Plants of the James River Park System, There are already 700 posts.

Belle Isle

The students can post photos and informatino straight to their blogs with mobile phones while in the field.

Tom Woodward on who’s blog I discovered this site explains the details:

This early days for the site but in the end the intrepid biology duo of Jill Reid and Dianne Jennings will worked with their students to create a site that local residents can use to identify plants in our James River Park System.

Tom goes onto explain how he set the site up and the plugins used.

Glow Blogs

One of the problems with suggesting FeedWordPress for learning is that it requires a fair bit of work to get going, you cannot use it on WordPress.com, edublogs or other sites that host blogs for you, you need to set up your own hosting and add and configure the plugin. As we work our way through requirements and procurement of the new blogging solution for glow the possibility of being able to offer this sort of factuality is very exciting…

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The Unicorn in Motion Rainbow

A wee bit of an update on the ‘glow product owner’ gig. The title is a bit of a mouthful and still difficult to explain. I should now be able to give an elevator pitch, but I am not quite there yet.

What I can do is give an idea of what I’ve been doing so far. We have started the business of creating teams that develop various aspects of the glow environment as projects.

The one I’ve had most to do with so far is the blog migration project. The main folk involved in this are: a project manager, a business analyst, a technical architect and myself as product owner. This is not a full time job for anyone, we are all involved in other projects, activities and meetings. We can also involve other people, say another technical architect with specialist knowledge or procurement experts.

We start by gathering requirements for the project, looking at what the blogs and e-portfolios do at the moment and what we would like them to do at the finish. A lot of this is understanding and unpicking how the blogs are connected to the glow service and authentication as it stands. This turns out to be quite complicated;-)

There are procedures for this sort of operation, with a standard way of writing the requirements. Luckily for glow I don’t directly do any of the writing, I just discuss, review and sometime make a decision.

By now we are near having a first draft of the requirements for the blog migration. Then this will then go for further examination from the technical and procurement experts. Then on through, options, ‘invitations to tender’, procurement and more.

I’ve probably missed a few steps and got some in the wrong order. The project also has dependencies on other projects, for example the authentication one, Ian owns that one.

A lot of this is not really what I am interested in, but more a way to get to what that is. That is things like, mobile blogging, better media handling, a quicker setup for e-portfolios plus some rainbows and unicorns. Things that will help learning. The whole project process is just a means to get from where we are to where we want to be through the procurement jungle and down the options river on a technical raft.

The other job I have is to decide when to drop a feature. This might be a blue sky idea that I love or something more realistic. The problem(for me) will come when that feature will have an impact of delivering on schedule, then I’ll have to move from giving ideas and advice to making the call.

The process is a fair distance from what my ideas of the job were. I had some sort of romantic vision of myself and a team of crack developers cranking out amazing services that just work. I now understand that there is a lot more to it. Before the crack developers start to work lots of other folk have their parts to play. Turns out that these folk are smart and a pleasure to work with. Maybe we will get rainbows and unicorns after all, it might just be it takes a bit more work than I though to get there.

The gif at the top of the pages is based on the public domain image from: File:The Horse in Motion.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia by Eadweard Muybridge.

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I’ve been reading a lot about teaching code in schools and computational thinking recently, good to see an alternative view Why Pushing People to Code Will Widen the Gap Between Rich and Poor | Wired Opinion | Wired.com

Public vs. Private – Should Student Work Be Public On the Web? | The Edublogger, When I started blogging with my pupils, the whole point was to be public. Recently, I’ve been involved in setting up e-portfolios with hundreds of pupils and the idea we are missing a trick by making these private is always at the back of my mind. In North Lanarkshire, where I work, there has been a recent flourishing of use of glow blogs, but a lot of the public ones are written to by staff as an adjunct to their school website. I wonder if this will develop to more pupil publishers? I also notice that now blogging is much more widespread that many using them are not involved in the social aspect of blogging: commenting and reading other blogs. The are perhaps being used more for communication with parents and the local community?

appear.in – one click video conversations is one several sites that have popped up recently offering WebRTC video conferencing in some browsers (Chrome, Firefox, opera).

I’ve been doing a bit of iPad screencasting of late this is a good guide on how to do it. I use Airserver and screnflow rather than the applications Ben Rimes use but the process is the same, Ben’s scren cast is in a competion at the monet so if you want to help him win give his youtube the thumbs up. How To: Screen Record Your iPad – ScreenChamp Finalist 2013 – YouTube

Here is how to turn your smartphone into a digital microscope for just $10: DIY