David Davies: Commentary

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Tue, 05 Aug 2003 21:49:43 GMT

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Sat, 13 Apr 2002 11:51:54 GMT

Interesting observation of the day #1 "UserLand's implementation of Google's API" in "Frontier" & "Radio" is undoubtedly a powerful thing. Witness all the activity since its release only a few days ago. Its highest profile manifestation in Radio and Radio weblogs in particular is in the form of a Google box, often set up to list the top 10 occurrences of the author's name. Now here's the observation. In a Radio weblog the HTML title of the page is always the same, at least by default. In mine it's always 'David Davies' Radio Weblog' so every page in my weblog has this html title. Putting 'David Davies' into my Radio Google box lists a bunch of pages that give me no indication whatsoever what they're about, so they'll be no use to you either. Browsing around some other Radio webloggers shows exactly the same thing. We're abstracting all of our hard wrought musings into a repetition of the same basic title. I wonder if individual day archives in a Radio weblog can have their own title?

Fri, 05 Apr 2002 21:22:57 GMT

Holy moley! Is this true? Chlorophyll on Mars! This is NOT April 1st!

Fri, 22 Mar 2002 20:37:45 GMT

The following was originally posted to David Carter-Tod's Serious Instructional Technology (required reading incidentally) but as it might be generically useful I thought I'd reproduce it here. Comments are welcome, use the link beneath this article. Here's a little bit more detail about what we've done to develop our Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) using Manila. It may not be relevant to most but it'll outline the thought processes we went through that lead to our decision to use Manila rather than WebCT, our corporate system. Our course is split into around 50 modules. Each is discreet in that it stands alone as far as content is concerned but overall each module is part of a single programme. Students progress through all modules to fulfil the requirements of the programme. For me the decision of one Manila site per module was easy. Different module leaders and lead teachers equate to MEs and CEs in Manila. Functionally separate content could be kept separate on the web. As an aside, manila's a fairly lousy collaborative environment once sites get beyond a fairly small number of pages. Don't believe me? Try editing a site with >300 stories and 30 editors when the only story list you have is alphabetized by story title. So each module team has their own Manila site. A big breakthrough for us was exploiting browser cookies to devise a shared membership scheme that didn't use Manila's built-in authentication but rather an external membership database. Our users also authenticate against a regular HTTP realm in WebSTAR for all the static content serving. The single log-in authenticates against the realm and sets a browser cookie for shared Manila access. Once in a module's manila site here's what you'll find. Metadata is supplied using both John's excellent plug-in to give Dublin Core metadata but also our own subject-based metadata that we use for interoperability with other VLEs in other institutions (e.g. See http://medweb5.bham.ac.uk/databases/interop/mcqs/). We write our own metadata into a message's table in Manila. A new project we've developed and are taking further is versioning where the message table is archived every time a story is edited. The editor can restore old versions of a story a la Zope. This is being taken further by being able to version other site content such as templates, navigation, etc. Much of our teaching & learning content is stored/delivered outside of Manila. So that everything links together I've set up some simple XML-RPCs to link Manila data with external data via subject-based metadata. For example, all learning objects in our system that share the subject content metadata 'myocardial infarction' are linked. This allows us to generate a content-based portal view of our curriculum whereby all related resources are pulled together. By good fortune (or was it good design) the metadata schema we've adopted is shared by other institutions and library-type information services so we're able to interop with these too. None of these other institutions use Manila yet the integration is seamless (e.g. See the example cited above). The built-in Manila discussion groups and the commentIt plug-in provide valuable pieces of the student aspect of our VLE. In my opinion it is possible to set up a suite of linked Manila sites that do not necessarily exclude your interop with commercial VLEs though the latter are often less flexible than Manila. There's a growing user-base of Manila-based VLE developers and a number of new tools such as access control (time release and cohort-based) extend Manila's built-in functionality further. Our budget? Two Frontier licenses and a lot of my time. Plus the invaluable support of UserLand in developing Manila plus the active developer network. Training is our big issue as we have to go up against our corporate University MIS team that are offering WebCT as an institutional solution. This is a political battle only as pedagogically there's little contest. The pedagogical neutrality of Manila is a distinct advantage of the constrained commercial systems. Their days are numbered as interoperability renders them obsolete.

Wed, 20 Mar 2002 17:25:52 GMT

It seems that versioning in Manila is not only possible but also relatively easy. With even my clunky scripting skills I managed to set Manila up to allow a managing editor (or contributing editor for that matter) to restore any previous version of a message or story. An immediate application is a simple undo post feature but of course you could restore any version of a page. Alternatively you could use all versions as an audit trail of the development of a page. This is a really powerful feature that's been missing for too long in Manila. Presently if you zap a page due to a hasty pressing of the 'Post changes' button you're screwed. Well now you can undo. And remember that version of a page you did last year? Well now you can get it back. After discussing this idea at some length with some other folk for whom versioning would be a useful tool there may be opportunity to consider versioning other site features such as templates etc. However, some more thought needs to go into this as well as some more scripting! Who'd be interested in such an extension to Manila I wonder?

Sun, 20 Jan 2002 00:03:52 GMT

Why I think Radio 8 is totally unlike anything else You only have to follow the above link. Radio Userland 8 is a desktop web server and scripting environment. It's also much more than that but that's enough for now. Userland can release a new feature such as a scraper-free email form and provide a link on a public web site such as http://www.scripting.com/ that links to every user's private desktop web server. That simple action alone is so powerful and so totally unlike anything else that's come before. There are going to be some very interesting solutions to come from this functionality over the next 12 months. You just wait and see. User's are going to reclaim the web in a big way.

Wed, 16 Jan 2002 01:06:57 GMT

Getting some interesting responses to the early days of mobile blogging. Move on with it people! Find something new to do. Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it. Find your own voice and just get on with it but don't whinge telling us all how you've now done 10,000 times what someone had to do the first time. Just in case those of you without imagination are desperate to say how often you've blogged from a plane since the first plane blog, here are some suggestions for new SMS blogs (with a nod to Steve for starting this thread). log blog - scatological
snog blog - for the teenagers
drug blog - today I'll be mostly taking...
wank blog - excuse the shaky typing
shag blog - it's got to happen so who'll be first? and my personal favorite... blog blog - sms blogging about what you're blogging to Blogger

Tue, 15 Jan 2002 13:52:13 GMT

Ha! You can say that now sir. Just as someone would say, crossing the Antarctic these days is 'simple enough.' Wise words from Steve Hooker in response to a claim that SMS phone blogging is easy. Of course it's easy, it's ridiculously easy, a few lines of code. Nothing clever. But like so may other easy things, someone had to spot how easy it was and be the first to do it. And as SMS blogging pioneers, Mr Hooker and I are only too aware of how easy it was ;-)

Mon, 14 Jan 2002 23:09:07 GMT

Back to terra firma and to a more conventional style of blogging. What has the last 36 hours shown us? Well, for me, it's taken the blog beyond the conventional commentary and narrative and turned it into something more experiential. Sure, with mobile blogging and SMS you're limited in character count so brevity is more important that verbosity (unless you're lucky to have a 3rd gen phone like Al), but it's more immediate, in fact it *is* immediate. It doesn't matter where you are or what you're doing, within reason, you can capture the moment. A kind of snapshot in text. For sure if I'd have waited until I got home to tell you about my trip it would have been a lot less personal. This is definitely going to be totally irrelevant for the majority of people but I think that from now on we're no longer constrained to blog the world post hoc. We can be there, right in the moment, and tell it as it happens!