September 2008 Archives

I have been thinking a lot about this video from Jim Groom's Edtech Survivalist. Not thinking about the message of the video so much, but the way the message is expressed so effectively using video.  I've noticed a lot of video cropping up in the blogs I read over the past few weeks. I like it.

For a long time I have threatened to stop using so many free web services in favor of just using a blog or blogs for all my online presence needs.  Why give so much of our online selves over to entities that could disappear at any moment and that also keep us locked in with poor to no data portability and more importantly no people-network portability.

I finally decided to give it a try. I created a blog where I will dump my links in the same manner I have used delicious. This is just an experiment. Although I did change the templates a little bit, and had to hand-roll a more useful quickpost bookmarklet, I tried to keep it close to a standard blog on purpose. Although there is no reason a template set couldn't be developed to make it look more a standard bookmark repository.

Another question I have grappled with is whether to make this a separate blog or just post directly here. I don't really post to either place with such frequency that I feel that I need to separate it. In fact, combining both together could make for a stronger whole. But no, I think I will keep them separate, for now at least. I am going to give upping the blog post frequency yet another try here.

So, am I going to abandon delicious for this new blog? Don't know, still experimenting. What about the network? What about aggregating links based on tags, or from your network? The network question might be solved just by firing up google reader. The tag question - I have a trick up my sleeve for that one. Hold please.

Can a people-network be sustained by interlinking of blog posts, blogrolls, and rss? This is one big question. What about privacy controls integrated with your people-network? Another thing that is easier with a big silo service as opposed to a mish-mash of scattered blogs.

Here is the link to my links.

And in case you are not familiar with the quickpost bookmarklet, I provide you with this screencast showing it in action. I didn't add any sound for this screencast. I would have loved to have the Quincy theme playing underneath.

If you look at this blog (not just viewing in your feed reader or syndicated on some other site) you will notice that this blog is now sporting a new theme.  Variety is the spice of life so I decided to try something new, but not sure I will stick with this theme long term.

I found a site containing wordpress themes that have been converted to work with movable type.

It doesn't seem like the site is structured to work with the style catcher. To get these themes to work with blogs@psu, you need to download the zip of the theme, upload it to your personal webspace, then edit your templates for styles.css to point to the css in the theme you uploaded.

I left a comment on the site and it looks like the theme porter will be making a style archive to make it easier to use these themes with your MT blog.

Some people that have seen my blog have asked about the intellectual property implications of transferring the themes. Seems most wordpress themes include a GPL license, and some say that wordpress themes must be GPL since wordpress is GPL. What about images and stylesheets? Some have taken to including CC licenses with themes. The issue is a bit muddled.
 
I also found some other MT themes created by Six Apart's Byrne Reese. There is more info about these themes in my post at the blog community hub.