Alan Levine | Read Write Collect

Bookmarked At Almost Ten Years Old, Five Card Flickr Tells Its Survival Story (CogDogBlog)

How many web sites you use now will be around in ten years? Your odds are better if you make it your own, Keep on Reclaiming.

Interestingly, PechaFlickr came up in comversation the other day. Sadly, that website seems to have a PHP error too.

Originally published on Read Write Collect

Bookmarked 003: Land of 1000 SPLOTs (Reclaim Today)

In this episode of Reclaim Today we are joined by Alan Levine (better know as Cogdog online) to talk all things SPLOT (the simplest possible learning open tool thingy). But forget the acronym and focus on the opportunity because Reclaim is working closely with Alan and wants to work with others to build out a library of tools for educators and technologists working in and on the web.

Liked SPLOT and Calling Card One Click Installs Ignited at Reclaim Hosting (CogDogBlog)

Coming soon to a cpanel near you (if you are hosted by Reclaim Hosting)

Liked SPLOTting a Path to Coventry (bavatuesdays)

Continued excitement around SPLOTs is timely given the day before heading to Coventry, Tim and I spoke with Alan Levine about starting to roll SPLOTs out as stand-alone application installers. Big Picture Calling Card will be the first, but hopefully more will follow given Tim is on an Installatron application installation roll. One of the big benefits of stand-alone apps is all updates Alan makes to the SPLOTs will get rolled out to users, through the current WordPress installation of SPLOTs there is no way to incorporate updates.

Replied to Making Sense of Blog Post Content Data? My Own Spanner Found in the Bottom of the Toolbox (CogDogBlog)

For the obviously obvious statement, WordPress is built on a database. The question is, besides data like visitor counts, what can you infer from the data in the posts and metadata itself?

I am always fascinated what data we are collecting, whether conscious of it or not.

This reminds me of Tom Woodward’s work with Sheets and data. I wonder if this will work for Post Kinds too? Off to dig around in the code.

Replied to Picking a Noticing Pattern: I’ve Logged 469 Photos of 106’s (CogDogBlog)

So it’s been 7 and a half years since that first 106 photo and I find, when I’m out, my secondary senses are usually noticing signs and addresses and license plates, as my brain seems tuned into looking for that pattern.

I will never forget walking the streets with you Alan when you were in Melbourne. All the sudden it occurred to me that you were counting. It wasn’t that you were on the hunt, but rather you seemed opened to the opportunity:

“A House of DS106” by cogdogblog is licensed under CC0

What it made me realise was how much I take for granted. I really like your idea of picking something to notice.

I had a similar experience with Amy Burvall, who stopped mid-conversation to capture a unicorn caught in the concrete.

Liked Lumpers and Splitters, Tags and Categories for Organizing and Sharing by Alan Levine (CogDogBlog)

It takes a while to develop a system for organizing posts, but it’s really worth doing from the start, or right now. I assure you, if you keep blogging, having a system for organizing your past ideas will help you as you pile on many posts– I rely more on tags and categories to find things than search.

Replied to Hacking an Ontario Extend Visited Countries Map (CogDogBlog)

Alan visited 17 countries (7.55%) Create your own visited map of The World

While most people might fog over in a faint at the site of HTML, to me it’s like good coffee. So in the img tag, src="" contains a URL we are calling some kind of Google API for charts that dynmically returns an image. Without bothering too much, I can guess easily for the value chld=BS|BZ|CA|MX|PR|US|VI|CN|JP|QA|SG|AU|NZ|DE|IS|ES|GB we are sending the list oc countries to map.

You can play with it in a web browser, by adding or removing countries. Try manipulating this URL

In following your blog Alan, I have learned to the love the URL. There is so much hidden in the code and not all of it is that complicated. A simple one that I got from you is ?random to pick a random post.

Liked a post (Twitter)

Replied to Blog Posts As Old Concrete Slabs or Alive in the Cracks In Between? (CogDogBlog)

Here’s another nifty way to make your blog alive; link to your own posts. It’s so easy in the WordPress editor when selecting text to hyperlink.

Even better again Alan is to link to other people’s posts too! There are flowers absolutely everywhere.