I recently stumbled upon the
Feed to JavaScript tool created by Alan Levine from the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction(mcli). An incredibly useful tool that allows you to aggregate xml feeds (rss, atom, etc.) and call them via a simple JavaScript on your page. This way, you can create an auto-updating segment of a webpage without any heavy lifting on your part.
As an example, I created a little test page that snags the two most recent posts from this blog, as well as Alec Couros’ blog. Not a terribly useful example, I admit, but the idea has potential. Say you had a number of course blogs hosted for free on Blogger (which now supports syndication via Atom for free) that listed the current homework in the class, and were creating a main teacher page (Mr. Schellenberg’s Home or somesuch). Well, using this Feed2JS idea, you could have a sidebar that automatically lists the current homework from each of your classes by grabbing the Atom feed from each of the blogs. Very nifty. Or, you could have auto-updating news feed from the BBC or whomever you want.
The only drawback that I could find to this system was that Feed2JS, as it was then implemented, did not generate xhtml compliant code, so pasting it into your page would cause it to not validate with the W3C’s validation service. Basically, having your page validate simply means that you are paying attention to making your site accessible to everyone (including handicapped users) and therefore complying to established web standards (it sounds harder than it is).
Anyhow, changing the resulting JavaScript to be compliant was rather trivial, and could be done automatically using HTMLTidy. I let Allan know about this, and he is planning to fix up the generator soon to generate compliant code (see the comments in this blog entry).
That was rather long-winded. I’ll give it another go: neat tool — go check it out.
For some odd reason, when I upgraded this WordPress installation from 1.0 to 1.2, I was unable to log into the WP admin area with Safari. It didn’t help that there was a small bug in the WP code (though a quick chat with the developers at their IRC chatroom quickly resolved that), but it had me stymied for quite some time. I eventually tracked it down to the cookies in Safari, and was able to simply delete all related cookies in the Safari preference panel, and now things are peachy.
As a side benefit, I was able to explore Firefox a bit closer during this time, and have found a number of nice features in that browser as well. However, I just can’t give up surfing with no ads, thanks to PithHelmet in Safari, so I’ll be sticking with Safari.
Speaking of PithHelmet and Safari, I have been chatting briefly with Mike Solomon, the creator of PithHelmet, to see if there would be a way to filter out the text ads that appear on the right side of the Gmail interface (that’s right, I’ve got a Gmail account!). He mentioned that there is a new version of PithHelmet due in a few weeks, and that it *may* address the issue, but can’t guarantee anything. If it were able to take care of the ads, Gmail might actually become useful to me…
There has been a bit of a rage in the last few days regarding the potential Mac OS X security issue. For those who are paranoid of some malicious person exploiting this bug before Apple gets around to fixing it, take a look at John Gruber’s excellent description of how to protect yourself.
Daring Fireball: Disabling Unsafe URI Handlers With RCDefaultApp
Personally, I think it’s a bit of a stretch, but hey — better safe than sorry. Took me about 5 minutes to implement this temporary solution, and will take about a minute to undo it when Apple does remedy the problem.
NOTE: Apple has just released an security update to solve this vulnerability. Get it from the Software Update panel.
Are you frustrated by having to give your email address when wanting do download software or to register for a free service? If you are like many people, you have multiple addresses, and keep one as simply a garbage collector that you can use to sign up for online stuff.
Mailinator attempts to eliminate this need, and does a remarkable job of it. Mailinator provides email addresses on the fly, no sign up, no activation — nothing. Say you are signing up for a service from www.somethingfishy.com, and you need to provide a valid email address to access the service. Well, you can make up ANY mailinator address, say jimbob@mailinator.com, to enter into the form. Then head on over to Mailinator and enter in jimbob, and presto — you will be able to read any email sent to jimbob. Note that the email will be automatically deleted after a couple of hours. Goodbye spam…
I was recently having a chat with Alec Couros about using encrypted and signed email, and how it would be really nice if such a thing were possible without the hassle that it seems to be. That conversation lead me to reinvestigate whether or not encrypted mail could be easily integrated into my mail application (Mail.app on Mac OS X), while also being unobtrusive to those who don’t use similar encryption. My first thought was to check out PGP again, but on a whim, I stumbled across an article on MacDevCenter that described how to set up encrypted mail using a certificate from Thawte.
After reading over the article, I decided to give this method a try. In my minimal (1 day) experience with it thus far, it gets top marks. It uses the secure RSA algorithm when encrypting mail, so I can feel safe that my communications will be secure. Mail.app also allows very easy integration with these keys, allowing you to automatically sign all outgoing messages. Adding to the appeal is the fact that whenever you receive mail from someone with an authentic certificate, their information (public key, for those of you who understand and care) is automatically remembered, so the next time you send an email to that person, you can encrypt it seamlessly. Therefore, making your communications secure doesn’t require any substantial work, but simply the continued use of your email. Very handy. Read the above article for more detailed information, or do a Google search on using Thawte freemail certificates with your favorite email client.
This certificate system can be used on any platform, with most modern email clients, so there is no excuse for not making the switch to secure email. After all, why send sensitive information in a postcard when you can enclose it in a rather strong envelope?
Additional Note: I have since found another good article to read on using Thawte and Mail.app. I would recommend following this article instead, if you are going to get a certificate using OS X: http://www.joar.com/certificates/
Well, it certainly is time. Turns out that Blogger has finally gotten around to creating some new templates for use with their free blogging system. The best part of this, beyond ascetics, is the fact that all of the templates now used are fully valid css and standards compliant. Just what you would expect, since among the designers are the likes of Jeffery Zeldman and Todd Dominey.
This means that “the millions of pages Blogger users create are now standards compliant and machine readable – a big step forward for the Web” (Biz Stone). I can now recommend Blogger as a beginning tool for the technologically illiterate with a clear conscience. Nice.
Well, after a fair bit of work (more revisions than I would care to describe — silly IE!), I’ve finally completed the first round of webquest templates that I’ve been working on. The idea was to create a set of webquest templates that would be valid XHTML (Transitional 1.0) and CSS for teachers to easily put to use in their classrooms.
Due to the fact that with XHTML and CSS, the content is separated from the presentation of the data, it was possible to use the same markup (html files) in each of the templates, and only change the .css file. There was one exception to this, as I moved the footer div outside of the maincontent div in two of the left and right navigation templates (orange and yellow). This was a matter of moving one line of text up about 5 lines. The point I’m trying to make is that these templates are really easy to alter. I am just starting to create a small introduction to XHTML and CSS that is intended to serve as an appropriate into to altering these templates.
Enjoy!
For those of you priviledged enough to be using Mac OS X, here are a few utilities that I use frequently. All of these utilities are free, and most are open-source.
- Quicksilver – simply can’t live without it. A free replacement for LaunchBar that lets you launch any app on your machine without taking your hands off of your keyboard. Also lets you keep a ’shelf’ of various items (images, URLs, text, etc.), and a clipboard history. Note that Quicksilver requires OS 10.3.
- PithHelmet – absolutely wonderful (and free/open source) ad-blocking plugin for OS X native browsers. Goodbye, stupid ads…
- Sogudi – handy tool for use with Safari. Allows you to type, say, goo something somewhere in order to search Google for something somewhere, or mu sogudi to search MacUpdate for Sogudi. You can customise the rules to create your own search patterns. Really nice.
- SiteSucker – allows you to enter in a URL, and SiteSucker will download every child file it can find. You can set a variety of parameters and usually get exactly what you want. Very handy for me when I take my laptop to a place without high speed internet, and would like to use content from a particular website.
- PDF Browser Plugin – lets you view online .pdf files within your browser of choice. If you have 10.3, you can also grab a copy of the Word Browser Plugin.
- mail.appetizer – for use with Apple’s Mail.app. Shows you a translucent window with the first part of an email message, without having to switch to Mail. I have Mail automatically checking for mail every minute, so whenever I get a new email, a translucent box pops up and shows me the first few sentences of the message. Really handy.
- Taco HTML Edit – great freeware HTML editor that has a live preview window.
- Balthisar Tidy – great tool to help make sure that your html validates according to W3C standards.
- SubEthaEdit – another great code/text editor, which gives syntax coloring to a whole raft of languages (html, php, latex, and on and on….). Also lets you have real-time collaboration over Rendevous very easily.
- TeXshop – simple(ish) editor for those of you who use LaTeX to typeset documents.
- Latex Equation Editor – handy if you want to use LaTeX to create a typeset equation to use in a non-LaTeX document. Creates a .pdf of the equation for you.
- NetNewsWire Lite – RSS feeds reader.
This morning, I had the opportunity to hear a panel presentation on a new venture here in Saskatchewan — a digital asset repository entitled Saskatchewan Learning Exchange. A fellow member of the audience, Rick Schwier from the University of Saskatchewan, wrote a nice summary of the session in his blog. I was pleasantly surprised to notice two other Mac laptops in the room.
The idea of a centralized repository for educational resources seems a long time in coming. The most surprising feature of it to me was the fact that it was mentioned that the SLE may take on the task of actually archiving digital assets instead of simply letting others take care of it themselves. I can imagine this will be a hefty undertaking, but will greatly increase the value of the repository.
I’m very interested to see how this idea evolves, and look forward to being able to put it to use.
