Archive for August, 2006

Blogger Beta Bug

Published on 23 August 2006 in page element, Blogger Beta and bug. 2 Comments

Just came across a bad bug in Blogger Beta. Blogger Beta users, don’t use the Feed Page Element!

Click on picture for more detail

Last night when I tried to look at this page all I got was this message: “We’re sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.” I don’t know about you, but messages like that, well, they irk me. So unhelpful just stating the obvious while not giving any clues at all.

I left it last night hoping it would all be fixed when I got up, so you can imagine the heart-sinking feeling I got when I saw that it still wasn’t working this morning.

Thank goodness for other users - of course I was not the only Blogger Beta user with this problem, and I found a post on the Blogger Help Group from another Blogger Beta user who reported that when they removed any feeds they added to their blog, voilà! everything worked fine again. So I took out the lint feed (which I added yesterday morning), and we’re cooking with gas once more.

I hope they fix this bug soon. I was really pleased to see the feature as it’s a very easy way of adding a feed to the page (you basically plug in the feed URL as a “page element”) but needless to say it should be avoided at the moment as it will make your blog inaccessible!

Five quotes

Published on 22 August 2006 in meme. 0 Comments

Meme on Kottke.

Go here and look through random quotes until you find five that you think reflect who you are or what you believe.

Here are my five:

Sincerity is the way of Heaven.
Mencius (371 BC - 289 BC), Works

My library
Was dukedom large enough.
William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), The Tempest, Act 1 scene 2

“I meant,” said Ipslore bitterly, “what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?”
Death thought about it.
“Cats,” he said eventually. “Cats are nice.”
Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

Hell, there are no rules here– we’re trying to accomplish something.
Thomas A. Edison (1847 - 1931)

I want all my senses engaged. Let me absorb the world’s variety and uniqueness.
Maya Angelou (1928 - )

Teaching others ’bout blogging

Published on 21 August 2006 in blogging. 12 Comments

Yesterday I showed a group of students how to start their own blogs, on Blogger. (I rewrote this sentence: I didn’t teach them how to blog, I think that comes with practice. Also, aren’t there almost as many different types of blogs as there are bloggers?)

What surprised me:

I expected that blogging was a topic university students aged in their early twenties would know about, but none in the group of nine students knew the word. An earlier group I spoke to (some forty students) also had no idea.

What surprised them:

Several students commented on how easy it was - one student said that her initial response to anything “technical, on the computer” was that it was going to be too hard to even consider doing, but “this looks really easy”. This makes me wonder how many people would blog but think it is all just too difficult.

What I hadn’t accounted for:

The fact that Blogger, after years of having the same interface, would go and release a new version in the week before this second class. I stuck to showing the class the old Blogger, mainly because I’d already shown other students in the class the old version a few weeks ago, and I thought it might be confusing for these students if they compared notes and realised that they were using different Bloggers. Also I’m not sure how Blogger Beta will develop over the next few weeks and months.

And working with an online tool can be challenging, when the tool suddenly stops working while you are showing a group of students how easy it is to add team members to their team blog. Blogger decided to have an Unscheduled Outage just as we were finishing with setting up one of the blogs. Hopefully the team won’t have to go back and set things up again.

I was disappointed that the students haven’t found RSS as useful as I’d hoped they would. I’m not sure if this is because I didn’t do as good a job in explaining it to them (likely - nothing else gets me as tangled as RSS does), or if it’s because they’re in the middle of a challenging part of their studies and using RSS is not immediately relevant/too much information overload for them at this stage.

To end on a positive note, their lecturer says that so far he’s been finding it a valuable experience, and he thinks that most of the students have found it useful as well - and he’s considering introducing blogging to his students at even earlier stages of their studies, so they can get used to the technology early on!