Ninny Pants

Over the last six weeks Ozzy has been going to one of PetSmart’s training classes and is doing quite well. During this time I have become acquainted with his instructor who is highly involved with an organization called CAWS. Who’s training, fostering, and adoption services help homeless pets who’s time is up at the shelters. I’ve met several of these foster dogs, and have been really impressed by what CAWS is doing for them. So I’m going to start donating some of my time and services to help them out; I’m going to be helping with my first adoption this Saturday at the Orem PetSmart. Hopefully it will go well.

I’m slow posting but I will be co-presenting with Jake Spurlock at the Wordpress Meetup on Wed. October 14th. You can find the details below.

Well, it has been a while, but we are going to hold another WordPress meetup in two weeks. For those that haven’t been before, the format is pretty simple:

1. Show up
2. Mingle
3. Couple quick presentations
4. Share problems
5. Bask in a sense of childlike wonder about the intricacies of WordPress
6. Go home a better individual then you were before.

All corny jokes aside, these meetups are a great way to meet fellow bloggers, designers, developers, and social media types from the area.

At the October event, we are going to have a loose format where anyone can take the podium. If you have something that you would like to share, please leave a comment here proposing a 5-10 minute presentation. Proposed topics currently include:

Myself & Tyrel Kelsey: WordPress theme developement

Thom Allen: WordPress Backup and Recovery

Ash Buckles: WordPress SEO (Plugins/Permalinks/etc.)

Nate Bagley: WordPress in use for UVU school newspaper

Details

Thanks to Ash, we are having the event at the newly minted SEO.com. We have room for about sixty people, so tell your friends to come too.

• When: Wednesday Oct. 14 from 7-9 p.m.
• Where: 14870 S. Pony Express Road Ste. 100, just off Interstate 15 at the Draper/Bluffdale exit near the point of the mountain.
• What to bring: Bring your questions, your problems, something to share intellectually, and something on a plate to share physically. (i.e something delicious, perhaps cookies, crackers, seven-layer dip, etc.)

Please leave a comment here if you plan on coming so we can get a general count of who is going to be there.

Rebloged from http://jakespurlock.com/2009/10/wordpress-meetup-october-14th/

Kelly and I recently bought a house I Provo, and I climbed onto the roof to clean some things off. When I got up there parts of the roof were squishy. These are some pictures of what we found when we looked in the attic.

Lately I’ve had a need to use the Tinyurl.com API. The API has been usefull for a couple of things since I started using it.

Shortening URL’s

This is obviously the intended purpose of the Tinyurl API. With a very simple function you can shorten urls very easily. This function passes the url to the Tinyurl API which shrinks it and then it is pulled back using file_get_contents()

function shrinkUrl($url){
    $url = file_get_contents('http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url='.$url);
    return $url;
}
$tinyurl = shrinkUrl('http://www.ninnypants.com');// equal to http://tinyurl.com/6lbwc4

Generating a Random Key

The Tinyurl API can also be used to generate a random key specific to the information you pass in. As long as you don’t pass in a url Tinyurl will only return the the code at the end of the url (6lbwc4) The service now attaches the the first part of the url to the code also so the random key function takes a little more code.

function randomKey($url){
    $key = file_get_contents('http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url='.$url);
    $key = str_replace('http://tinyurl.com/', '', $key);
    return $key;
}

Recently I decided to try reducing the size of hacking the HTTP request for cross browser support in AJAX. This little snippet has been tested and is working.

// new xml http object
var xmlHttp = new XMLHttpRequest() ? new XMLHttpRequest() :
		( new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP") ? new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP") :
		( new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP") ? new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP") : null ) );

I find this new method easier to read and is much more elegant than the method bellow; which is the only method I’ve seen out there.

try{
	// Firefox, Opera 8.0+, Safari
	xml=new XMLHttpRequest();
}catch(e){
	// Internet Explorer
	try{
		xml=new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
	}catch(e){
		try{
			xml=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
		}catch(e){
			alert("Your browser does not support AJAX!");
			return false;
		}
	}
}

I know that I am not the only who has tried to shorten this section of code. Let me know what you think or how you handle it yourself.

Today I got the project of fixing a file that was displaying only gibberish for students to read. When the file was pulled down to the desktop it had a nice little Microsoft Word symbol on it, so I though I would share what microsoft word can do to a nice elegant piece of html. This is just 27 lines of 1389

ÿþ< h t m l x m l n s : v = ” u r n : s c h e m a s – m i c r o s o f t – c o m : v m l ”

x m l n s : o = ” u r n : s c h e m a s – m i c r o s o f t – c o m : o f f i c e : o f f i c e ”

x m l n s : w = ” u r n : s c h e m a s – m i c r o s o f t – c o m : o f f i c e : w o r d ”

x m l n s : m = ” h t t p : / / s c h e m a s . m i c r o s o f t . c o m / o f f i c e / 2 0 0 4 / 1 2 / o m m l ”

x m l n s = ” h t t p : / / w w w . w 3 . o r g / T R / R E C – h t m l 4 0 ” >

< h e a d >

< m e t a h t t p – e q u i v = C o n t e n t – T y p e c o n t e n t = ” t e x t / h t m l ; c h a r s e t = u n i c o d e ” >

< m e t a n a m e = P r o g I d c o n t e n t = W o r d . D o c u m e n t >

< m e t a n a m e = G e n e r a t o r c o n t e n t = ” M i c r o s o f t W o r d 1 2 ” >

< m e t a n a m e = O r i g i n a t o r c o n t e n t = ” M i c r o s o f t W o r d 1 2 ” >

< l i n k r e l = F i l e – L i s t h r e f = ” i n s t r u c t o r _ f i l e s / f i l e l i s t . x m l ” >

< l i n k r e l = E d i t – T i m e – D a t a h r e f = ” i n s t r u c t o r _ f i l e s / e d i t d a t a . m s o ” >

< ! – - [ i f ! m s o ] >

Yesterday I completed one of my life goals of donating my hair to Locks of Love. A charity which takes donations of hair and make wigs for financially disadvantaged children with long-term medical hair loss. I certainly got plenty of surprised comments/looks afterwards and I greatly dislike the haircut. This is all easier to think about when I think of the fact that an underprivileged cancer victim is profiting from my small loss it makes me feel much better about it.

Today I took the Survey for People Who Make Websites, and if you build web sites you should to. We should all thank the people at A List Apart for providing this service, and for taking steps toward building metrics for our industry.

The Cheatability Factor at TTIX08 was one of my favorite sessions of the entire conference.

The first part of this Session was a video that covered what cheating is and why students cheat. The first part also covered ways to cheat and how to cheat. These were covered in the video through comedic shorts similar to those on Conan Obrian. The back channel was the most used I think of any of the Sessions of the conference, but I had to leave as soon as the discussion started.

Part two was highly iteresting. The discussion turned to why students cheat. Most students cheat because of unnecessary load created by the professor. Professors are not the only producers of load. Students also create plenty of load for themselves by slacking, and not keeping deadlines. I know that I’m guilty of this. I doubt that any of the attendees had any of the major cheating risks in their courses. From my experience teachers who were there were either technologists themselves, or they actually cared about their online courses. The classes that would have most of the trouble with cheatability would probably be classes with teachers who think that they do not need to be involved in their online courses. The details are starting to fade from my memory so I’ll stop here…

Last week John Krutsch asked me “do you think there is ever an ok way for teachers to use social media in classes or for course work without being creepy?”. My answer was yes if they are used in the right way, and that is what I would like to elaborate on.

The thing I find about integrating classroom tools into social media, is that for me to truly accept it the tool needs to serve a purpose. If the tool is just a calender that is inserted into the normal interface of a social device like Facebook or Myspace what is the point? what purpose does it serve? Student’s will still have to go to their course web site to truly do anything of importance, so in my opinion the app is just adding to the noise. I feel that the use of networks like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter should not be used in classes. (the one exception are classes on society or social behavior.) The use of these networks invades student’s private lives which they may want to keep separate from their school work.

While I find social devices mentioned above to not be acceptable there are platforms that are acceptable. Blogs for instance are a great source of information that are often used in a social way. The use of these for academics is highly acceptable because they can be used for the purpose of study or a way to get feedback from classmates. While blogs can be very effective they like other forms of social media need to be implemented correctly. The use of these types of media while less invasive can still feel very invasive to college students. That is why the way they are implemented is very important. Just requiring the use of blogs in your class can cause a creepy tree house effect, and may meet rejection from your students. I believe that if you explain the use of the blogs in class it will most likely have a much better effect. Also offering an alternative to blogging in your class may also accent this effect. While the use of social media in the classroom is acceptable you need to implement it correctly to achieve the desired effect.