A $25 Handheld Computer for Education
Raspberry Pi is a new credit card-sized computer designed specifically to teach computer programming to students. The device is the brainchild of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a U.K. charity that “exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level” and wants “to put the fun back into learning computing.” ...
ThinkUp: Social Media Insights Engine
Since Feb 2007, I’ve been playing with different methods of importing my social network activity and data into my own database and site. I first used a plugin to import data into my then Expression Engine blog. Later when I switched to WordPress, I used variations of the Lifestream plugin and then eventually the Twitter ...
WordCamp 2008
WordCamp is a one day event organized by the creators of WordPress for users and developers. This year’s event was held on Saturday at Mission Bay Conference center and featured talks by a range of people. In his “State of the Word” address, Matt Mulllenweg mentioned this was the largest ever WordCamp with over 400 ...
Video Bits
It’s the weekend and I’m going through my digital archives and files again. I know, it’s an obsession. While I definitely output a lot to the web and the social sites I use, there’s always an exponentially increasing amount of digital data that I’m collecting on my computer and storage devices. The more I collect ...
Photos Added
Looking through my site FTP directory, I came across a folder for “photos” and remembered that I never finished setting it up or linking to it on my site. There’s now a photos link in the navigation of this site, where you can see recent photos I post to Flickr, as well as my current ...
Who’s the Best Presidential Candidate for the Open Source Community?
I’ve been a supporter of the open source movement since I first got on the web in the early 90s. Almost everything I’ve learned about the web and programming, I learned from downloading open source software and giving it a try, then hacking it to customize it to my own needs. If it weren’t for ...
Jalenack’s Ajax Periodic Table of Elements
I’ve been wanting a new way to have a grid of thumbnails that pop-up larger images. While I like the functionality of my blog photo gallery, it’s not as seamless to click to each photo and to the next page or all the way back to the thumbnail page. Once you’ve experienced inline loading or ...
Wikipedia for all
One of my all-time favorite websites is the wikipedia – partly because I’ve used it for many years to look up terms, concepts, historical facts; also because I like to link to its pages for terms where I want to provide context; but mostly because of its altruistic and utopian perspective. Imagine a world in ...
Open source
MIT Technology Review has a story, The Tech Boom 2.0, that covers a point of view that I couldn’t agree with more. I often use open-source software to develop high-end, robust, and full-featured websites and web systems for clients and our own projects. Open-source software isn’t just for geeks anymore, but a viable basis for ...
Choosing Blogging Software
A recent article by Susannah Gardner in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review titled “Time to Check: Are you using the right blogging tool?” is a great starting point if you’re new to blogs (features, terminology, uses) or looking for a blog software comparison chart.
How much does a college or university blog really cost?
If you’re a school that wants to start a blog for reasons of recruitment, communication, academic voice, strategic planning, or community-buiding, but you’ve been hesitant to, I feel your pain. I used to work for a “marketing communications consulting firm in higher education” where they once recommended an admissions-focused blog for a client with a ...