2005 April | Rebecca Thomas Designs

Del.icio.us as a blogger tool

Apr 282005

I’ve spent some time this week joining Bloglines, organizing the feeds I was already reading (imported from my LiveJournal account), and adding some new ones. I’m proud to say that I now subscribe to over 100 feeds (including my own blogs, and it takes me anywhere from 30-45 minutes two or three times a day to keep up with them. If things change, I’ll implement a reading schedule on myself.

One of the new feeds I added (and was rather surprised to find I wasn’t already reading it) is Weblogg-ed, where I found this post on using del.icio.us.

Now, the funny thing is that as I read this, I thought about how I use del.icio.us and Furl. As I read through my feeds every day, I save any posts and articles that I want to blog on in the Tasks tab of Outlook, complete with date I want to write about it and where i found it. Once I blog it, I save it to both del.icio.us and Furl. Sometimes when I can’t find anything I like, I’ll go through “…and other people” to see what interesting links might be out there. Sometimes I find myself running in circles and have to look for links that go outside anything related to my own tags.

I’ve often worried that I was completely silly in my approach, but it’s nice to know that others blog in a similar format.

A web professional?

web design View Comments

Apr 282005

The other day, I was invited to sit in on Dreamweaver training. It was quite an interesting experience.

Let me preface this by stating up front that I am a total web design amateur. When I work, I keep w3 Schools open and refer to it frequently (along with any other sites that provide tutorials relevant to the design I’m working on).

The training was conducted by the web designer who currently maintains the site for the organization, which would seem just fine. Theoretically, he would be the person who would know what the organization needs to know most to work on the website. Except he inherited the site from the person who created the site, who created the site in FrontPage and didn’t initially clean up the code.

As I was watching this training, I was struck by how often the current web designer kept saying that various things couldn’t be done because they were originally set up in FrontPage. Excuse me, but if you are a professional web designer with self-proclaimed years of experience behind you, wouldn’t your first order of business on discovering poor code have been to go in and clean up or streamline the code to be more useful to people who inherit the website down the line? Wouldn’t you be able to go in with a non-WYSIWYG editor and fix things so that they’ll behave appropriately, regardless of what editor is used down the road?

Call me crazy, but I just can’t figure out how someone can be a professional web designer and not work toward creating clean code. I just can’t.

Any thoughts from the professional web designers out there on this one?

ePortfolios and Big Brother

finding my path, writing View Comments

Apr 272005

This is by no means meant to be alarmist. If anything, it’s the result of reading In 2010, every citizen (Ed: Europe) will have an ePortfolio (source) combined with my current interest in trying to write for a subgenre of science fiction.

Science fiction comes in a few different varieties, but the one I’m trying to write for is one where large corporations run the world and the government knows your every thought or move through computers. I’ve been gathering notes from all types of sources that I think would be interesting to incorporate into such a setting, and this quote was just one more victim.

Again, I’m not looking to be an alarmist, because I think that this might actually be a good move in the society that currently exists. The thought of people being able to glance at each other’s portfolio and see what they know or how they view what they know…the potentials are great for collaboration, for networking, for just building interpersonal relationships in general.

Then, a thought occurred to me as I thought about the potential for incorporating this kind of open knowledge repository into my dark, unfriendly world: What would happen, though, if that wonderful wealth of knowledge, if that introspective nature, was suddenly turned around and used against us? What if open awareness of what a person knows becomes reason to persecute him?

I don’t believe for a moment that e-portfolios will ever become, or lead to, that. I suspect that by supporting this level of open awareness, it would actually keep the kind of world I’m trying to write for from becoming a reality. It really was just this incredibly odd tangent that my mind raced down in the timespan of maybe a minute as I read and processed that line.

Wayfindin’

productivity View Comments

Apr 262005

I am a fan of the Fruits Basket manga. Almost obsessively at times. The most recent English volume was released this month, so I was quite excited. Friends all over the country were finding it, and here I sat in a fairly metropolitan city, completely unable to find it. I asked a few customer service people, who all told me it was in various stages of being developed (except for one who just gave me a blank stare).

I’ve driven over quite a bit of the area trying to find it, somehow completely forgetting to check one of the nearby towns (which has one of the two best Barnes & Nobles in this part). So yesterday, at the suggestion of Thing 2, I decided to drive over there after my volunteer work to see what I could find.

First, let me explain that I’m still not terribly familiar with this area in general. I can get myself to and from work in Lynnwood. I could get myself to and from Issaquah when I worked there. I can get to and from Amtgard and friends’ places around Redmond. I can get myself to and from bowling in Kirkland. Just going randomly from one town to another is tricky, though. So I took off for Woodinville, and missed the exit, which led to driving through Redmond to get to Woodinville. (Redmond is essentially on the other side of Woodinville from Bothell.)

Part of the problem is the way the exit to Woodinville is marked. Coming from Bothell, Woodinville is nowhere on the sign, and the numbers are very small, so it’s difficult to see which highways are affected. Coming from Redmond, Woodinville is clearly labeled so you don’t have to worry about the numbers.

Either way, I really ought to just make a point of learning which exit goes to Woodinville. Then, I won’t have to take a scenic tour of Redmond.

The development of tagging

reading View Comments

Apr 212005

I’ m stil exploring the concept of folksonomies and tagging and trying to make sense of it all. This article on social bookmarking tools has been an interesting perusal in my readings lately. I’m still reading it, but I wanted to share it anyway.

What I thought was really interesting was that the first place I found this article linked. The post was talking about how some blogs are nothing more than link blogs, and I couldn’t help but think to myself, “Isn’t the origin of blogging in weblogs that were nothing more than link blogs because people wanted their bookmarks to be more portable?” We’ve evolved from these link blogs to blogs that may or may not link to some interesting piece of information and surround this link or main concept with personal reaction. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to see when, exactly, tagging entered the picture.

Found via elearningpost and Stephen Downes

Ted the Panda

creativity View Comments

Apr 202005

I’ve been spending more time with a friend recently. Last night, he learned about my love for pandas and decided to gift me with a stuffed animal panda that had been abandoned.

We debated over the name most of the evening. For a while, the front runner was “Abbie the Abandoned Panda”. I decided that I didn’t want the cute little plushie to be reminded of its lonely beginnings, so the debate continued until my friend started on a series of names relating to the black-and-white nature of the panda. (It now occurs to me that we never thought of “Newsprint”. That would have been fun.)

Anyway, we were discussing black-and-white names, when I suggested “Ted”, after Ted Turner who ruined so many old movies by deciding they needed to be in color. My friend thought the panda needed some color, but his roommate was amused by the irony. The name stuck, and Ted sits happily on my bed with my teddy bears (yeah, that’s fairly funny, too).

Give me a good black-and-white classic movie anytime! I’ll be curled up on my couch with my cocoa and Ted the Panda!

Jotspot responds

web design View Comments

Apr 192005

Last week, I wrote about JotSpot not allowing non-registered visitors to view wikis that were intended to be viewed by the general public.

Well, JotSpot responded. In a positive manner, even. There was enough interest in making JotSpot wikis accessible by guests that JotSpot has added this feature to their wiki design. If you’re interested, you can check mine out, as skimpy as it currently is.

It’s just great to know that there are still companies that are willing to listen to and work with their visitors to create the features the visitors want. (It’s also really neat to note that JotSpot uses tools weekly to see what’s being said about them outside their own site, and respond.)

A possible tool to catch learning disabilities sooner?

education View Comments

Apr 142005

There’s a potential aid to help identify students with learning disabilities sooner. It’s just fascinating. I think if we could determine ways to diagnose learning disabilities, then perhaps we’re one step closer to create learning plans that facilitate a student’s particular situation to help that student be successful in his learning.

If you design something online, and no one can access it…

education View Comments

Apr 142005

I’ve been working on lesson plans and project/technique sheets for wire jewelry, possibly as a start to develop an online class. This is a project I’ve been working on for a month.

Originally, the plan was to develop the lesson plans for a teaching position I was taking with a local craft store. However, they decided that I didn’t fit their psychological profile (yeah…I know…), and decided to hire someone else without telling me they had changed their mind.

I wasn’t terribly surprised, given some of my conversations with the people there, but it left me with these lesson plans. Currently, I’m thinking that I might be able to convert them to an online course, but I haven’t really decided on that yet.

In developing these lesson plans, part of my goal was to develop technique and project cards that could be handed out in class (I wanted to encourage my class to get into the habit of collecting and organizing patterns for future reference.) I slaved over some of them, and then ended up without a class to hand them to. It wasn’t an issue in the least, since I was starting to work on a wiki.

It was going to be perfect. I was going to put the project and technique sheets into the wiki as a starting point for building it.

However, I ran into a small glitch once I got everything established. I’m using a hosted wiki. Go ahead, click on the link. I have it set so that anybody can read it.

Let me guess…it asked you to sign in, didn’t it? What Jotspot forgot to tell us until someone asked recently is that it is not suited for widespread public viewing. Oops. After marketing itself to its beta testers as this great solution for managing bits of knowledge, it falls dreadfully short.

When considering making your work available, you must consider your vehicle and make sure that it is accessible by those you wish to access it.

A flashback from childhood

creativity View Comments

Apr 132005

As a small child, one of my earliest and favorite toys was the ice cream tub of legos that lived in the cabinet under the phone in my grandmother’s house.

Much of my childhood (and even my teens) were spent with that tub of small plastic blocks. It was great. My cousins and I would sit down and build everything you could imagine. We made little computers, big bowls, ships to travel in various mediums. We even made weapons. Please believe me when I say that nothing is more satisfying than watching a lego grenade split apart on your older cousin, and nothing hurts worse than said cousin rebuilding the grenade quickly and throwing it back at you.

I remember moving into my granmother’s house while I was working on my bachelor’s degree, and being so sad to discover the legos were gone. With all of us grown, my grandmother had given them to children who might as well have been our cousins. Another generation to know the joy and creativity of legos.

Yesterday, I was in Bellevue spending time with a friend, and discovered a lego store. An entire store devoted to legos. We probably spent 30-45 minutes in there. There were the various popular sets. There were related products (and having an Amtgard-style fight with foam swords designed for little kids is just fun) and display cases with all sorts of lego creations. My favorites were the mice and pigs made entirely from bricks.

Our favorite part, though, was the back wall.

The back wall had bins and bins of legos. Some were specialty pieces, but for the most part it was just the bricks in all their various sizes and colors. (You buy them by the cup!) We were just in love with this store.

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Meta

Del.icio.us as a blogger tool

A web professional?

ePortfolios and Big Brother

Wayfindin’

The development of tagging

Ted the Panda

Jotspot responds

A possible tool to catch learning disabilities sooner?

If you design something online, and no one can access it…

A flashback from childhood

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