Perceive Designs has created an excellent Aggie stylesheet that incorporates stock quotes, local weather, tracking keywords hits in blog entries and more. Amazing what you can do with this xsl stuff. (Found via Bitworking.org.)
Category Archives: Weblogs
Linkback Referrers
I spotted Stephen Downes Referral System via www.davidwatson.org.
Very cool little script. I have added it to my templates here on high context. It will display the referrers to each individual page. So if you link to anything on this site your page will be listed on the sidebar as people follow the link.
One small bug I’ve discovered with Mozilla is that a local referral within the same site creates an unexpected value for document.location in the javascript code. No problems in IE so it must just be Mozilla.
Adding MT css to Aggie
Have you ever hit one of those little technical challenges that keeps you up half the night until bleary-eyed and tired at 1 in the morning you have finally triumphed over it? And going to bed before figuring it out is not an option?
I had one of those last night. I’ve always wanted to customize the page that is generated by the Aggie newsfeed aggregator. I poked around in the install directory and noticed an Aggie.xsl file. Aha! I had read about transforming XML by using stylesheets but had never explored how it was done.
So what I ended up with several hours later was an xsl/css skin for Aggie that lets you apply any of the standard Movable Type styles (which are beautifully designed) to the output. I also added a sidebar blogroll list of all the blogs with entries displayed on the page. If a feed you subscribe to does not have a new entry then it will not appear in the blogroll since Aggie does not include it in the aggregate.xml output file that gets parsed to create the html page (unless you have checked off the show all entries box).
That blogroll is the piece that kept me up late. XSLT is hard.
Here are the files (right-click on the links to save the files to disk):
Just drop these files into your Aggie directory (back up the originals if you want to be able to revert the look and feel). To apply a different MT style simply open up Aggie.css and swap out all the code for that of the style you want to use.
Face Time
I’ll be at the Rockville Starbucks for the local blogger meet up tomorrow evening. Looks like 8 or so folks are planning on showing up.
In mid-August I’ll be at ASAE’s Convention in Denver.
Self-herding Cats
From Michael Helfrich’s weblog: Technology Confined Collaboration?
Collaboration is about people. Collaboration needs technology frameworks that support adaptive, ad hoc interactions. Adaptive from the sense of extending functionality on the fly and securely embracing new members on the fly. Simply put, it’s the swarming culture fused with adaptive technology.
Good article from a Groove VP. It reminds me of the famous commercial for a consulting firm that featured cowboys herding thousands of cats across the plains. The joke there is that cats are independent minded beings and are not very receptive to centralized herding control. The other joke is that the consulting firm claimed they could do the herding for you.
Decentralized collaborative software such as Groove and weblogs allow knowledge worker cats to do their own herding. They really won’t be herded any other way.
KMPings Bookmarklet Generator
I have created a KMpings Bookmarklet Generator for those users whose software doesn’t support TrackBack yet. This allows anyone to ping an entry to KMpings no matter what software they are using.
I adapted the bookmarklet generated by Movable Type and hit the ping script directly from the bookmarklet. Kind of an ugly little hack but it works! Let me know if you have any feedback about the tool.
Who Will It Be?
From Scripting News:
Good morning weblog fans. I got a few emails overnight about a project John, Jake and Lawrence are doing with a famous publication while I’m reading books and watching movies, walking and recuperating. Murphy-willing we’ll be hosting thousands of weblogs under a new brand quite soon.
My guess as to the mystery publisher: Salon. Hosting a bunch of independent and opinionated weblogs seems to fit their style.
Blogware as Disruptive Tech
Via Terry Frazier’s weblog: Blogs as Disruptive Tech – How weblogs are flying under the radar of the Content Management Giants
This piece is definitely worth a read.
Increasingly, there’s only a thin layer of functionality separating blogware from low-end Content Management solutions. Features like:
* Basic Workflow, so administrators can approve content and templates
* Permission Levels, so you can easily separate content editors from template designers
* Update Histories, so you can track whose updating what (and when)
* Multiple Types of Data, so you can do more than just post blogs (e.g. post Press Releases or Job Listings)A blogging software company that adds those functionalities to basic blogware could start to eat away at Content Management market share on the low-end. It’s already starting to happen with corporate weblogs: knowledge management blogs, corporate communications blog, and marketing blogs are all making a splash in the marketplace without much participation from the low to mid-end content management systems.
I think it represents the growth of more diverse tools to meet the diverse needs that have always been there. Why buy a $100k hammer if you have $0.02 nails?
Test Page for KMpings
I’ve created a test page for KMpings for those folks out there working on building TrackBack functionality for their blogging software and for those who just want to test the ping function before hitting the main page.
The KMpings Experiment
I created a little blog called KMpings that allows any blogger writing about knowledge management to ping their post to a tracking page (if their software supports it). Think of it as a themed www.weblogs.com for the knowledge management community.
I wanted to try out this experiment since I think the TrackBack function created by Movable Type has a lot of potential for aggregating blog posts within communities of practice on the web or an intranet. Please post any feed back you have to this message or shoot me an e-mail.
Check out the KMpings blog for links to information on how to configure MT as well as a TrackBack hack for Radio.
If the page takes off I’ll look into enhancing features based on feedback from the community. One I’m definitely going to work on this week is creating an RSS feed of the pings.
Happy KMpinging!
C. David Gammel, CAE 