We are looking at ways to integrate the new Teachers Without Borders site with Google docs. Turns out that you can open: documents – .pdf, .doc, .txt, .html, .rtf and .odt spreadsheets – .xls, .csv, .ods presentations – .ppt By feeding the file url to this google url: http://docs.google.com/?DocAction=updoc&formsubmitted=true&uploadURL=DOCUMENT_URL Here’s an example if you needed…
Category: Programming
Using Starling, Workling with Ruby on Rails
For the project we are working on for Teachers Without Borders we need a reliable asynchronous way to process tasks. There are a myriad of ways to do this and if you aren’t careful you’ll spend weeks second guessing yourself while investigate every possible option. Not that I would know that from experience. We chose…
Helpful Git configuration file
For anyone out there using Git here is a great .gitconfig file. It will help you get started with aliases etc.
51Weeks at ICLS
Last year for our open ed conference here at Utah State I built an application called 51weeks to help preserve the presentations and to help people interact. Tomorrow it will be used at ICLS in the Netherlands. The hardest part about these kinds of applications is life cycle management. I am frequently asked to build…
Morph Exchange Review
I recently wrote about Cloud Computing. Alain Benedict from Morph Exchange told me that I neglected to add his company to the list. I said I would check it out. He said he would hold me to it. Last night I spent a little quality with Morph and now have a few impressions to share….
Elastic Cloud Computing
One of the most difficult tasks when putting up a new site is picking the right host. Moving hosts later on is terribly difficult so choosing the correct hosting company is as important as selecting a business partner. I’ve collected about 30 hosting companies in my delicious bookmarks. Some are specific to a platform others…
Ruby Grand Masters
I spent two years in Japan. While there I met all kinds of interesting people. I remember one individual in particular because he was a chess grand master. He was also very good at Shogi. In fact he had written Shogi the video game for Nintendo. I like chess and so we played a game….
Plugin Loading for Ruby on Rails has Changed.
I am tired of recreating the login system for Rails for each new project so using the RESTful Rails Authentication Tutorial I created a template project that I can use to create new projects. While adding in the OpenID Authentication component I started getting this error: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.0.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:376:in `new_constants_in’: You have a nil object when you…
This Clears Things Up a Bit
I’m not sure if anyone has seen David Wiley’s blog today, but I think his efforts help to illustrate the idea of distributing the social network. Take a look at it. It might change, so look soon. Does it look familiar?
Turn WordPress Into Social Butterfly
I have been pitching this idea of a distributed social network to everyone that can stand to listen to me. I realize that the conversation around WordPress and the future of social networking is heating up, but as it does I think it is important to begin thinking about implementation. It is fun to philosophize,…