Sandvox, a new web publishing tool

Sandvox is a new web publishing software tool for Macs (OS 10.4.3) \that's beta now but soon to be released. Alwin Hawkin's brief but enthuasistic review led me to download it, and, yes, it's beautiful! From the site:

Sandvox, for Mac OS X. "Dig in" and download our Beta today.

Sandvox: A powerful, playful new website creation tool, for Mac OS X (version 10.4.3 "Tiger" required). From Karelia Software — the developer of Watson®.

Instant Gratification. Sandvox makes website creation elegant, intuitive and fun. It's the Macintosh way — the way it should be: drag and drop content, watch your site take shape as you create it, and publish. Sandvox makes it easy to keep in touch via the Web with friends, family and customers.

Express Yourself. Sandvox will help you be more creative on the Web. Small business owners, show your customers your latest products and services. Authors, publish your stories. Photographers, share your libraries with the world. Families, keep your friends up to date with more than just a holiday letter.

There's More to Life than iLife. Sure, iWeb looks cool and similar to Sandvox in many ways, but it's just a toy. Can you afford to tie yourself to .mac? Not everybody wants, or needs, a .mac account — especially businesses who need their own domain name. iWeb has very limited choices for designs or pages; Sandvox will be extensible. iWeb provides no opportunity for custom HTML content when your needs demand it; Sandvox fits the bill. If iWeb isn't quite enough for you, then dig into the Sandvox.

Some of the features you can see at the website are drag-and-drop web assembly, pagelets, podcasts, video, and photo integration, and more.

JAlbum: free web photo album

JAlbum (via Education Weblog) is a photo web album generator. From the site:

This gallery software makes web albums of your digital images. JAlbum aims to be the easiest to use and most powerful tool in this category - and free!

With JAlbum, no extra software is needed to view the albums, -just your web browser. Unlike "server side" album scripts, JAlbum albums can be served from a plain web server without scripting support. You can also share your albums on CD-ROM.

Successful High Tech Charter School

Dale MezzaCappa (The Philadelphia Inquirer) writes about High Tech Hi, a charter school in San Diego that successfully integrates education and technology.

It is "high tech" not because it trains students to fix computers and write software, although some do, but because technology is infused throughout the curriculum. Students work on networked laptops and maintain digital portfolios.

Some travel; this year, 12 seniors went to Baja California for eight weeks to study marine life, including plankton, whale sharks and sea turtles, as well as the area's history and culture. They not only collected specimens but also created poetry, a documentary, a mural, and a novel.

In the last two years, Jay Vavra's junior biotechnology classes designed, wrote and photographed a field guide to wildlife in San Diego Bay, with a foreword by anthropologist Jane Goodall.

It's encouraging to see a school that engages the students in real "work" as opposed to "learning" alone.

Integrating educational social software into a course

Terry Anderson (via OL Daily) has an article on how he integrated social software into his own online course, using Furl, Elluminator, ELGG, and Moodle. It has some good insights into what worked, what didn't, and why.

Best web 2.0 software of 2005

Dion Hinchcliffe offers his list for The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005, quite a few of which could support class activities.

One is Netvibes, a free, customizable web 2.0 homepage service that allows for data feeds. I've been thinking about how to introduce students to RSS feeds to promote more reading, analysis, and synthesis. It can also integrate with writely.com, an online word processing site.

Another free one is Rallypoint, which promotes online collaboration via the creation and editing of web pages. Those subscribed to the pages can receive email notifications when a page is edited.

Ross Mayfield (Many2Many) commented on some social software applications a few weeks ago.

Mac "thinking tools"

James Fallow in The New York Times has a nice article covering a variety of Mac "'thinking tools' - software for storing, retrieving and generally making the best use of information," including mention of Tinderbox, a program I'm beginning to learn how to use.

More software tools

From Educational Weblogs:

schtuff.com: a free wiki service

Schtuff is a FREE Wiki service. A Wiki is a website that lets anyone easily create and edit pages, promoting group collaboration.

photon: another free software tool.

Smart, intuitive, and highly configurable, Daikini Photon gives you the power to manage your Movable Type™, TypePad™, Blojsom and WordPress photo-blogs in the familiar surrounds of Apple iPhoto.

It's the missing link between the world's greatest photo management software and the world's favorite blogging platforms.

Tinderbox and coding

I got my first comment a few days ago, and surprisingly, it spread to every posting in this blog and in my other one. I was using the same account for both, and the postings were not unique. After creating another account for the other blog, I then used "id," which is unique to each posting. However, it didn't work. I put my problem on the Haloscan forum, and someone said "id" was apparently being treated as text. So, going back to the manual, I tried 117 in the template. Success! And for once, it took me less than an hour to figure something out with software.

Moveable Type is free

You can download for free Moveable Type, software for writing blogs, or you can get better support with a greater number of authors for a reasonable price.

FlickrExport for iPhoto

Download for free FlickrExport, an iPhoto plugin that lets you upload photos from iPhoto directly to Flickr.com. The software was created by Fraser Speirs, who has started a new company, Connected Flow, which has one other product, Xjournal, a client for the LiveJournal weblog (i.e., blog) service.

New technologies and software

Via Educational Weblogs, here are some new technologies:

MediaTuner: a rich media RSS aggregator/player that handles text, podcasts, videocasts, etc. (free)
Blog.mac: a weblog editor designed for the Mac ($29.99)
Free vlog tutorial
mefeedia: an aggregator for videos

From Sudeep Bangal at Brilliant Ignorance (via XplanaZine): a list of essential freeware for PCs

Moving sites

I moved my site from .Mac to this site, hosted by Lunarpages. At .Mac, I had 250 MB storage for about $100/year, while here I have 3000 MB for $95 plus $15 for the domain name. There's more, too, but the main one I plan to look in, perhaps next year, is Moodle, course management software for educators.

The only real problem in moving my site was changing the links for the categories. It's not easy to retype links without crossing them in Tinderbox, at least for me. It was just easier to rewrite all of them and relink them. The rest was straightforward.

The right blogging tool

Susannah Gardner (via Edublog Insights) gives guidelilnes on determining which blogging software is best for your purposes and also defines blogging jargon. She also has a related Blog Software Comparison Chart.

Exporting text in Tinderbox

It's difficult to get the text in Tinderbox, the software for this blog, to look like I want, and the text looks different on PCs and Macs. I found preferences for text export, but that doesn't seem to be doing the trick.

The photo touch

This weekend, I started to set up my new website, Second Language Writing, where I plan to move this blog. For starters, I used Yotophoto, a search engine for free photos, to collect pictures of writing in different languages, and then I put them into a Flickr badge. These software tools help to add a nice photo touch to one's website.

Digg: social bookmarking, RSS, blog and more

A new software tool Digg combines elements of social bookmarking, RSS feeds, blogs, and more. From their site (via Ulises Umejias):

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

This seems to combine all the software tools into one. But what's different is that the users decide which articles are the best.

Keeping up with blog reading

Nathan Matias (via Mark Bernstein) details how to keep up with reading lots of blogs via aggregating RSS feeds, along with describing popular RSS aggregating software.

Putting photos online with Flickr

Flickr is a software tool for putting your photos up on the Internet. For tips on how to use it, read Giles Turnbull's article at MacDevCenter.com.

Turning blog text into podcasts

A new software, Talkr, transforms blog text into podcasts. Talkr states:

"Our pitch is simple: we will convert your text-only blog into a podcast for free. We will monitor your blog every hour, and convert each new article into an mp3 audio file using the best speech synthesis software on the market. We will host those audio files and provide you with an RSS feed (and bandwidth) to make it easy for your readers to get access to your podcast."

According to Jeff White on Kairosnews,

"I took the couple minutes register, and the next thing I know...I was listening to posts from kairosnews.org being read to me in a quite pleasant voice. I was actually pretty impressed by the intonation skills the synthesizer had."

Social bookmarking comparison

At ConsultantCommons.org (via Kairosnews via Depraved Librarian), there is an excellent comparison made of social bookmarking software tools and their functionality.

Tinderbox agents and categories

I've just figured out (it only took 90 minutes plus reading the manual carefully) how to do categories for my entries with Tinderbox, the software I use for my blogs. Tinderbox is great for querying words in a text and then gathering those notes into one category. The only problem I had that took another hour was how to exclude items from the sidebar and other places. I tried the simple code in the manual, but it didn't work. Finally, from the Fortran course I took in 1983, I remembered to group the included items and excluded items as hierarchically equal.

iTunes and podcasting

David Pogue in The New York Times writes about Apple's software iTunes podcasting features bringing podcasts into the mainstream by making it easy to make your own podcast plus access to thousands of podcasts online.

Spyware and adware

After reading the article on spyware and adware below (7/17/05), I decided to update my Dell desktop at home, spending about 8 hours online reading and downloading freeware, including Ad-aware, MS AntiSpyware, Hijack This, SpyBlaster, and quite a few other free items Saturday night at school instead of at home via a modem. Sunday morning, I installed most of it, reenabled the firewall, ran the software, and got lots of popups asking for permission to "allow" or "deny." Some of it I recognized, and some I didn't. Taking care of a PC is almost a full-time job unless you want to pay someone else hundreds of dollars. A good starting web-site full of information is the "Home PC Firewall Guide" with links to hundreds of online sources and articles.

Bookmarking software

There seems to be quite a bit of software available for tagging websites and images.

Furl stands for File URLs, and it's a web-based application for keeping track of interesting sites you've come across that you can access from any computer on the internet and also archive pages so you can read them later in your Furl account.

Mark Bernstein brought del.icio.us to my attention. It's a bookmarks manager and more. One neat application is the ability to paste snippets from another site onto yours. See the picture he does this with from the play "Amerika." Graham Stanley (via Will Richardson) has an entry on how to use del.icio.us with podcasts.

A manager for tagging just images is Wists.

PDAs in the classroom

In a pilot project, elementary school teachers are using PDAs loaded with diagnostic software to assess students on reading proficiency for immediate feedback and adjustment of lessons. I wonder how that could be adapted for first year composition.

Haloscan

I came across Haloscan, a free web-commenting software (free for the basic set-up). The steps were easy enough to follow; however, they didn't work, neither for the comments box nor for their icon on my page. I looked at the icon code, and it looked right, but then again, I don't know html that well. So, I just copied their icon, put it in my Tinderbox collection, and copied the html for the Tinderbox icon. That worked well enough.

Next, I looked at the commenting section. There was only a straight line. But that was due to just not putting it up on the web, and that was also the problem with their icon. Once on the web, it all appeared. The next problem was the font size of the Comments was just too large, so back to their Forum for advice: set the font size, type and color before the Haloscan script. That worked.

Trying the Comment pop-up, it came up with my email and site info, but it should be blank for the commenter to fill in. Back to the forum. Turns out it fills automatically from a cookie on my computer. On another computer, it's different.

The only thing that troubles me about Haloscan's commenting is that the comments and backup are on their computer. If I wanted to move to another location or another commenting device, then I would lose the previous comments.

More on RSS feeds

On RSS feeds, Elise Bauer has a good introduction to them and lists some software that can do it easily. Although I can do a single RSS feed with Tinderbox, I haven't learned how to aggregate them all into one document yet. That will be an going project. For now, I will use iBlog to do it. iBlog, although blog software, is also an RSS reader, and a good one at that.

You may have noticed in the previous posting on Blogging controversy that the font in the quotes are different from my writing. I haven't quite figured out how to get them the same. I'm using HTML codes blockquote and font. The blockquote worked, but it made the font too large, so I inserted font, trying to control the size and style, but for some reason, I can't get it to be just what I want.

Mellel, an inexpensive word processor

Sometime ago, I bought Mellel, a word processor oriented towards academics and technical writers, and for Macs only. It was cheap: only $29 for teachers and students, $39 for others. And it looked prettier than MS Word. But I never got around to using it. Why? I'm at a primarily PC campus and our department's printer didn't have a Mac driver. Well, there's a new printer that my iBook can print from. So now I'm ready to try this software. For those interested, two reviews are at MacWorld and The Times Online.

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