December 2007 Archives

NPR: Middle School Kids Write Story on Twitter

Twittories. Collaborative fiction with twitter.

Not sure what twitter adds to process, except that you could follow the twittory and have read it as it is being written in real-time. Not bad.

I just opened up a netflix mailer, and inside was an ad for the upcoming film, "Walk Hard". What url did it advertise? facebook.com/walkhard. Reminds me of the good old days of AOL KEYWORD: WALKHARD.

Came across this post about a biology lab at University of British Columbia where everyone is required to maintain a science blog.

When it comes to science labs I am way out of my element, but the piece does touch on the benefits of blogging in the open. These include the blogger more fully developing ideas and gaining improved writing skills.

Cole recently blogged about how powerful it would be to have a feed2js-like feature tied to the blogs@psu. We also talked about this in the episode of ETS talk we just recorded.

It got me thinking. With Movable Type's templates, there really isn't a need to run a separate service to create an embed javascript based on RSS feeds. Movable Type could just generate a static javascript file each time the blog is updated, just like is does with the rss file, index file, etc.

So, I just whipped up a little proof of concept. Works pretty well, IMHO.

directly below here are the results. Keep in mind, as I produce new posts, they will be listed below:

And here is how I did it:

1) created a new index template and set it to output a file called "feed.js". I called the template "JS Feed", but you can call it whatever you want.

2) Whipped up a little template to create the javascript. This text file has the template body.

3) Now, whenever I add a new entry or rebuild my blog, a file called feed.js in created. I used this code to embed it into this post. I could use this to embed my blog's feed into any page.

That's it. I could easy add this template to the default templates that come with new blogs at blogs@psu. I could also make another template that would auto-generate the embed code. So simple.

After a two month break, ETS talk is back. We ended up spending a lot of time talking about how online sharing creates digital identity.

ETS Talk 34: Multiple Identity Disorder | Podcasts at Penn State