Blogs
Week in Review
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/08/2005 - 10:02It has been a rough week, Kim’s grandfather’s funeral, problems with one of my hosting services, getting a new website up and the hard disk on my laptop crashing. I’ve written about Kim’s grandfather’s funeral in several entries. I haven’t written about the website I’ve been working on. DemSpeak is based on CivicSpace, like so many of the sites I’ve been working on.
One of the advantages of CivicSpace is that you can enable many people to be contributors, or even administrators. A problem that this can create is that worse than being a site developed by committee, it can become a site developed by a committee of sorcerer’s apprentices, and as you approach launch, it can become a committee of panicking sorcerer’s apprentices. Despite all the panic and hard work, the site has turned out very well.
Grief in a Family Context
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/04/2005 - 11:20With the recent deaths of my wife’s grandfather and her great aunt, I’ve been spending a lot of time talking with people about grief. Several years ago, I took a wonderful online class entitled Grief in a Family Context It was a wonderful course, and I encourage everyone who is at all interested in a scholarly exploration into the grieving process to take this course. It is “a 3-credit, combined graduate and undergraduate course”, so don’t take the course unless you are up for doing some hard work, both academically, and, if you are dealing with grief yourself, emotionally.
Tuesday update
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/04/2005 - 09:30Grieving Aldon writes web software ponders the internet as a news medium, thinks about tsunami relief, and considers run for State Democratic Chair.
I hope that some of the people randomly and briefly surfing this weblog through Blog Explosion will find the lead interesting enough to click on a link or two, and maybe even spend more than 30 seconds here.
Blog rolling with Drupal
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/04/2005 - 09:20Over on the Progressive Blog Alliance they’ve run into some problems with blog rolling. They’re blog roll is now over 150 people and they are trying to figure out a better way to handle the blog roll.
One idea is to use the RSS feed from del.icio.us. I had set up a tag for PBA there. I haven’t updated it in a while, but it is a tool that could be used. Unfortunately, currently, the most items you can see in a Drupal block of a feed is 25 items, so this doesn’t really help a lot.
So, I started writing a modification to the aggregator module for Drupal so that you can use Drupal as a blog roller. The aggregator module isn’t really the right place to do it, but it did give me a good first pass.
NationStates and Progressive Frames
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/04/2005 - 08:39While Mairead was visiting, I asked her how much she knew about what was going on with the tsunami relief efforts. For those of you who aren’t regular readers, Mairead is my exceptionally gifted fourteen-year-old daughter who is off in college. While I know that younger folk are now getting more of their news from the Internet and from the Daily Show, I was surprised at her answer. It wasn’t that she is getting her news from Google’s News site, or from blogs. She is getting it from discussion boards at NationStates “NationStates is a free nation simulation game. Build a nation and run it according to your own warped political ideals.” They have a bulletin board where they discuss the issues, that it where Mairead is getting her news.
