learnandteachonline.com

Dave's been refining his experimental Flickr 2 Twitter app.

The picture part is a new wrinkle in TwitterGrams, a way to send an audio tweet -- by uploading an MP3 file, or much more easily by phoning it in using a gateway enabled by BlogTalk Radio.
It would be nice if the picstream had a little player like Blogger's Blogger Play.

I did make a no-Flash player for the audio TwitterGrams. I'm not sure I'd know where to start with a slide player (but might think on it! ;-) )

While reminding myself this afternoon how Moodle's glossary module works I noticed it has its own RSS feed. It could be the feed is mainly intended so instructors can be notified when a student submits a new term. But it struck me it could also be output in a different way to make a little word-of-the-day widget.

I'm messing around with the glossary with an eye toward putting some textbook glossaries online for work, and possibly trying to make it work as an English-Spanish safety dictionary.

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. ;-)

Ever since I read the thread on the Moodle forums about integration with Facebook, I've been thinking how the two species just don't want to meet in the wild.

But what about something like this? Build a Facebook app that's a simple output of an assignments feed from a learning management system. Give it a name like "Here's what I'm supposed to be doing; tell me to get back to work."

I think most kids -- heck, most humans -- like the idea of a nudge if they've asked for it. Think of diet groups or the dissertation support group I started 10 years ago, run for years now, and more ably, by Tom Tom Jankowski (PhinisheD). That kind of help can be quite motivating.

I made my OPML blog's comment chat box into a Clearspring widget. See how it works.

Pretty well. This is the page on the Clearspring site where you send folks to grab and use your widget.

This is what the configuration console looks like:

Maybe this widget has been around for a while but I only noticed it today at the bottom of a story about disputed war casualty counts. (You may have to log in to WaPo.) Made in Flash and served on the Clearspring widget platform. I'll check out Clearspring.

I bought the domain, sidebarstuff.com, a year ago or so when I started getting interested in widgets, but ignored it when I did not seem able to come up with a cool enough looking home page for it. Widgets are so ultra 2-ohish it seemed like it should be the very epitome of round-cornered-gradient-light-blueness.

But concerns like that ebb and flow -- don't they for you, too? -- and at the moment the design doesn't seem so important. I'm going to start putting some of my little projects there. Like this form that leads to a mobile page visualizer.