“No parameters, just engage honestly with what you are doing, thinking about” – Jim Groom, in his OpenEd session.
2900 users in 2300 blogs. People given their own spaces. Jim’s Blog.
Case study: “I want my students to build a literary journal” literaryjournals.umwblogs.org/ They did it.
Random links: Flickr blog shots | The Blog story |
Tackling again the task of having a new theme here.But what I need probably requires more than I can manage.
A cool theme: but some complexities. A post at DarrenHoyt.com gives some background to using template tags and custom fields to pull out specific highlighted posts (with an image). The instructions on his Blog are superb – it helps someone like me know what you can do without an extensive knowledge of PHP and understanding the tags concept in wordpress.
1BlogTheme has a lot going for it: but it has not been updated for a year or so.
Topics in this blog: there are several. A diverse focus, too diverse maybe, certainly according to typical Blogging 101. But Darren’s Mimbo theme may cope with this. If it is set up right. Without the custom fields, the intentional use of the tags you just get a random jumble of material on the page. BUT: once you get the things right: the layout takes care of itself.
The next things: read the comments in the Mkimbo blog. Lots of them. The first few places I went to (people raving about the theme) were no longer using it. That’s the blogosphere for you.
OK: something completely different: sliding doors.
Seven themes for the blog, easily customisable, click to view. Hmm. Might just work.
Most – by far most – of the blogs I visit are still vaguely unsatisfying, I have to work to find what I want, there is clutter and noise.
A sparse home page with clear links to current stuff and a range of view sof the themes in the blog.
Something will emerge out of this.
Just considering the question of a disclaimer for an official site. Some samples . . .
The student blogs available on this website represent a real and authentic depiction of student life at Wilfrid Laurier University. In an effort to present this authentic depiction, the university maintains minimal editorial control over the communications of its bloggers.
Consistent with this decision to exercise minimal editorial control, the statements or communications of the bloggers on Lauirer’s website do not represent a statement of the university’s official position or policy.
Blog Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed here, except as specifically noted, are those of the individual authors or commenters and do not represent the views or policies of DePaul University or the College of Law.
Comment Policy: Comments should be civil and on-topic. The site administrators may, at their discretion, delete comments deemed to be uncivil, off-topic, spam, or otherwise inappropriate. This Blog/Web Site is made available by the lawyer or law firm publisher for educational purposes only as well as to give you general information and a general understanding of the law, not to provide specific legal advice. By using this blog site you understand that there is no attorney client relationship between you and the Blog/Web Site publisher. The Blog/Web Site should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a licensed professional attorney in your state. (University of Houston)
Just for interest:
How much do you balance risk with freedom? Need something soon to go on our new economics site.
POSTSCRIPT later in the day . . .
Just discovered a blog on a Canterbury URL: blogs.libr.canterbury.ac.nz/econ.php?blogid=8 I think you have really got to be an economics person to appreciate this, but it’s a start . . .
Alex Boschmans discovered yesterday I’d commented favourably on his blog design, but with a little throw away comment on the Google Ads.
Alex’s comment:
It’s true, I admit it, I put a google ad on my frontpage. But it’s supposed to be just the one wee small text-ad, it shouldn’t take up much space…
I can’t see it myself, either Google or my work proxy is blocking it..
Please let me know if this is not the case and you are getting something humongous, that’s not what I want…
Alex, since you cannot see it, here is what it looks like:
I presume this is what you want. It is small and discrete . . . and obviously the Google algorithm to detect words on the page is working. I looked at the page a few times, and found there can be sometimes 2 ads, sometimes one. Hey – it’s not too bad.
Anaconda. By the way, I read Alex’s comments on the Anaconda theme. (Which is the theme I use as well) “Also, it bothers me that they want to make some money out of it, when their theme seems to be assembled from other, freely available themes that are GPL…” and “The forum was is full of spam”. Yes. I noticed this (and yes, they have fixed the spam problem). I was less worried about this than the fact that there were lots of OLD questions on the forum unanswered. Things have improved a lot now, but the replies are usually by guests rather than the guys from home base . . which is OK again. They have Google adverts to, but scattered inside their posts as well, and not just one or two but lots . . . I hope they do OK.
Book reading plugin. One of the strengths of WordPress it the plugins. Alex uses Now Reading from Roblog. (and this blog has Google ads across the top even more prominently placed). From Alex’s blog . . .
\
This is quite cool. Links to Amazon, and has some quite complex incarnations like this blog: darkfaerytale.com/library. Kind of like your own personal Shelfari on the edge of your blog. Mark Bernstein’s was the first blog I saw featuring current reading, and I’ve often meant to do something about this. Do I want another plugin to maintain when I have other things I have yet to do?
Alex, your blog is OK, the ads are discrete as you want. (How can you survive not being able to see your blog??) Have a Nice day.
I was interested to note that when I first began reading blogs I saw a lot of blog posts about Blogging. Now I know why. I’m now on my fifth day of tinkering with themes, and blog design. I just wanted a nice simple setup:
Do you think this is easy? Things have grown a lot more complex and fun since we first started designing our own blog 2 years ago. I started with the themes . . .
There is the themes directory for WordPress. One at random: MamboPress. These themes are very good of course, but not many have the things I need, and in many the implementation seems patchy. Tim of course tells me this is normal and I just need to learn to hack the code cause I will never get what I want out of the box.
At present I am using Anaconda. K2 plus Mollio > Anaconda. However I may not continue with this. They are seriously going commercial. There is a free support forum with about 20 questions on it, some 70 days old and no answers. But I do like the theme. It has support for a few nice plugins. Like the tags you see on the left. But, this created a problem.
How do I want to categorise my blog? It might end up something like this:
* Blogging (11) * Coffee (1) * Communities (7) * Community of Practice (4)
* Conferences (2) * Cool Tools (8) * E-Learning (3) * Events 05 (1)
* FLLiNZ (5) * Food (2) * Leadership (7) * Learning (6) * mylife (8)
* ole (5) * Quotes (1) * Stillpoint (4) * Storytelling (2) * Travel (1)
* two point zero (1) * Web 2.0 (8) * Whimsey (4)
But do I want several communities categories? What about OLE PLE VLE (etc) which is a HUGE preoccupation at the moment, but I may get bad news on Monday and it may be off the radar. And where do I put special topics I want to actively promote like Feuerstein? I probably need an articles page.
Then there is tagging. What do I do with tags? There is the potential to create something quite special with tags, to search for and find just what you want, and serve up the posts in lots of different ways.
Other blogs I really like the design of.
Then came the question of asides. For a musing on asides, and probably an overuse of them see Photo Matt. And weblogtoolscollection.com/ for another use of them. Little postlets between real posts, but very appropriate for this blog – just a collection of links really. But how frustrating – they would be a lot better listed in one place. But you can make comments. In amidst the extreme clutter.
Tim (who has another neat blog format, his whole life in 4 categories) told me about asides.
One category in WP is set aside as an aside category and these are treated in a special way. I will activate this sometime.
Jack Vinson probably did not quite mean the comparison to be this literal:
Blogs are better than communities because:
Communities are better than blogs because:
And how can blogs and CoP’s live together:
And this extracted from James Farmer: “Blog based communities – explaining the basics:
Not sure that I entirely agree with this comment.
Nancy White, in reading this article came up with concept of Blogs as “containers of conversations”. However she does also point out (on a comment on James’s Blog) the difficulty some people have and some conversations pose.
There are two specific discussions involving Blogs I am interested in at the moment:
“CoP’s and Bloggers” was my last minutish presentation at BlogHui, and I shared briefly on the Saturday, which was day 2.
I used the same slideshow on communities that I had created for e-fest last year. Stunned silence at the end of it at BlogHui. They had little to say on the key question “What are the key facets of community, have you ever been part of a real community, how does it feel?”
Maybe I shouldn’t have been suprised, this was a bloggers conference after all, and there were more typical bloggers present than a-typical.
Kai Koenig had told his story on day one: The macromedia blogs. This constellation of several hundred blogs has all the hallmarks of a genuine community of practice: identity, belonging, care for the domain, shepherding of the practice, informal emergent membership, discipline of members who get out of line. Etc. So there is at least one community build around blogging tools.
Things have moved on a lot: what I’d have said in May 2005 (BlogTalk Downunder) has now changed a lot.
Gwen Gawith talks about note making not ‘note taking’. Some discussion of notes at Blogtalk Downunder. Most experienced and hardened bloggers (based on my informal research) have a notes system. Sort of thoughts in the incubator I guess, and these are electronic (in a system like tinderbox or more random) or on scraps of paper.
I think I still have a strong affinity to print and to paper. For me, I’ve realised that most of what I write about is based on print or something I’ve heard – rather than something from the internet. Nearly the end of Queens Birthday Weekend holiday here. Back to work tomorrow.
cMap: Mind Mapping
Free for non-profit use
(plus Learning management system called Leo)
From the site: “The CmapTools program empowers users to construct, navigate, share and criticize knowledge models represented as concept maps. It allows users to, among many other features, construct their Cmaps in their personal computer, share them on servers (CmapServers) anywhere on the Internet, link their Cmaps to other Cmaps on servers, automatically create web pages of their concept maps on servers, edit their maps synchronously (at the same time) with other users on the Internet, and search the web for information relevant to a concept map.”
Tinderbox: (Personal) Knowledge management and moreOnly for Mac’s, but will be out for the PC sometime.
Commercal product.
Met a bunch of people at Blogtalk Downunder who used this all the time. (Plus we also met Mark Bernstein who wrote the product)
From the Tinderbox site:
“Tinderbox is a personal content management assistant. It stores your notes, ideas, and plans. It can help you organize and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs.”
Audacity: open source sound editor/recorder
From the site: ‘Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems’
Picasa: image management
Free – from Google
The program you have been waiting for if you run a PC and do not have iPhoto. Superb!!