Or, happier people blog :)

Nice to see some local Melbourne research too!

As I mentioned yesterday Twitter is possibly the best human powered monitoring / feedback service a big blogging website could ever want.

And sometimes that’s pretty frustrating because you see Tweets that are just plain wrong, and you can’t ‘add a comment’ or feedback to them without all sort of pain (if at all).

But other tweets make up for that :)

OK, so in addition to SharpReader (thanks Sue) here’s another heap of ways you can keep an eye on / facilitate other people keeping and eye on your servers & sites.

Pingdom – Rocks the house… incredibly reliable (unless you’re using caching :/) so point it at something dynamic and give it your server tech’s mobile phone number :) – or just email if you’re feeling slightly less evil. Highly recommended!

Tweetscan and/or Terraminds – If Pingdom does’t tell you about it then your users certainly will. Real human testing! Put the feeds from these in SharpReader and get it to check them every 15 minutes (or whenever you compulsively click it)

Gmail – When your servers are down, so is your email :/ Don’t look so professional there then do you…. don’t, whatever you do put your server based email account into Pingdom for example (duh :)

Forums – More after the fact issues as they usually get hit by the initial issues, but still to be watched darn close, although preferably with a manual feedreader (like SR) as finding out about stuff 2-6 hours after it’s happening SUCKS.

After the fact:

Get your server techs to configure a WHM load review on each server to be emailed to you every day – so you can look back on spikes and alike and pull up patterns between days. Very useful also in the it doesn’t let you forget the issues you had that afternoon!

Google blog search updates, talk to people once in a while and remember, it’s never ever going to be just fine so don’t just back up your HDs but also yourself – at all times!

Maybe I’m just old fashioned – or slack – but I’ve never got the ‘private beta’ model.

It’s just that IMPO you should be able to release something with a level of simplicity that means you can just roll it out in public from day 1.

So usually I just ignore ’em… but how could I with Edmodo (via TechCrunch – new goal for year, get Edublogs on TC :)

Not only because I like the ‘Twitter for Education’ idea – but also because from Jeff’s blog:

“Edmodo is the brain child of Nic Borg (my partner) and I and we envision this company to be the premier provider of free web 2.0 tools (boy I hate that name) for Teachers, Students, Parents, and Schools.”

Hang on, that’s our plan too!

Anyway, if you’re reading this Jeff and want to let me in to have a look / play that’d be ace… I promise not to break anything ;)

… yet inspiration is hard to find.

So, I’m gonna go all old skool and tell you what books are currently beside me as I tap this out in bed on a Saturday morning.

There’s a biography of Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin called ‘Thomas Hardy [duh] The time torn man’ which is unusual as it’s taken a pretty standard slant in the title (stuck between the ages etc.) but then doesn’t actually mention that much.

There’s also ‘A Suitable Boy’ by Vikram Seth which is just getting to it’s exciting part (200 pages to go) which has, bizarrely, stopped me from reading it to help me get to sleep ;)

And there’s… ‘My Booky Wook’ by Russell ‘shagger of the year’ Brand courtesy of my Uncle and Aunty which is actually quite a good read if you’re into utter, startling, honesty.

One of these days I’ll actually finish them!

Anyone know a decent desktop (XP) feed reader that you can set to actually go out and check feeds minute by minute?

Am thinking of those tweets / forums posts that you really need to know about a couple of minutes after they’re made.

As opposed to 4 hours later (grr..)

Via Stephen, The Slashdot take on Blackboard’s setup is very informative – particularly this bit (cut down):

 It produces hundreds of megabytes of absolutely useless logs every day.

The built in log archiving utility doesn’t work.

It’s built primarily on Tomcat.

Their support is nearly non-existent

They use incredibly inefficient stored procedures which can bring down an entire system

Read the rest to get an insight into how much Blackboard’s existing clients love them.

Karma, anyone?

Sorry Richard, setting my proxy to proxy to cache1.optusnet.com.au port 80 or webproxy01.syd.optusnet.com.au / webproxy02.syd.optusnet.com.au hasn’t helped with my Optus cable internet woes.

Again, come 9:45AM this morning I’ve been locked out of gmail and bizarrely a selection of our servers in the US (not all – like the one this is on).

Update: Actually using webproxy02.syd.optusnet.com.a and port 80 has just started working. But still!

And have I had a response from their support or complaints department – both of whom I’ve now contacted. I don’t think so!

Maybe time to go hit Whirlpool… or maybe not, I can’t reach them :/

Yep, ‘Incorporated Subversion’ (or should I say ‘James Farmer’s Radio Weblog’) was born on this day 5 full years ago.

That’s half a decade, from my 20s to my 30s, and blimey things were different back then.

Funnily enough though, I’m still writing about pretty much exactly the same thing :D

Anyway, to celebrate the event I figures I need to get ‘back into blogging’ for as bit so expect a juicy tidbit (or who knows, maybe more) every day for the next 30 days. You lucky things!

Yeh yeh, I know I bag out forums as the root of all evil in online teaching and learning… but not when they’re used in the right way, and as an element (certainly not the main one) of an environment.

So, as evidence of my balanced and completely non OTT perspective on these things, we gives ya forums for all Edubloggers.

Basically this means that every Edublog can now set up and host forums within their blog – on posts or pages – and I think it’s rather neat.

Sure, there are some improvements we can make to it (and we will!) but doesn’t this add another rather decent element for poeple wanting to use their blog to manage an online learning experience…

Here’s a 3 minute ‘tute of how it works…

Oh, and we’ve made Edublogs.org open to students as well as teachers now… so new accounts on uniblogs, learnerblogs and eslblogs have been disabled (but the sites themselves will remain live indefinitely). Another day, another biggie at Edublogs!