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These are nice articles - a place to write, nothing fancy | Weblogging: Another Kind of Website - Part I and Weblogs, Part II: A Swiss Army Web Site?

The Times:

Discard those search engines and 'blog' your way to find out everything you might need to know about almost anything

HERE's a trade secret that could get this column suspended from journalism's equivalent of the Magic Circle: there is a way to be stupendously well-informed without reading absolutely everything. Just leave the filtering to other find minds, and scour the highlights in their weblogs - online journals that link to the best finds of an opinionated editor or community.

Thanks to Dave for including me in his Credits for Radio Userland:

This release was the largest beta group we've ever worked with. And while it's hard to top the previous groups for intelligence, enthusiasm and hard work, this group was the most exciting to work with, and the most forgiving of our huge flaws. The software we gave them to begin with was true garbage. They stayed with us while we turned corners and broke their sites, they never complained, not once. We are so lucky to have these people helping us.

I'm proud to have been a (very) small part of the process and its an honour to be included in that particular group - all of them very smart and enthusiastic people.

I personally think of the beta testers as the 'Triple-Zeroes' - those that have three leading zeroes in their usernum - proud 'badge' of honour. For instance, http://radio.weblogs.com/0001247/ ;-)

JISC-ANNOUNCE archives -- January 2002 (#6) | Procurement of Plagiarism Services - National Detection Service:

In 2001, the JISC commissioned a project to review the use of electronic detection products and their use in the HE and FE communities. This project made several recommendations, including the establishment of a national advisory service, which included access and training for a national detection facility. Procurements for the advisory service and detection facility are being carried out simultaneously.

This document outlines the requirements for the detection facility. Expressions of interest are sought to provide this service for the UK further and higher education community. Funding in the region of £500,000 (inclusive of VAT) over two years will be provided.

The Detection Service will be expected to provide:

• An online electronic detection service, for potentially, all further and higher education institutions in the UK
• A service that has the capability to compare students work with Internet sources to identify possible plagiarism
• A service that has the capability to review student's work for possible collusion or sharing of text.

Jeez! Do they really have any idea of the scale of the effort required to deploy a National Detection Service?

Not forgetting the National Advisory Service:

This document outlines the requirements for the national advisory service. Proposals are sought to provide this service for the UK further and higher education community. Funding of up to £300,000 per annum including VAT is available.

The main role of the Plagiarism Advisory Service will be to provide tools to support institutions in their endeavours to prevent and detect plagiarism. This will be achieved by the commissioning of generic guidance, support material and case studies to be made available via the service web site. In addition to this, the service will manage and support institutional access to the electronic detection service being procured in parallel.

The Advisory Service will oversee the day-to-day operation of its programme to ensure that it provides value for money through cost-effective operation.

The Advisory Service will be responsible to the JISC Services Division/ Directorate and will also report, via a Steering Group, to the JISC Learning and Teaching Committee. A Steering Group will be established to guide the work of the Advisory Service, and members of this committee will act as advocates for the academic community.

The main tasks of the Advisory Service will be to:

• Commission generic material relating to good practice in plagiarism prevention and detection.
• Identify particular problem areas and/or areas of particular interest to ensure the service fully meets the needs of the community.
• Liaise with the community to provide the advisory service and ensure it is fit for purpose
• Provide and maintain a user-friendly online interface to the resources outlined.
• The management of the electronic detection service contract and the training of sites on its use
• Organise workshops for the community in the area of plagiarism. These may include discussion/presentations/training on specific issues.

Well, at least they're taking plagiarism seriously!

Tools...

...bring together all of the major areas of Frontier and Radio UserLand functionality, in a single place.

Radio UserLand : How to publish a category to a different FTP server

Your site may be upstreamed to the UserLand community server or you may have enabled upstreaming through FTP. You can also configure Radio to upstream any category to another FTP server by creating a new #upstream.xml file in the folder where your category is stored.

If you're reading this then the post via Radio Conversant running under RU 8.0 worked.

If it worked then I'm in good shape to modify Dave's ManilaBloggerBridge Tool to work with the RadioConversant Tool.

Fingers crossed.

Rather than clutter up my primary weblog all Conversant/RU experimentation is going on over at http://www.smeed.org/cruxial/ which I've been neglecting since April last year B-(

Wish me luck!

[Originally XML-RPCed from Radio to Duncan's Cruxial Experiment (see also Duncan's Radio-controlled Weblogs)]:

Excellent!! New posts in RU get XML_RPCed to my test Conversant weblog at http://www.smeed.org/cruxial/

The first two attempts were winged on their way up to Dave's test ManilaBlogger site. [Haven't (yet) had the courage to go and check to see if they turned up there! ;-)]

Although susbsequent attempts hadn't appeared to work they in fact had been 'held for delivery' and once I sorted out the correct script path, the try clause in conversantBridgeSuite.publishItemCallback() succeeded and off they went - arriving asynchronously so they aren't necessarily in the correct order ;-)

How neat is that! This framework is pretty damn cool! It even copes with hacked scripts that I break ;-)

A big thankyou to Dave and Greg for making this all possible. Now that I have newPost() working, I'll crack on with editPost() and deletePost() taking into account the fact that Conversant ids are not the same as blogger ids.

A comparison of Conversant's XML-RPC Interfaces [166 methods] with the Blogger API [6 methods] is pretty revealing.

What this means is that it's going to be trivial to support the equivalent of Bloggers 6 methods, but controlling even a fraction of the functionality of Conversant with Radio is just not a viable option. So, I'll just be using Radio to route posts to my Conversant site and, perhaps, editing them offline. I doubt very much I will be using Radio to participate in my discussion forums or to use it to administer my Conversant sites.

Nevertheless, Radio is going to be a great tool for collating RSS feeds, etc., and publishing the links. A job which it does extremely well.

Onward...

Seth's news was almost in time ;-) To which I replied (in part) with:

I actually laughed when I read this news. Luckily, I was just treating my hacking around as a learning/refamiliarisation experience. I know much more about RU than I did before I made the mods. I'd also not done much UserTalk scripting recently so that was a welcome diversion too.

Blogger post

A test post using the b[l]og-standard Blogger API now implemented by Conversant.

Free-Conversant Support: [ANN] Blogger API support

Conversant's XML-RPC interfaces now support the Blogger API...

http://xmlrpc.free-conversant.com/docs/bloggerAPI

The Doc Searls Weblog : Tuesday, January 15, 2002 - Wow!

In all other respects OS X on the TiBook (which I'm writing on now) is near-infinitely better. It goes to sleep and wakes instantly. Last night I unhooked seven plugs (speaker, power, 2 USBs, firewire drive, ethernet, SVGA monitor), closed the thing up, took it up on the roof, opened it up, quickly figured out how to set it up (for the first time) for wireless, plugged in a USB mouse, and hacked away. Then I closed it, took it downstairs, opened it up, watched the Mark Twain thing, wrote on the blog and did some correspondence, closed it up, brought it back down to the office, plugged all seven cables back into their sockets, opened the lid, and it was all back up again. The OS fired up the external monitor, recognized the Firewire drive, and had no problems doing anything other than remembering the background picture for the external monitor.

Thanks to Iain for pointing out the Slashdot | Cheating Detector from Georgia Tech story. Lots of good opinios and a few ironic observation such as this:

Maybe someone should write similar software for slashcode... it might prevent them from posting similar stories:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/09/198259 &mode=thread [slashdot.org]

I've linked to other such threads before now, and have expressed my own opinions, and which can be found with a Search This Site query.

OSXfaq.com - osxfaq-com

I'm very excited to announce that we will be offering an OSXFAQ Dr. Mac "tip-of-the-day" via email. Each week day I'll send you a tip, hint, trick, shortcut, "got-to-have-it" product or something else that will help you use Mac OS X better, faster, and more elegantly. So my first order of business is to ask you send me email immediately (if not sooner). I want to know what you want to know, what buttons you want me to push, what topics you want me to cover, and whatever else is on your mind. I'm Bob LeVitus at bob_levitus@osxfaq.com

On Sunday David Davies' blogged

I'm going to Dundee (in Scotland for all you non Brits) today for a presentation tomorrow on some of my Frontier-based interoperability work. There's some public stuff here:

http://medweb5.bham.ac.uk/databases/

There's a lot of potential here for Radio Userland as a desktop client allowing teachers to create their own web-based teaching & learning applications. More later.

Incidentally, David blogged his way through that day -and the next - by mobile phone!

Jake appears to be almost as fond of '!'s as I am ;-) - Jake's Radio 8.0 Blog - Made with MacOS X! | Jake's Cool Macros: Jake's own crazy-cool macros!

Dave - Radio UserLand : Callbacks for Post and Publish

This evening we released support for two new callbacks that should open up new possibilities for developers to hook into the flow of content being created for Radio sites.

This is a welcome step forward in the quest to integrate Radio with Conversant in some non-trivial way. Alas, the Blogger APIs are pretty impoverished and lack support for things like a message subject.

One incentive I have for getting Radio and Conversant to interoperate to a degree is the fact that Conversant is IMHO far superior to most/all of the groupware CMS that seem to have caught peoples' eye. In fact, if it came down to a choice between Radio OR Conversant, then Conversant wins hands down for me - no contest.

I'm still thinking of the features I would like to see and how (best) to implement them. I know others are deep in thought too ;-)

Dave's been busy! - Radio UserLand : Beta: Manila-Blogger Bridge Tool

These are preliminary docs for a new Tool that allows you to flow news items entered in Radio 8 to a Manila or Blogger site, or theoretically any centralized CMS that supports the Blogger API.

Seth, you're quite right to point out that Conversant has had the capability to be blogged by mobile phone for some time.

Conversant Documentation

Conversant's XML-RPC Home Page

This site hosts information and documentation on the use of XML-RPC interfaces in Conversant.

NewsForge | We can put an end to Word attachments - Richard Stallman:

Don't you just hate receiving Word documents in email messages? Word attachments are annoying, but worse than that, they impede people from switching to free software. Maybe we can stop this practice with a simple collective effort. All we have to do is ask each person who sends us a Word file to reconsider that way of doing things.