If you are an educational blogger, you’ve probably read about Dr. Scott McLeod ‘s survey in 15 other places already. But have you filled it out already? If not, read on to see what he said at his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, and then follow the link.
Hear ye! Hear ye!
All education bloggers are hereby invited and encouraged to…
- complete the short and completely unscientific, but hopefully interesting, education blogosphere survey;
- forward the URL of said survey to all other known education bloggers to ensure decent representation of the education blogosphere; and
- publicize said survey URL on their own blogs to foster greater participation in this most noble endeavor.
Survey results received by Sunday, January 14, shall be posted in the town square on Wednesday, January 17.
Those solicited who choose not to participate shalt be labeled both publicly and widely as dastardly scoundrels, notty–pated hedgepigs, or beslubbering, doghearted, maggot-ridden canker-blossoms!
Kent and I each bought a MacHeist bundle, which was a Good Thing and brought me lots of new apps to explore. I let Kent choose my Pangea game since he’d be the one playing it, but yesterday I dug into NewsFire, the shareware RSS reader that was part of the bundle.
I’ve been using NetNewsWire Lite, which was doing a pretty good job of meeting my needs. I didn’t expect this one to be very different, but since it wasn’t free, I expected it to have a few more bells and whistles. I decided to give it a whirl.
What a whirl! What it does best is keep your unread feeds at the top of the list so you don’t waste time scrolling through them. To do this, as soon as you finish reading one feed, it drops down the list and the next unread feed slides into first place. At first all this motion is a bit disconcerting, but that feeling soon gives way to appreciation for how efficient this is.
Another thing it does well is grouping. I was able to easily organize my feeds into groups, and now as I add new feeds, I get a nice drop down menu that lets me select which group to add them to.
It has good keyboard shortcuts to make your feed reading efficient. Many of its behaviors can be configured from the preference pane. The more I use it, the more I find the software becomes invisible because it is doing its job well.
The MacHeist deal is over, but you can buy Newsfire at the NewsFire website.
Today, Lancerlord shares information about The Gender Genie. Paste a chunk of text from your blog into the Gender Genie, and it will make an educated guess as to whether the chunk was written by a male or female.
How does it work? The site says…
Inspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.
I tried it with a short entry that was judged far more feminine than masculine. Then I read that it works best on text with 500 or more words, so I plunked in a larger text and that was much more masculine than feminine. Dejá vu! Way back in college, the professional inventories I took listed me as scoring similarly as male teachers who liked their jobs, but not female teachers who did. Whatever.
Give it a try. Let us know how it did with your writing.
All right. Since the switch to the new Blogger went so smoothly, I decide to play around with one of the new features, custom layouts. I was hoping that there would be a few new templates in there to play with, but there aren’t. Despite that I switched to a new, old template. Green again. I seem to have a thing for green templates.
I got brave and included a photo this time. Over the years I’ve enjoyed finally seeing photos of other bloggers, so I decided to include mine. Unfortunately, most photos I have of myself were taken on holidays, and I only seem to travel to really hot, humid places, which don’t make for a portrait you’d want to hang on a blog. This photo is a crop out from a snapshot taken at school, hence the arm growing out of my head. It’s also a bit fuzzy, but it’s the best I have at the moment.
But that is more than enough about me. More important are these new custom layouts. They are pretty slick. You get to build your page in a modular way. You have lots of options of things to add to your sidebar, such as lists of links, photos, logos, feeds from other sites, and HTML code from other sites, such as counters. Once you’ve created these modules, you can drag and drop them to where you want them. It’s all very simple and doesn’t require any special technical knowledge beyond knowing how to cut and paste.You’ve always been able to make these sorts of changes if you knew HTML code. This new system removes the need to know it.
Other changes are a redesigned Dashboard that is easier to use, posts publish much more quickly, and the spell check is less cumbersome and has a larger dictionary. Since Blogger is part of the Google empire, you do need to switch from your old login to a Google login.
The only trouble I’ve had was trying to access comments using Flock. However, our Internet is still a bit dodgy due to the severed cables near Taiwan, so all that may straighten out once we are back to full speed.
All in all, the new Blogger seems to be largely improved. It makes the old Blogger seem slow and outdated. Give it a try if you still haven’t made the move.
I haven’t heard anyone complaining lately about the new Blogger causing them grief. And I heard that those of us who didn’t upgrade on our own would have it thrust upon us, so I have upgraded this blog to the new Blogger. Please let me know if you experience any negative consequences from this upgrade. Thanks.
At long last I have a bit of down time. My school has an amazing three weeks off over the holiday. I had time for a quick dash to the US to see family and friends and snow. Now I’m back in Singapore, battling jet lag and trying to finally organize and decorate the apartment– we haven’t hung any of the 30+ framed pieces of art we brought with us, much less organize any drawer or closet. It is definitely time to dig in.
However, despite tending to assorted home chores, I’ve been in blogger bliss because I’ve finally had a chance to get caught up on most of the blog feeds in my NetNewsWire Lite. I hadn’t realized how much I was missing those complex, passionate, divergent, inspiring voices. I won’t summarize or synthesize their posts here; one day’s immersion doesn’t give me enough processing time to have anything meaningful to add to the conversation. However, I will send out a HUGE generic thanks to all of you for taking the time to write, and write well. My life is richer because of you. May your new year be full of good health, enjoyable work, and time with those you love.
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