The fact that I would have to reside in Philadelphia was a drawback. I paid to live in the dorms there because I did not want to have to brave the rough neighborhood that surrounded the school. Homicides occurred at the dormitory door. It might be best to consider having to live in Philadelphia as part of the cost of attending.
Universities are going through a tough time financially. People no longer have to attend them to get the credentials they need. People inside universities think they are selling an experience and that people are turning away from that. I think universities were always selling credentials.
They're just not the only place to get them any more.
(n.b., this essay was inspired by a conversation with Patricia Anderson)
]]>A few general observations about Twitter's utility:
I am doing a global tag search on my MT4 blog, and the entries are coming out sorted by blog. Is there a way to get them sorted by entry date alone?
I had put in a lot of work customizing search templates and just wanted a solution that would give me entries sorted by date without reference to blog. The idea is that students will have their own blogs with a central aggregation blog holding a list of their entries and organizing them by tag. Tags are used to organize conversations that students carry on in their posts. Think of it as a sort of mini-Technorati without the SPAM. I call it the Learning Remix project
Well, I had a number of responses. Mark Carey suggested his fast search plug-in for MT4. It appears to work well and solves a number of problems. However, two things caused me to remove it from immediate consideration:
After reviewing this plug-in, I suggested I would be willing to pay for a drop in plug-in that would just sort tagged entries without respect to which blog they were in. In enters Nemui Ailin. Nemui suggested he could develop a quick plug-in, would I be willing to pay $20. We agreed the price with the condition that the plug-in be released under the artistic license that Perl is released under.
I comssioned it for open source because I want others to be able to do the sort of thing I'm doing with Movable Type. I'll be making a page for the plug-in on the learningremix domain shortly. In the mean time, Nemui has made it available for download here.
BTW, Nemui is located in Germany. I paid him via paypal. Welcome to global sourcing on an individual scale. I'm highly satisfied. The whole experience once we got started took well under 24 hours.
]]>Maybe the thing that irritates me the most is Sixapart's, the software maker's, utter failure to address the higher education market. Here's a text of a letter I sent to the product manager this morning:
]]>All through this beta process, I had been anticipating *upgrading* my higher ed. classroom license to build and extend a blogging knowledge network I had run under various guises, starting in 2004 and most recently with some donated plugins from Tim Appnel. This year, we're adding automated social network analysis, an exciting feature.
Well, 6A quietly DISCONTINUED the higher ed classroom product I had been using when they went to MT4. I now have to complete a whole formulary stating that I want a higher ed license for the classroom and wanting to know if others are interested.
http://www.movabletype.com/download/contact-us-education.html
Wasn't sure how exactly to address [the question on the form of] who else might be interested, given the apoplexy I was experiencing as I filled it out.
My simple message is this: If you want wider adoption, lower the barriers to adoption. If you are offering a product, sell it like a product with clear value for money. That means for $X you get Y. Just let people make their decision and move on.
Personally, given the hours I have had to spend debugging key components of the software (CAPTCHA with incorrect error message, any kind of install on RHEL5) and the time I expect to spend in further development (custom search template for tag aggregation), I suspect I am a pure MTOS customer.
This custom licensing nonsense has just got my goat.
Bud
/var/www/cgi-bin and that you have moved mt-static to the server's root html directory /var/www/html.
getsebool -a
The output of this command lists all of the settings for all of the daemons running under RHEL5 and is quite lengthy. If your system is properly configured to run MT4, you'll see the following SELinux settings for httpd and mysqld amidst the command's output.
httpd_builtin_scripting --> on
httpd_can_network_connect --> on
httpd_can_network_connect_db --> on
httpd_enable_cgi --> on
httpd_enable_ftp_server --> on
mysqld_disable_trans --> off
If you are running the getsebool command against a fresh install of RHEL5, your output will show a number of these variables set differently. You need to change them to what I have just shown to get MT4 to run. The command to do that is setsebool. For instance to set httpd_enable_cgi to on, type this:
setsebool -P httpd_enable_cgi 1
The -P option indicates that the change should be permanent and persist through reboots.
/var/www/html and subdirectories. To make it possible for MT4 to do all of this, you need to switch to MT4's root directory and type the following commands:
chcon -t httpd_unconfined_script_exec_t *.cgi
chcon -t httpd_sys_script_exec_t mt-config.cgi
The first command makes it possible for all of MT4's basic scripts to execute without restriction. The second command makes mt-config.cgi behave like a normal script without unrestricted permissions.
/var/www/html (where the html files are). Under the standard RHEL5 install, this directory is owned by root and so is not writeable by apache. A solution that is writeable by apache is simply to change the ownership of this directory to apache using this command:
chown -R apache.apache /var/www/html
You can then make this directory so that it is not viewable by other users using the following command:
chmod 700 /var/www/html
If you unpacked your Movable Type files in some subdirectory of the cgi-bin directory, you should have the proper standard unix permissions.
apachectl stop
apachectl start
In case you don't know, Movable Type is a blog publishing software you can install on your own server. Version 4 is such a major upgrade that it might be considered almost a total rewrite.
Put loosely, the goal of the rewrite is to both make the software simpler for novice users and more powerful for those wishing to do more sophisticated things. I think it is this set of conflicting goals that is leading to the show stoppers. Consider the following:
Well, a lot happened, and I got sucked in. Here's a highlights reel:
With this set of facts, it's clear to me that one of Brad's main business generating strategies is to leverage his online presence. Looking at a search for "venture capital", a highly competed for term, Brad's blogging group comes in number 11, a respectable showing. Looking at his series on "term sheets", a stock of the VC trade, Brad ranks number one and two.
Bottom line, Brad Feld has created an important entry way into his business via his blog. That entry way is all through search and links. He has built a reputation as the source of information for some of his key topic areas. His attention to details like permalinks indicates the value he places on that asset.
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