in Ann Arbor, MI 48103
{ Monthly archives }
Still a pretty tentative list, but I need to pick three of the following:
also doing an SI internship / secret project at NEW.
Inspired by Andrea’s Half-MSI post, here’s a list of things I’ve actually learned about in the first half of the MSI program. The program is pretty much a bust so far. Anyways, as a student of information I’ve learned (in alphabetical order):
There’s probably more than that, such as the interesting people I’ve connected with along the way. But the real surprise for me is how little of the above came out of the curriculum, rather than whatever else I happened to be doing at the time.
I’m cataloging blogs written by Ann Arbor nonprofits at annarbor+npblog on del.icio.us. My criteria are simple: it gets tagged if it is
There’s a surplus of general nonprofit blogging links at del.icio.us tagset nptech+blogging by way of netsquared; I’m just looking for local nonprofit blogs. So who am I missing?
Notes on setting up a wiki for internal use in one of my favorite organizations. I get the sense that this is the first wiki for everybody in the group, so I wanted to make a smooth experience.
Turns out that slapping up OddMuse with FCKeditor rich text instead of wiki markup, page trails for navigation, and nice CSS was both quick and very impressive.
The FCKeditor works really well: you use its built-in link tool for regular hyperlinks, and WikiWords for wiki links. In practice, this is less confusing than the ordinary wiki experience, since the two kinds of links are visually differentiated for page editors as well as page readers. I also cleaned up the FCKeditor toolbars as follows:
FCKConfig.ToolbarSets["FCKWiki"] =
[['Cut','Copy','Paste','PasteText','PasteWord','-'],
['Image','Table','Smiley','SpecialChar',
'UniversalKey'],
['Undo','Redo','-','Find','Replace','-','SelectAll',
'RemoveFormat'],
['FontFormat','FontSize','Bold','Italic',
'Underline'],
['OrderedList','UnorderedList','-','Outdent',
'Indent', 'Rule'],
['Link','Unlink'],
['About']];
This was the laziest way I could find to allow for reasonable creation of document structure — headings, lists, block quotes, etc. — without crudding up the edit page too badly.
FCKeditor doesn’t work well with OddMuse previews, and visual diffs are even more ugly than normal. However, the overall result is good enough that I’ll probably use this again. As always, thanks to Alex Schröder and others who’ve built such a nice package.
Yesterday Apple recalled a million iBook and Powerbook batteries, two of which belong to me. This post is intended to provide helpful information for forensics and/or eulogists in the event that the uBook explodes.
For your pleasure: yet another unofficial U-M Academic iCalendar.
Michigan Radio superstar Todd Mundt is moving to Iowa Public Radio. Among his other roles at Michigan Public Radio (and television), Todd hosted the excellent Todd Mundt Show. Todd gives an interesting perspective on all this in his blog:
I’m excited because there’s a chance for Iowa to be one of the leaders in re-imagining the partnership we have with our audience. As Robert Paterson wrote in a recent post, “Participation is not a feature - it is central to the new media.” The power of public media is the way it connects us to our listeners, our listeners to us, and our listeners to each other.
… There’s another aspect of Iowa Public Radio that excites me. These three entities have (largely) decided to stop competing with each other and focus on working together. This merger is not occurring under catastrophic circumstances - giant budget cuts, a future in jeopardy. The biggest reason it’s happening is because, by joining together, Iowans will get the best public radio service they can. If we can do this well, perhaps we can show the way for others who want to address the problem of an overbuilt public broadcasting infrastructure in their locale or region.
