Sounds Interesting

Daniel Kies is an English professor at the College of DuPage. He also designed the department’s website, it is stunning accomplishment. Unfortunately, there seem to be a number of dead links to resources outside of the site. Still, there is much to learn from exploring what Daniel has created.

With the upgrade to MT 3.2 and the latest version of Brandon’s Enclosure Plugin, things seem to be working too well. With bash podder, all of the jpgs and gifs were downloaded. Somewhere in the documentation is method to control to what file types get automatically written as enclosures.

Note to self – figure out how to do this and determine whether or not it is needful of doing.

technorati tags: MT-Plugin, rss 2.0 enlcosures, Brandon Fuller

Gina Trapani is an editor at lifehacker who gives some useful advice about how to best write for the web. Though Strunk and White remain the final arbiters, the points she so cogently puts forward are not a rehash of freshman composition.
Main points that she brings up deserve a second reading:

• Write a strong lead
• Use frequent paragraph breaks
• Provide context
• Link smartly

It mustn’t be forgotten that what makes a blog or website memorable isn’t the imagery or the animation or even the stunning design; what brings people back is the quality of the writing. This will be a point that blogging advocates and enthusiast will do well to remind newbies they bring into the fold.

technorati tags: writing, blog-advocacy, education

I am using Flock most of the time these days. One thing I’ve been trying to figure out is how to get themes and extensions designed for Firefox to work in Flock. Frobba offers Info on Porting Themes. The Flocker appears to be tool to assist in the process on porting extensions.

technorati tags: flock, flocker, firefox-extensions

Trying to imagine themes to explore in the blogging class I’m schedule to teach I’ve com eup with the following:

1. Business – marketing, communication with customers, inter-organizational communication
2. Writers and artists – a way to distribute one’s work and draw publicity
3. Individuals – reading and writing weblogs to become connected to a network of people with similar interests
4. Education – this seems to be a natural not in need of further explanation
5. NGO and Non-Profit organizations – blogging offers an affordable point of entry to a world wide communications network

Last December (22204), Extension 337 had this post listing 10 reasons why non-profits should use RSS and ostensibly blog.