Category: The Rest

MT 3.121, Blacklist v2.01b and Comment Spam Blocking Bliss

I’m probably the last Moveable Type user to realize this, but boy does your blogging life get a whole lot easier by upgrading to MT 3 and using the newly updated MT Blacklist 2.01b release. The new Blacklist plugin very handily throws comments with too many URLs or ones on really old posts into your list of comments needing moderation without posting them to your site (in addition to blocking ones it knows outright to be spam), and the ability to batch delete pending comments in MT means that maybe 1 out 1000 comment spam attempts in the last week or so got through to my site, and dealing with them is now under a 1 minute process in the morning. And my ISP is happy because I no longer bring their servers to a halt trying to despam my blog. If you haven’t already done it, a highly recommended set of upgrades for MT users. And extremely painless too. I can feel my blood pressure going down already. – SWL

EdTechPost Wiki bites the dust, partially resurrected

After a stressful week last week where I had my hosting company threaten to pull the plug on EdTechPost if the MT Comments script didn’t stop hammering their servers (due to comments spammers and my not having upgraded to 3.12 yet) today I had a somewhat contrite (though not nearly enough in my book) help desk worker explain to me that they had a fatal error on one of their primary file servers that corrupted some of the data on *the secondary backup* server as well, and that, yes it was true, a yards-worth of directories on my site had made their way to data-Valhalla, never to be seen again.

I’m still waiting to see what sort of recompense they will offer me, and it better be good consider the crap they gave me about a simple script consuming too many server resources. Boo Hoo. I’ll give you something to complain about – wiping out a year’s worth of my work!!!

Fortunately, somewhere deep in the reptilian IT-administrators part of my brain (yes, I was one at one point in the past) something prompted me early this year to make a backup of the EdTechPost wiki site, even though I thought that was what I was paying the #@!#$%^$ hosting company for. So all is not completely lost, only about a year’s worth of my own wiki notes and planning. Sheesh! The hosting company shall remain nameless for now, until I see how they handle this. – SWL

Firstlight.ca – commercial “royalty free/rights managed images and footage” repository

http://www.firstlight.ca/

Sent to me by a colleague as a “Canadian example of digital rights managment for digital media,” (thanks Brian!), this is worth pondering for those in the repository building business.

The site uses a lot of Javascript, frames and flash which makes it a real pain to try and point out specific aspects to you as it mostly returns under the single URL, but if you go to the pricing info page you can launch a Flash-based “Rights Managed Pricing Calculator” which is worth looking at (if only for a bit of sticker shock at how much images cost to license). The browseable taxonomy terms and how the searching works (clearly using some thesaurus) is also worth a glance.

Yeah, yeah, I know, all content should be free/it’s the networks, not the closed silos/the revolution will be blogged/yada yada yada. For the rest of us, here’s simply an actual real world commercial example to chew on. – SWL

Google Scholar & OpenURL Firefox Extension

http://www.ualberta.ca/~pbinkley/gso/

As soon as Google Scholar hit the streets there was quite a stir in the library community and various ponderings about how to tie it into existing library systems, so it was inevitable that someone would develop this, but this quickly!!! A Firefox extension which, when you perform a Google Scholar query, also sends queries to your institution’s OpenURL resolver, and in cases where your University owns a licensed copy of the cited article creates a link directly to it. Too cool! – SWL

Great Open Source cost breakdown graphic in ‘Elearning Dialogue’ article

http://www.campus-technology.com/news_article.asp?id=10299&typeid=155

Nothing really that new in the article except a nice graphic to illustrate the cost breakdown of commercial software vs. open source projects.

I wish they would have cited where the data was from on which the cost breakdowns are based.- SWL

CiteULike: Del.icio.us for Academic Citations

http://www.citeulike.org/

That edubloggers links feed has already paid off a number of times – this morning Alan furl’d this new site, in essence del.icio.us for academic citations.

So what not simply use del.icio.us instead. Well you probably could, but the advantages seem to be:
– the “most active” tags that have currently emerged come much more from the world of scholarly jargon (jargon’s not always a bad thing, you know)
– a nice feature specific to academics, the site allows you to export your collection to either BibTeX or Endnote to help build a bibliography.

Will it take off? Who knows. It does offer RSS feeds on keywords; for instance, here’s one on self organization. – SWL

Please do not adjust your sets….

Finally upgraded my MT install (my ISP is threatening to heave me off the server if the comments script on my site keeps bringing the server to its knees, the REAL cost of spam!, and I’m hoping this upgrade will help). Apologies for the intrusion.