Note: SIclops is not something I worked on. I just liked what it was trying to accomplish.
A few days ago, the SIclops aggregator stopped working (it’s the famously fickle+fragile Drupal aggregator); SIclops hasn’t allowed new user registrations in months. This is student project half-life at work. I don’t have any firm evidence to go on, but I am not expecting the site to last much longer. So if you want a list of all the feeds SIclops was pulling from, now would be a good time to download the list for your own reference (and compare to the SI.opml I maintain).
Andrew | 19-Dec-06 at 10:40 pm | Permalink
no, the server that was running the drupal cron job (which you could have run yourself) is busted. it got fried by a failed power supply. it was a task i forgot the machine was doing until today. this is why the aggregator hasn’t been updating.
due to whatever change SI made to their server (I’m assuming this) that resulted in password emails not going out upon registration, and no reply from anyone I inquired about this with, and no one else doing anything as far as I can tell and me being unsure how long I’ll have access, I was going to propose moving the installation off SIs servers.
in any case, if someone want to write some drupal code so the thing actually does something useful, they can email me. or if someone knows of an aggregator that supports commenting on aggregated items and tagging/classifying aggregated items (a much better idea for KM than the tacked on forum, I think), point me at it.
i’m also still waiting to hear from the person who offered up the cosign module.
I think Drupal sucks too much to bother writing modules for it, but I don’t mind keeping the thing alive for the time being.
Brian | 19-Dec-06 at 11:14 pm | Permalink
I’m using Planet Planet for another project. No comments or other crufty add-ons like you describe, but this gets back to the SIclops as aggregator vs. SIclops centralized web resource that everybody uses / “distributed cognition” or “information coffee grounds” or other SI tail-chasing (and I see space for the former but not the latter re: SI weblogs).
Andrew | 19-Dec-06 at 11:45 pm | Permalink
I don’t see people using SIclops like bboards, newsgroups, etc. of yore, but I do think if I could tag all those aggregated posts as they fly by, some people might dig back into them and find information relevant to them. That this would be a minority…well it appears to be a minority who even look for info about SI student life before they come or who think these blogs are relevant to people other than their friends once they are here, or want to exchange information outside of their cliques, etc. so I don’t know why I bother. I should have just privatedly archived every blog I could identify and not told anyone and handed it over to the Bentley some day.
For the time being, if anyone registers, I’ll send them an email with a password in it, but I don’t see a future for the SI Answers (the only thing that depends on logging in) unless it is with a different technology, something that reaches people yet does not intrude.
Andrew | 19-Dec-06 at 11:55 pm | Permalink
I like some things about Planet Planet. I don’t see how tagging aggregated items would be crufty. In any case, have you looked at Plagger at all? SI alum Mark A. Matienzo switched to it from Planet for http://archivesblogs.com/
Andrew | 04-Jan-07 at 1:12 pm | Permalink
I’ve moved SIclops to an outside server. http://siclops.net is the addresss. Registration now works like it should. Presumably can be set up to send out email notification of new content, etc. again. No more crippling Novell BS. Just crappy Drupal BS.
Brian | 04-Jan-07 at 2:41 pm | Permalink
Hey, thanks much for all your work here - I will plan to log in and add some feeds soon.