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always crashing in the same car: recurring misuses of higher-education web sites - “the family of publications”

Here’s one that’s been buzzing around universities for the past several years: The desire to make the Web presence and brochures look like “a family of publications.”
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always crashing in the same car: recurring misuses of higher-education web sites - introduction

Pick a higher education Web site. Any higher education Web site.

Likely what you’ve got is the agglomerated result of battling needs, wants, and not a little politics.
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read this: who killed the webmaster?

zope/plone breaks on dapper drake

Saint Brendan, Patron Saint of NavigatorsLast week I quite thoroughly blew up the Ubuntu installation on my test server. This was after repeatedly taking various approaches to installing Zope/Plone on Dapper Drake (both by apt-get and Synaptic installer) and getting the same I/O error over and over and over and over and over…

IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied

Meanwhile, threads on the Ubuntu Forum point to a bug in Dapper Drake that makes it seriously difficult to set up Zope/Plone.

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how to make the worst of your content management system

I recently heard tell of the following activity, parading as content migration to an enterprise level content management system. I am not making this up:

  1. Copy large volumes of Web-content-to-be, page by page, into separate Dreamweaver files containing the design (created and sliced up in FireWorks)
  2. Copy/paste said Dreamweaver files into content wells of the content management system
  3. Repeat this activity ad infinitum until an entire Web presence is constructed in this fashion

When I heard this, something inside me snapped.
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2057 pages of polysyllabic fun!

Riverside ShakespeareI am currently rereading The Riverside Shakespeare.

This weighty tome (7.33 pounds) is the complete and heavily illustrated, annotated, commented collection of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Gorgeous reading.

Shown here is the ~1979 edition. This is my old textbook from the days when I was a literature major. This edition is minus Edward III and “A Funeral Elegy,” which scholars have identified as Shakespeare’s works since its printing.

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facebook, time to grow up

Question Mark in B-Surfers FontI appreciate how Facebook has enabled me to connect with colleagues, and (younger) family members in a manner that is both informative and expressly cordial. It attracts students like Nutella attracts chocolate lovers, and because of that, I see interesting potential here. In fact, one of our faculty members at Penn State plans to try running his human-computer interaction course through Facebook this fall. Definitely worth pursuing. Read the rest of this entry »

python for beginners

pythonI’ve written a considerable amount of dynamic code, but until a couple of weeks ago, I was new to Python.

The APress book Dive into Python, by Mark Pilgrim, is a very good resource and will come in useful later. For now it brightens up my bookshelf with nice Halloween colors.

However, it assumes a background in Perl, which I lack. So I went on the hunt for a book that begins with the basics of Python and that speaks to my learning style. Read the rest of this entry »

customizing wordpress

Pia, My CatI’ve been experimenting with creating custom themes in WordPress, one of which is the interface of this blog. WordPress is remarkably easy to customize. Read the rest of this entry »

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