Category: Social Media and the Web

Social media, blogging, tweeting, facebooking, web design, and all the stuff that isn’t here yet. Subcategories highlight some areas of particular expertise.

Harvard Law in Second Life [en]

[fr] Un cours de la prestigieuse Harvard Law School est en train d'avoir lieu en partie à l'intérieur de Second Life. Quand je parle de Second Life comme outil/média éducatif, c'est à des choses comme ça que je pensais. Je suis allé y faire un tour, j'ai parlé avec une des instigatrices du projet, et je compte bien essayer de suivre en tous cas une partie de ce cours, qui a lieu les lundis et mardis.

By chance, I picked up a link to today’s RocketBoom in the #wordpress IRC channel (thanks, twidget). I don’t often watch RocketBoom, but the new presentator (en?) had a nice British accent, so I watched the whole thing.

A Harvard Law course in Second Life caught my attention. I watched the trailer, and decided to hop in and see for myself. I’ve been telling people around me that Second Life provides opportunities for education that we can barely yet imagine. I’m glad to see that it’s starting to happen. Watch the trailer for yourself [10.5Mb].

Inside the Second Life lecture hall (a replica of the real Harvard one, from what I understood) I chatted a while with Rebecca (one of the instigators!) and a student, LZ.

I learnt that the class was open to “public” (“at large”, they call it), and I’m very tempted to participate. I missed the first classes though, yesterday and today, but the wiki contains a lot of information and is supposed to give links to the lecture videos (haven’t found those, I’d be glad if somebody can point me to them). A lot of reading material is online. They also have a 20-minute introduction to Second Life but Flock can’t find the missing plugins I need to view it. Damn!

So, anyway, had to let you know about this. I think it’s exciting!

Response to Yvette: Loving Links in Posts Through Tabbed Browsing. [en]

[fr] Comment lire un texte plein d'hyperliens? Le mieux, à mon avis, c'est d'ouvrir les liens dans des onglets séparés en utilisant un navigateur comme Firefox. On peut ainsi facilement y jeter un coup d'oeil sans perdre de vue notre lecture principale, et y revenir plus tard si désir il y a.

Je pense qu'il est de la nature du web de nous disperser. Je commence à écrire un billet, en consultant mon matériel source, je me retrouve à répondre à un commentaire, et pour ce faire à mettre en ligne une saisie d'écran sur Flickr... J'utilise depuis peu un "mind map" pour me souvenir de ce que je suis en train de faire. Cela m'évite de perdre de vue ma tâche principale quand je suis plongée dans les ramifications des tâches secondaires qui en dépendent.

The best way to deal with reading links in a blog entry, IMHO, is to open them in tabs in the background. Then you can either go to the link page straight away to look at it, come back to the blog post, and read the linked page more in detail later.

To work with tabs, you’ll need a browser like Firefox, which you can download and install for free. Once you’re in Firefox, instead of simply clicking the links you want to visit, ctrl-click them (or command-click if you’re on a mac, like me).

Here’s a picture of what it can look like.

I find that there is something in the nature of the web that encourages one to get sidetracked. It’s a web, not a road! For example, I started writing a blog post, came to read this page (as “source” material), decided I was going to reply to Yvette’s comment, then halfway through thought “hey, I should show a screenshot of what tabbed browsing looks like!”, so took a screenshot, saved it as jpg, uploaded it to Flickr, added a few notes to it…

I sometimes find it useful to keep a mindmap current with what I’m doing, when the “sidetracks” start becoming “tracks” in their own right. In this case it’s not too hard for me to remember I’m actually trying to write a blog post (my main task), because the “secondary tasks” (visiting links, putting a screenshot on Flickr) are things I’m comfortable doing.

And finally, now, because this comment is becoming really long, I’m going to make it into a blog post and publish it on my blog instead. See how things go on the web?

Try Tails! [en]

[fr] Une extension Flock/Firefox qui permet de visualiser les informations présentes dans une page sous forme de microformats.

The Firefox extension Tails shows you what microformats are embedded in the page you’re viewing. Try it out here while K2 is still on! Thanks to Yoan for pointing it out to me.

Tail on CTTS

K2 [en]

[fr] Essai d'habillage. K2 semble aussi être un bon point de départ, peut-être nécessitant moins de travail que Sandbox.

Chris suggested that I check out K2, which has been hAtomised. I have to say I like it! There might be less work starting from K2 than from Sandbox. The only grudge I might have against K2 for the moment is that they prefer UTW to my Bunny Tags. (Means I don’t have a lot else to complain about.)

Modifying the template for Bunny Tags and Basic Bilingual was quickly done. I quite like this Star Wars design, even though it’s not pink! Here’s a screenshot, because I guess it won’t last long…

CTTS Trying Out K2 Vader Clothing

The hAtomisation of CTTS [en]

[fr] Un pas vers l'implémentation du microformat hAtom sur Climb to the Stars. J'ai commencé à adapter le thème WordPress Sandbox, qui est déjà tout plein de hAtom, pour que le résultat ressemble à ce que vous avez l'habitude de voir ici.

Par la même occasion, j'ai commencé à transformer ma sidebar en widgets -- c'est comme des petits blocs de construction qu'on peut ensuite assembler à sa guise, sans mettre les doigts dans le code.

Well, I’ve made good progress. Starting with the Sandbox theme, I imported and converted most of the CSS from my pink theme into a Sandbox skin. It’s not quite there yet.

I edited the function (provided with the theme) which generates navigation links so that it would show the few links I wanted instead of my huge list of pages. Then, there are a few things which are not in the right order in the Sandbox template for me to make them appear where I want. For example, I had to swap entry-title and entry-date so that the date of the post would float at the top right as it does here. Then, I had to add my own personal stuff: the lang attribute on the hentry div. The “other-excerpt” block, the technorati cosmos link, the tags, the trackback url at the bottom of the post. Phew.

I also installed the widgets plugin and started converting my sidebar to widgets. Great fun! But still not quite there yet either. The first difficulty was understanding that widgets are plugins and need to be activated before they appear in the widgets pool.

If you embark on a similar adventure, get the Exec PHP widget first. You can literally paste your current sidebar into it. You’re allowed nine instances of it, once you find that you can select that number lower down on the widgets page. Drop-down archive widget is nice. Sadly, Show coComments doesn’t seem to like apostrophes as a title, and there’s obviously something else wrong too — it worked briefly for me, but then stopped working. Didn’t manage to figure out why despite over half an hour of troubleshooting. Oh, and while I was at it, I uncovered a small glitch in the coComment Enhancer plugin — if your blog URL and wordpress install URLs are different, you might want to patch up your version (it’s really easy).

Links in WordPress Comments not Linking [en]

[fr] Les URLs dans les commentaires de ce blog ne sont pas transformés en liens, alors qu'ils le devraient. Appel aux idées pour résoudre ce problème.

Lazyweb, hear my call!

When people type URLs in my comments, they aren’t converted into links. WordPress should do this, but it’s not doing it. I don’t know where to start troubleshooting.

Suggestions and solutions will be thankfully tried out 🙂

Mon premier Stamm Genilem [fr]

[en] An evening spent networking on the local business/startup scene. Really interesting.

Suite à un interview, je me trouve invitée au Stamm Genilem sur le site de l’usine des Clées de la Romande Energie. Thème: le développement durable. Cerise sur le gâteau: visite de l’usine. Blonde: tongs et pas de petite laine (on était dehors).

Stamm Genilem Romande Energie (31.08.06) C’était très intéressant: quelques présentations sur le thème du développement durable, entre autres par Julien Perrot, fondateur et rédacteur en chef de La Salamandre, journal entièrement bio 🙂

Ensuite, les personnes présentes (Poulains d’abord!) avaient 15 secondes pour dire en quelques mots qui elles étaient, ce qu’elles faisaient, et ce qu’elles cherchaient. Ça facilite grandement le networking après, autour des pains surprise. Quelques prises de contact intéressantes (entre autres un projet de podcasting en milieu scolaire, DéDOC, des p’tits bonheurs…), une série de photos, et l’envie de revenir.