Ruminate

Turns out that there are at least two tools for combining RSS feeds, one of which I had made note of 6 months ago (note to self: search del.icio.us bookmarks before posting). I discovered this thanks to a recent post on CogDogBlog on the topic of creating ’superfeeds’.

Rollup and BlogDigger both provide this service. I don’t yet know which is ‘better’ in terms of reliability, speed, and article retention.

It does seem like these tools, combined with Feed2JS (also out of Maricopa) will be a quick answer to the vexing “how do I use my feeds in Blackboard or other CMS” questions that faculty are beginning to raise.

and free shipping (if you are extremely easily offended, please don’t view)!

A few observations about David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) framework for organization:

• It works. It’s simple, and it may well be nothing but an amalgam of other systems, as my skeptical friend Link seems to feel… but it gets rid of most of the artificial “fluff” I’ve found in other system and the tyranny of hierarchical, prioritized lists, which become a kind of organizational quicksand. Instead, focusing on capturing idea without stress, instilling confidence in finding information, and letting me determine natural priorities within defined contexts for actions works out to be a real winner. It is likely that any of these popular systems can work, one just has to find that which is most suited to the way they think. GTD is it for me– and apparently for many others.

• To really succeed you have to take a day (or two, or three) to completely make the change over to the GTD way of task management. I’ve been feeling pretty good about the positive changes I am making, but it is also pretty clear that trying to ‘ease’ into it is just a way for me to put off some of the harder tasks of quantification and collection.

• GTD addresses– in a natural, comfortable manner– how to manage and approach projects and actions. But it doesn’t do those actions for you. At some point “the rubber has to hit the road” and that’s usually when my old friend procrastination settles in for a long, distracting visit. I wonder about the psychology of procrastination and why people do it. It’s not just me, and judging from others it isn’t about being too smart (or too dumb), nor is it really about laziness. Is it fear? An addiction to the adrenaline of pulling things together frantically? Is it about stimulating that part of our brain that works best with near panic?

• You don’t have to join a cult or buy any products beyond the book. In fact, it’s probably best not to because:

• It is easy– way too easy– to get caught up in the technology of getting organized. I could spend the next year tinkering around with my PDA, haunting the GTD forums, and coming up with new and ever more efficient way to organize paper and folders. If that’s not the antithesis of getting things done, it has to be pretty close. As a certified geek I fall into this trap all the time in many areas… it isn’t just this area. But in this area the consequences of getting wrapped up in the method is that there can literally be no benefit at all from one’s effort!

I have a feed for Cosmopoetica, another for its comments, another for the Commonplace Book (which is a separate weblog), and yet another for its comments.

I was hoping Feedburner would let me splice/merge all of these together into a single feed. But no such luck. Is there any RSS service that will do this for me?

XMPLAY has become my new standard audio player (software)– great sound, intuitive feature set and only (wonderfully unbloated) 300k download.

WinMX has become my peer-to-peer software of choice. Spyware free and decent variety for the kinds of things I typically look for online (B-sides, live tracks, etc). A few of the choice picks:

• Ben Kweller’s cover of The Lemonheads classic “My Drug Buddy”
• Ani DiFranco and Aimee Mann collaborating on Prince’s “When the Doves Cry”
• Elliott Smith’s “Just Between Us” (live)
• Audioslave’s version of “Seven Nation Army”
• “There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You”– Ben Folds hasn’t written a bad song in a long time

I’ve also gone into much-retro-rock mode listening to Motorhead and the newest thing in 80’s butt-rock/hair-metal The Darkness.

…it is more accurate to think of weblogs and wikis as work arounds for the broken parts of the web, rather than a new innovation.

James Farmer, who authors Incorporated Subversion one of the more useful educational technology blogs, was recently given a cease and desist order from his University employer.

His crime? He dares to write about using blogs and wikis and other technologies in the classroom– technologies that aren’t supported by the the expensive learning management system the campus has bought into (either WebCT or Blackboard, the post doesn’t say which). This despite the fact that he does use and promote use of the LMS that is in place… he just recognizes that the monolithic solution doesn’t solve all problems. Outrageous.

After discussing with the piglets– I mean “children”– we’ve decided on the following Thanksgiving menu:

• Roasted Turkey with Cinnamon Apple Stuffing
• Sausage Sage Stuffing
• Orange Glazed, Clove Studded Ham
• Cinnamon Cardamom Sweet Potatoes
• Sour Cherry Pie (Lattice-Top)
• Spicy Pumpkin Pie
• Pecan and Chocate Pecan Pie
• Peppy Deviled Eggs

And I’m sure when they think about it they’ll want mashed potatoes. We’ll be eating leftovers for a year…

Podcasting is basically providing links to audio material within an RSS feed. By formatting the RSS feed in a particular way, scripts can be developed to snag the audio files and process them in some way. Initially this meant saving them to one’s iTunes playlist, but more and more applications are being developed to use other devices and hopefully do more with the audio files themselves.

Because the initial enthusiasts were iPod users, the horribly inaccurate (and somewhat offputting) name seems to have stuck, but this is a pretty cool development for one simple reason– it motivates providers to codify and standardize on a format to make this audio material so that it is simply easier to access (which, when you think about it, is really what makes RSS great, and this is just audio over RSS, so why shouldn’t it be great too?). I’ve been using various scripts to scrape audio content and various searches to find it in the first place– podcasting will, I hope, make it that much easier to find and listen to some of the insanely great (ha ha) stuff being produced every day.

Whether I use an iPod or not.

Now the revolution should start occurring in software and documentation to help more users over the hurdle of recording good audio after a few solid years focused on how to listen to it. There are plenty of great applications (free and cheap) to record, edit, and compress audio, but there is a real dearth of documentation about how to do it.

This is about the time of year that students (and others) seem to start getting serious about recommendations for hosting. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences in the past with subpar providers. I finally found my first really good one with Cornerhost (props to Michael Wallace who does excellent work).

But this year I discovered the Mother of all Hosts, Network Nirvana, Hosting Bliss with TextDrive. If you demand more from your provider… if you want to have your cake and eat it too in terms of service, performance, and price (you really can have all three), then TextDrive is the place to go. They have some serious mojo going on with their setup that I’ve seen nowhere else and sometimes even astounds me despite having run commercial hosting servers before.

If you want PHP (4 and 5 and fastcgi and modphp), MySQL, Postgres, WebDAV, webmail, PHPMyAdmin, PgMyAdmin, Subversion, SFTP/SCP, Secure SMTP/IMAP/POP, mailman, SpamAssassin, Ruby on Rails, Instiki on a real port, nearly instantaneous response to even the most brain-dead requests, reliable uptime and consistently high speeds– and an active user-user support forum, then I challenge you to find anyone that compares.

I don’t work for TextDrive; they just do things right and deserve to be recognized for it.