learnandteachonline.com

I was so happy to see all the developers popping up with ideas in answer to Dave Winer's advice request for the best way to go about porting the OPML Editor to Linux. Great idea to approach it that way, and get a fresh crop of techies thinking about it. The open-source Frontier crowd doesn't seem to be doing much at all anymore.

God knows I don't work at that level, and barely even understand what's needed or what the aim is, but I know I'd love to see the Linux build so the OPML Editor Community Server can run on it. That makes all kinds of sense.

But who knows, maybe Dave is thinking more along the lines of fractional horsepower servers. That's cool, too, and even more groundbreaking.

Hell yeah, I'd put a teensy web server in my little Sansa mp3 player to sync podcasts with my home network. Put one in my cat's collar or on the bottom of my shampoo bottle. Or, how about this? In a bookmark in my paper book that tells me where I left off so I can continue in audio when I get in the car?

If you use any sort of content management system or flexible blogging software, you don't have to junk up your site with commercial widgets and build somebody else's business. You can roll your own.

I work on a number of online and email newsletters having regular sidebar features that can be repurposed for use on other internal pages, or offered to constituent groups. Expression Engine makes it easy with its flexible templates.

Nope, EE doesn't pay me; I just love it. Decided to make my new hobby site, Sidebarstuff.com, using the free version. The only trouble is it feels too much like I'm at work when I'm building it at night. ;-)

A discussion of Facebook and Moodle integration is going on in the Moodle forums. The thread. Registration is required, but painless. Then I think you have to join the "Moodle Lounge" course to read or post on the board.

I'll read it more carefully later and may have something to say.

Maybe I'll narrate my progress with it here.

Rowan Nairn made OPod, an AJAX OPML and RSS viewer widget.

(I wonder if that's the same thing as a "badge." Got to get your terms straight in this lonely, mixed-up world.)

You need to install it on a web server running PHP. I tried it here but I must be running into the PHP version problem Rowan warned about. He said there might be trouble under 5.0 and my host has 4.3.11. I got a "call to undefined function" error.

I don't blame the hosting place. We have a Linux server at work that we had to roll back to PHP 4.something because when we went to 5 it messed up some older scripts.

I don't beat myself up anymore for not keeping up with everything happening on the internet. You just can't.

AJAX is something I don't know about, don't quite get, but it's creeping up on my not-written-down brain nag list.

This badge thing seems kind of cool. Rod Boothby describes them as "a way for non-technical users to drop AJAX-powered interactive tools into their blogs and wiki posts."

I missed this because I haven't been making courses lately and LMS matters haven't been on my radar.

The DoL's free Workforce Connections tool apparently has Moodle as its lizard brain. Cool. Though it looks like the latest version is made in Python, not too tough to craft from a start in PHP, I understand.

I found this when tracking down a remark on a Drupal board about there being some integration between Drupal and Moodle. Turns out it's just single sign-on, but if I were setting up a new LMS installation, I'd definitely use the two in tandem. I think I prefer Drupal's book module, for one thing.

Here are the other apps with which Moodle integrates.

I registered amyloo.com. Should have done that a long time ago, but I probably wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been prompted to sign up for a cheap Windows hosting service. I wanted a sandbox for playing around with some Cold Fusion/SQL Server stuff. I'm experimenting with FDF. I'll probably narrate some of it, especially if I hear that anybody is interested. I'm figuring out how to output data entered into a web form in a PDF template.

I've had my sites on shared Linux accounts for a number of years recently, but have gone back and forth. I learned on Unix starting in '94, then reluctantly moved my stuff to Windows when I thought I should, went back to Linux when so much exciting LAMP stuff was coming out and I wasn't afraid of databases anymore, and now it looks like I'll have both for a while anyway.

We also have both at work, but my heart is with LAMP. I asked the guy at work who replaced me in the web department (after I moved to the publishing arm) where his heart was and he emphatically said "Windows." But he's alright.

I still like Drupal -- don't get me wrong. It's just that I'm not used to so many features being optional. Like, Friday night I realized I hadn't approved a bunch of comments. I suppose I expected I'd hear in e-mail that comments had been submitted.

When I went to look for how to turn on that feature, I learned that it's a separate module. I've used open source, community-developed LAMP apps before where it took a while to intergrate contributed add-ons. But, I don't know. Doesn't notification seem like kind of a basic thing? It's kind of ordering a new car (does anybody do that anymore?) and finding out the windshield wipers are optional.

Hopefully it won't be too hard to install.

Later... See my talking-to-myself comments. It was. Hard. Well, harder than it should have to be.

Blog Savvy offers what looks like a pretty thorough census of LAMP tools that product multi-user blogging environments. Besides the usual suspects -- Drupal, Moveable Type, Word Press, Manila -- there's a name I hadn't seen: Elgg, which lets you build a Livejournal type community. It's in beta. AND, there's a project underway to integrate it with Moodle, my very favorite LMS -- open source or otherwise. I might just have to take it for a spin. There's a hosted version. Why do I have an urge to put it on my own server? Because I actually enjoy configuring and customizing new LAMP apps. Is that warped?

I keep thinking the OPML blogger community needs something in this line. Lots of times bloggers using the beta OPML editor yell across the backyard fence at each other in blog posts, but if you don't happen to be online at the same time that somebody is shouting to you, or you don't sub to everybody's feeds, you might miss the shout out.