WordPress version 2.8 was released earlier this month, and whether the developers actually read them or not, I’m glad that they seem to have implemented my suggestions for a cognitive science-based redesign for WordPress Widgets. In WordPress 2.5 Widgets: Taking the Load Off Your Mind, I argued that what a user sees on the back […]
Feedburning Learning
Feeds & email updates are all about drawing readers into a community from the margins–which is to say, they are all about learning.
RCB Bookmarks, Mid-January, 2009
Links on culture, reading, and the web.
A Heritage and Future of Reading
When the books we have are no longer the books we knew, who will teach us to read?
WordPress 2.8 – Better Widgets?
Widget management is item #1 on the list of priorities for WordPress 2.8 development. I explored the cognitive psychology behind the widget management screen design in an earlier post, WordPress 2.5 Widgets?Taking the Load Off Your Mind. Here are the takeaway design suggestions.
The Infinite Book: The Plastic Logic Reader (and the Real Nature of Books)
A book is essentially whole, unitary — a little world of human thought, word, & spirit, chosen, shaped, and bound within its covers. Books are bundles; a book is what is bound together. For what makes a book more than it’s binding?
Shiny new software…
Snow outside, snow on Matt’s blog, WordPress 2.7 (with a snazzy redesign and full support for child themes!), and Firefox 3.1 Beta 2. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…
Blog Day 2008–Reading, Learning, Hoping, Blogging, Being
Blog Day is a linkfest initiated by Nir Ofir in 2005, in the belief that bloggers should have one day which will be dedicated to discover new blogs and expose them to the world. We all have a small number of people and sources of information with which we interact of a regular basis, and that social and informational context is part of what shapes who we are in the world. Blog Day is a chance to expand those social and informational horizons by forging new links into new networks, bridging the divides between people and communities and enlarging our own experience.
The basic rules for Blog Day ask bloggers to post about five blogs that they would like to share with the world. I’ve decided to do a little more…
There’s Something Happening Here…
Nicholas Carr says, This is your brain online. You’ve been warned. Now go forth and read.
Civility on the Web (or, If you talk, be polite)
The New York Times explores calls for a Code of Conduct (like this from Jimmy Wales, or this from Tim O’Riley) on the web, as well as the motivations and secret lives of the Trolls Among Us; and Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, explains why A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.
Firefox 3: How to Surf the Web
I’ve been using the open-source Firefox web browser since 2003, when a techie friend (thanks, Rocky!) emailed our church list to suggest it as a less virus-vulnerable alternative to the standard Microsoft mess.
That makes me an internet expert 😉 –and since I know everything there is to know, I thought I’d write you this handy guide:
The Hundred-Mile Diet Map and More
A new map of food sources within a hundred miles of Madison, Wisconsin, shows kind of connection and sharing that will allow us as human societies to learn to be conscious of and take responsibility for the earthly places in which we live and move.