Author Archives: Boone Gorges

What’s wrong with TEDxNYED?

March 7, 2010 · 14 Replies

TED

TEDxNYED was an interesting event in a couple of ways. A few blog posts have hit my reader already from people I respect (eg Will Richardson, who was in attendance, and Jim Groom, who was not there but posted on a topic directly related to the TED and TEDxNYED phenomena). I enjoyed many of the talks but walked away feeling more defeated than energized.

I’ve always had extremely mixed feelings about TED talks. I’ve watched a few dozen of the freely available videos over the years, and most seem, in my unstudied view, to be little more than glorified project pimps or book promos. I’m sure that the folks who organize TED try hard to keep explicit self-promotion off of the stage, but in the end it’s a symptom of the format: if you invite someone to give a very brief, non-specialist-level teaser on some piece of great work they’ve done, what can it really be except for a bragfest?

TED

Sitting through TEDxNYED, I was in a sense relieved that all of the talks were limited to 18 minutes (a cornerstone of the TED philosophy) – the energy level in the room stayed pretty consistently high, which can largely be attributed to the brevity of the talks. But I also found myself frustrated, in much the same way that I do with TED talks in general, with the lack of focus on just what the 18-minute talk is supposed to do. Few of the talks present anything resembling a thesis; in eightteen minutes, just what kind of thesis worth defending could be laid out, considered, justified? It’s not as if argumentative presentations are the only ones worth giving – far from it – but in the absence of an argument to give structure to the talk, there has to be some other purpose. Some of the talks fall into the “rallying cry” category, which is to say that they present an issue in a way to get people emotionally involved enough to want to get out there and participate. This is a more realistic goal for 18 minutes, but few speakers have the humility, grace, eloquence, and project to pull it off. TED states its mission as “spreading ideas”, which in its vagueness is an indicator of how the individual talks themselves can vary so much in their focus, or lack focus altogether.

Then there is what D’Arcy Norman has called the “elitism” of TED. I will say happily that the TEDxNYED application did not ask for lifetime achievements, but only for a few sentences explaining why I wanted to attend the event. I don’t know how many people were turned away from the event, and what role these few sentences played in choosing who got in and who didn’t, so I’m afraid I can’t corroborate whether this was an awesomeness-filter. Related to D’Arcy’s concern, though, is the more worrisome hero worship that Jim gestures toward in his post. You invite a bunch of famous-on-the-edtech-internet folks to speak, fill the room with education dorks (which I mean in the sweetest way possible, including myself in the ‘dork’ camp), and then watch the echo chamber effect get out of control. As I heard a few people lament throughout the day, the people who really should be hearing some of the talks – and in particular the “rallying cry” kind of talk – were not the kinds of people who come to an event like this. Will’s post points out nicely the tendency to feel giddy after a day of chumming with like-minded folks, and the difficulty of connecting back with the work you do in your everyday life.

TED

I saw a tweet in the middle of the day – wish I could find it now – that remarked on the irony of a day full of lectures delivered to a roomful of people who love to decry the utility of lectures as a learning tool. Another part of the TED philosophy is that “all of knowledge is connected” (which, understood in the right way, can be an interesting hypothesis) but I walk away from the day feeling that connections between the presentations are still largely hidden or at least implicit. This disjointedness is in part a product of the unidirectional nature of the TED format: the speakers have a chance to connect by making references to earlier events in the day, but there’s no organized way for the audience to do the kind of hands-on synthesis that would ground the connections in their own experiences and goals. Some of these connections are made informally over lunch and at the after-party, but at those events I found myself talking to people I already knew about things we already agreed upon. Largely my own fault, I suppose, but it’s also a function of the way that the TED conference is not set up to encourage cross-pollenization of ideas between .

The above sounds like a lot of complaining. It’s not meant to be. I’m very glad I had the chance to hear several of the speakers through the day, and I made some nice personal contacts with people I had only heard of or only knew on the internet. The day was a net positive for me. But I can’t help but think that the TED format, while perhaps being well-suited to some purposes (explaining why neuroscience is important for non-neuroscientists, maybe), it’s more difficult to reconcile it with the needs of a community, like the NY educational community, that already shares certain practices and beliefs.

New BuddyPress plugin: BP Group Management

March 4, 2010 · 3 Replies

Another day, another plugin for BuddyPress. In BP < 1.2, it was impossible for site admins to manage group membership in groups where they weren't also the local admin. This is good in a lot of situations, but in some applications of BP it can be a pain – the system administrator needs more power in order to correct problem, wreak havoc, and so on. In BP 1.2+ the situation is better – admins can manage groups more – but it's still not all that easy to see everything in one place. This plugin rectifies the situation by allowing site admins to manage the members of groups across their BP installation from a single screen.

New BuddyPress plugin: BP Import Blog Activity

March 2, 2010

I wrote a BuddyPress plugin today that is very ugly. It imports activity into BuddyPress from blog posts and comments that occurred before you had BuddyPress installed. It’s ugly because it’s sloppily coded and extremely inefficient and likely to hit PHP memory limits every time you run it. But it does the job, so I thought I’d post it and share it with others.

New BuddyPress plugin: BP MPO Activity Filter

February 9, 2010

In the past I and others have experienced some problems with the way that More Privacy Options for WPMu interacts with BuddyPress – or, to be more exact, with the way that the two don’t recognize each other. Blogs marked as private via MPO were getting plastered all over the public activity streams. In the past I have suggested some unpleasant but more or less functional core hacks, but now I’ve developed a plugin that does the job in the right way. It’s called … drumroll … BP MPO Activity Filter.

Check it out here.

New BuddyPress plugin: BP Include Non-Member Comments

February 7, 2010 · Leave a reply

I wrote a plugin this afternoon that solves a small but potentially annoying limitation of BuddyPress: its inability to show comments from non-members in the sitewide activity stream. In a streak of extreme creativity, I dubbed the plugin “BP Include Non-Member Comments”. Read more about it, and download it for your own use, here.

Class blogrolls: No sweat

January 25, 2010 · 1 Reply

Last week, in the post where I announced my new WPMU plugin Shared Blogroll, I briefly mentioned the use case that I had in mind, which was of course education-focused. Yesterday and today I did some more work on the plugin itself (MORE AJAX 4EVA) and some of the supporting players. I thought I’d spell it out a little more so that others could implement what is probably the coolest system for shared blogrolls on earth, or at least on WPMU, which amounts to pretty much the same thing.

The plugins

Shared Blogroll. This creates a widget that allows bloggers to embed a link category from any other blog on the system on their own blog.
Add Users Sidebar Widget. This plugin is already pretty great, as well it should be seeing as it’s written by good-looking Canadians. I made some edits to the plugin to make it a bit more flexible.
1. First I removed the RSS box from the Add User widget. For most of my users, it’ll confuse; for all of them, it’ll be redundant, since they’ll all be using Wordpress blogs and thus will have feeds that are very auto-discoverable.
2. As the plugin stands in the repository, links are automatically put into the blog’s default link category (or, if they’re using FeedWordPress, the FWP link category). For most users, that’s something unhelpful like “Links” or “Uncategorized”. I altered the plugin so that the blog owner can choose which link category the added links will be put into. As I’ll discuss below, I think that this will add a lot of flexibility to the way that the plugins can be used together. You can download the text of my modified version of Add Users Sidebar Widget here: add-link-sidebar-widget.txt. Save as .php before uploading – and make sure that you uninstall previous versions of the plugin before uploading, or you might get whitescreened to death.
Optional step. The default WP Links widget is set up so that you can’t select to display an empty category of links. As you’ll see below, I want to have instructors create a new category for their blogrolls, and I figured it’d be pretty confusing if they couldn’t create a sidebar widget corresponding to a link category until at least one student had posted a link (thus populating the category). So I wrote a little plugin that replaces the default Links widget with one that allows you to pick an empty links category. Drop this into mu-plugins: link_widget_allow_empty_cat. Be warned, though, that this plugin deregisters the default Links widget, which might have the effect of removing every links widget on your installation of WPMU. (I haven’t tested it.) For me, it’s OK, because I don’t have any active users yet. As an alternative, you could edit the core of WP (making sure to back up, take note of where you made the edit for future upgrades, blah blah blah) in the following way. In wp-includes/default-widgets.php, line 139 reads [code language=”php”]$link_cats = get_terms( ‘link_category’);[/code] Replace it with [code language=”php”]$link_cats = get_terms( ‘link_category’, ‘hide_empty=0’);[/code] That should leave all of your pre-existing links widgets in place.

The process

The immediate goal of this setup is to allow a class blogroll to be shared effortlessly between members of a class. (Though I can imagine lots of other very cool uses.) Here are the directions I’m going to give to instructors and students on how to leverage these two plugins to make it happen.

Instructors

Create a new Link Category for your class blogroll – let’s say you call it “ENG 110 Blogroll”.
Add a Links widget to the sidebar, making sure to select “ENG 110 Blogroll” from the category dropdown.
Add an Add Links widget to the sidebar. Again, be sure to select “ENG 110” blogroll as the target category for added links.
Give your blog’s ID number to your students and give them the following directions.

Students

After creating a blog, visit the professor’s blog and enter your site’s URL into the Add Link sidebar widget.
Add a Shared Blogroll widget to your own blog’s sidebar. Enter the professor’s blog ID number as the source blog, select “ENG 110 Blogroll” from the dropdown list, and Save.

I hope that the instructors and students get into this blogroll sharing thing. It distributes what would otherwise be a huge amount of work for the instructor, or *worse yet*, for me.

Blog-specific email plugin for WPMU users

January 21, 2010 · 5 Replies

A quick WPMU hack that I think will help a lot of people using an installation of WPMU for multiple classes.

The plugin Email Users by Vincent Prat allows blog authors/admins to email users in two different ways: 1) by emailing a group of users (such as those corresponding a particular role on your blog), or 2) by emailing individual users. The problem, though, is that this second option brings up a list of every single user on the installation of WPMU. This can be a bit of a pain for the normal blog user, as teachers or students in a class would probably only want to see a list of those people who are in the class, or on the blog.

Here’s a hack that will make the Email Users plugin show list only the members of the current blog for everyone except for the site admin:

In the main plugin file (email-users.php), find the function mailusers_get_users. It should start around line 404.
Look for the lines of code (414-417 in my version) that define the variable $users in the first conditional clause:
[code language=”php”]
$users = $wpdb->get_results(
“SELECT id, user_email, display_name ”
. “FROM $wpdb->users ”
. $additional_sql_filter );
[/code]
Replace that line with the following code:
[code language=”php”]
if ( is_site_admin() ) {
$users = $wpdb->get_results(
“SELECT id, user_email, display_name ”
. “FROM $wpdb->users ”
. $additional_sql_filter );
} else {
$wp_user_search = new WP_User_Search(”, ”, ”);
$user_list = $wp_user_search->get_results();
$user_array = join(‘,’, $user_list);
$users = $wpdb->get_results(
“SELECT id, user_email, display_name ”
. “FROM $wpdb->users ”
. “WHERE id IN ( $user_array ) ” );
}
[/code]

Here’s the use case I envision. The instructor for a class places the Add User Sidebar Widget (by my boys at UBC’s OLT!) in the sidebar of his or her blog. As part of the first assignment of the semester, the instructor asks each student to register for an account, and click the “Add Me” button on the instructor’s blog. That will automatically populate the email list above.

File this tip under “who needs Blackboard?”.

True cross-platform comment syncing with Disqus and Wordpress

January 13, 2010 · 3 Replies

FeedWordPress works well if you want to syndicate content from various sources into a single Wordpress blog. Syndicating comments is, of course, more difficult. I’m finishing up a job for a client who wanted real-time synced comments, and suggested that Disqus might do the trick. I quickly discovered that Disqus is clearly not made to do what I wanted it to do. But, being the cool guy that I am, I hacked something together that is more or less functional.

Here were the requirements: Comments on a blog post needed to be synchronized between the source blogs and the hub blog. Readers had to be able to comment in both places and have the comments sync. While I’d be using Wordpress to create the hub blog, the source blogs would be hosted on various platforms: Tumblr, Typepad, Blogger, self-hosted Wordpress. (The distributed requirement is especially important. If the blogs were all on the same installation of WPMU, the job would be trivial and would not require a third-party solution like Disqus.) Because bloggers would be coming from different platforms, I not only had to be able to accomodate those platforms, but I also had to make sure that the system would work with the platforms’ stock configuration. That is, since I (and, generally speaking, the bloggers) don’t have access to the platform code, all custom modifications need to happen at the hub blog.

I don’t particularly recommend that anyone try to replicate what I’ve done here. But hopefully it will point the way toward what might be a viable third-party system for true comment syncing.

The details

Here’s my strategy with regard to Disqus. If all the source blogs were registered to the same Disqus Comments account (ie corresponding to a single shortname), then they’d all have the same forum_key, which is to say they’d be accessible by the same API request. Thus the strategy is to make Disqus unable to distinguish between API calls from the source blogs (which are, recall, making stock API calls to Disqus) and API calls from the corresponding posts on the hub blog.

I installed the Disqus Comment System plugin for the Wordpress hub blog and registered with the same credentials that would be given to the source blogs. When feeds starting syndicating to the hub blog, however, I found that the comment sections on the source post weren’t matching the comment section on the hub post. The URL for each comment thread’s RSS feed showed me why: Disqus indexes a forum’s comment thread based on some post information that it gets from the client platform, and each platform was formatting the information in a different way.

First problem: The Wordpress Disqus plugin uses a post variable called $thread_meta, which is set in disqus-comment-system/lib/api.php thus:
[code language=”php”]$thread_meta = $post->ID . ‘ ‘ . $post->guid;[/code]
Disqus would then create a comment thread based on this string. The problem is that $post->ID is the post ID number for the hub blog, and has nothing to do with the source blog (which, depending on platform, does not include post ids in its API request at all). So the source blog’s thread would be identified as test_post (for example) while the hub blog would be 34_test_post. I replaced the code above with
[code language=”php”]$thread_meta = $post->guid[/code]
which manages to stay pretty consistent across platforms. (NB: The same change has to be made on the source blog version of the Disqus plugin, if the source blog is running a self-hosted installation of Wordpress.)

Second problem: Getting a stable and unique identifier for each post thread is only the first step. You also need to make sure that the identifier is concatenated correctly when the actual API request is made. Disqus comment sections work by loading a piece of Javascript that is concatenated from an API request to disqus.com for the proper thread, then finds the comment section on the post page, and replaces the native comment code with the code returned from disqus.com. But I found (again, by looking at the URL for the RSS feeds) that each platform was making the request a little bit differently. At the end of disqus-comments-system/comments.php, the stock WP plugin reads
[code language=”html”]

Teleogistic

I like to stop at the duty free shop