“How I learned to stop worrying and love the blog”:

• A recent post on this blog had the video clip of Werner Herzog publicly eating his shoe to fulfill a bet he made with Errol Morris. Namely, if Morris would finish his brilliant first feature Gates of Heaven, Herzog said he would eat his shoe. And so he does, but in fact he uses this occasion to go on a tirade about the state of contemporary culture in 1980. This was a particularly special find for me, because I have quoted this story to others on a number of occasions, but never thought about actually trying to find footage that documented the event. I had no idea it was even filmed. Many eyes… (Link).
• For an added bonus, check out another post on this blog that discusses how the book Little Women was re-imagined as a pulp fiction novel. The image of the cover is well worth the price of admission.

¿Qué Onda?:

• A post on this blog offered up a preliminary cross-cultural examination of the hard-boiled novel. Linking Dashiell Hammet’s The Glass Key with an Argentinian novelist, José Donoso´s El Lugar Sin Límites (The Place without Limits). A link to a novel I am now quite interested in reading, how would an Argentine writer invoke the Noir to talk about their culture? I wouldn’t be surprised to imagine a framing of the Pinochet nightmare or the disappeared. But I can only imagine, but I didn’t even think to do that before reading this post. (Link.)

And why not? it worked in Blazing Saddles:

• This example illustrates just how willing students are not only to do extra work, but to blog about them in order to make connections.
  

  This post is a bit random, but after watching Miller’s Crossing I decided to rent another Coen brothers film. I chose Barton Fink—and wow. What a film.I wanted to talk about it for a bit, even though it’s not technically part of our class material.

  Moreover, the analysis of the hotel in Barton Fink as representative of the Dantean spirals of Hell is very engaging to boot. (Link.)

Ellie’s FTC Blog:

• These two posts about hairstyles are really a fascinating way to imagine film. These post deal with the impact of fashion and style in film upon the culture at large. This blog traces hair styles throughout the decades in order to suggest the role film plays in defining a more pervasive cultural identity. See “The Veronica” and Hairstyles Cont..

Kathleen’s Blog:

• A post on Kathleen’s Blog discusses the implications of The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris. She offers a nice overview of her impressions of Morris’s film-making acumen, and then includes a clip from the film that profiles David Harris which is a perfect example of the unbelievable moral imperative driving this film. It is really exciting to see that students have the ability to meaningfully quote films like this within their reflections. Moreover, the shots of the cassette tape towards the end of the highlight Morris’s unbelievable ability to inform his documentaries as much through the aesthetic of the shot as the compelling stories he so tightly weaves together. Brava!

I’m continually blown away by all the great stuff coming out of these blogs, and I have only focused on one of Gardner’s two classes. How does he do it? And if that wasn’t enough, UMW is currently preparing the next iteration of WPMu that will be a much broader, campus-wide multi-user blog initiative that even has working dynamic sub-domains -boooyah! You can get a sneak preview here, though keep in mind that this space is still very much in its infancy as of now.

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Original post by jimgroom

So what is divShare? Well, it’s not really a plugin per se, rather a free online file uploading and storage service that integrates directly into the upload field of a WordPress blog’s backend (see figure 1 below). It works seamlessly with WPMu as well, and the way to integrate it is relatively simple. Sign up for a free account at divShare ; download the WP plugin and install & activate it; finally, get your divShare Uploader Key from your divShare account settings and enter it where appropriate -you’re then ready to roll.

Figure 1: divShare upload field embedded within a WP blog

According to their site you can upload up to 200 MB of files at any given time, and I have seen no discussion of limits for how much space you can use up. It appears that divShare is offering unlimited storage and access to the files you upload to their service, but I am not 100% certain on this point. Here is their website copy:

DivShare is a new type of web host. We’re all about freedom and simplicity. Upload your videos, photos and other files, and we’ll host them forever, for free. You can embed your files anywhere, and co-brand your download pages. How? We’re ad-supported, but fear not, we’ll never invade you with obnoxious or offensive ads. Signing up takes about 15 seconds.

So while the verdict is still out whether or not they can host everything you upload for ever (how can anyone ever prove this true or not?), the interface and integration with WordPress is extremely impressive and has me quite excited for using such a program to enable students and professors alike to manage their web-based materials online in an simple, organized, and distributed manner. I particularly like that divShare offers an alternative to the WP uploading system, for while a fanboy, we were just discussing at DTLT last week with Steve Greenlaw just how
unintuitive and poorly configured the WP uploading logic can be for someone who is not intimately familiar with the backend. For example, why can’t users upload files using the “Uploads”� tab in the manage section of the backend? Seems logical, right? Certainly a space for potential confusion.

Figure 2: divShare Upload complete message

Figure 3: divShare “My Files” Tab

But I digress. What I like most about divShare is that it is simple, allows users to organize their uploads with the option for password protected folders, while also allowing for easy insertion of text files, images (creating multiple sizes for easy insertion into blog posts), and video (providing conversion to FLV on upload, a built in player, as well as a static URL and embed code much like YouTube -wow- how ’bout them apples Andy?). It is a dead simple interface that delivers everything the open source Coppermine media gallery promised last year when we were experimenting with that app. The only difference is we don’t have to host it, it is free as in beer, and a million times easier to work with!

Figure 4: divShare site interface

Figure 5:

Figure 6: Drag and Drop uploading interface:

In short ;), here is an excellent solution for a university hosted WPMu installation that gives the faculty and students the power to control and integrate their own text files, multimedia, images, etc. that we don’t have to worry about managing, i.e. losing, their files nor be over concerned with file size and storage space. This service offers much the same in the way of hosting videos on YouTube or images on Flickr, though I don’t dare to pretend it replaces the power of either of these sites by a long shot. What it does provide, however, is a centralized services for uploading and inserting videos, images, and miscellaneous files into a WordPress blog, while at the same time offering more sophisticated file management. I certainly wouldn’t want all the videos and images I have on this blog to be a part of my Flickr or YouTube accounts -for these space are increasingly becoming an extended part of my approach to presenting my work online. The images in this post, for example, would simply clutter my flickr account which I am imagining as a space for sharing learning resources not collecting random, decontextualized screen shots.

Looks like the Content Management features of WordPress are strongly rooted in the small pieces loosely joined philosophy of the plugins community -this feature is not part of the WP system, but integrated cleanly enough so that you don’t notice the difference. What’s more you can use this service across several WP installations, and you can really liberate yourself from the idea of getting information out of WPMu, it is never uploaded directly to WPMu so we don’t ever have to concern ourselves with transferring their data from one blog to another -it is always already in their possession and under their management.

An quick example of a video embed from divShare is below, you can see examples of the images above -just click on one for a bigger image and a little google ads action:

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Original post by jimgroom

Ok, here’s the tale of the tape thus far:

ELS Autoblogs: The first thing worth mentioning are the experiments with WP-Autoblog for WPMu (I talked about it briefly here). This plugin has really afforded some very interesting versatility for class blogs, in my opinion. WP-Autoblog is basically an aggregator plugin that pulls feeds from ATOM, RSS, & RSS2 into a blog post (which is very similar to WP-o-Matic -which does not work just yet with WPMu). What I like about this plugin is that anyone with a blog on ELS Blogs can enable and add feeds to it. It’s a cinch.

Now let’s think through the implications of this, a professor creates a class blog, enables WP-Autoblog, and then adds the students as administrators to this, and only this, blog. The students are then asked to login in and add their feed to the Wp_Autoblog aggregator (which you can see below) and there it is. An aggregated class blog that constantly provides a trackback to the original posts. So you can republish the student’s work in this class blog, making sure that they know that they should create a separate category for this class so only the relevant posts will feed out, and wham -you have a quick and easy class blog that does not disrupt the flow of the student’s blog nor overburden a professor with a whole lot of hacking and devising to make these resources show up in one, centralized space for the duration of the class.

OK, now what about the student? Well, why couldn’t they use these “autoblogs” to feed out their own work to separate blog spaces that they control to highlight their best work or particular subjects, etc. -what we have here is an infinitely malleable eportfolio? Can you dig it? I knew that ya could.

So Wp-Autoblogs is a huge, simple, out-of-the-wpmu-box solution to aggregation, I really like this. Not to mention it gives a central feed for all the relevant posts for a single class. We have three autoblogs running currently
on ELS Blogs: Film Text and Culture autoblog, New Media Studies autoblog, and All Els Blogs autoblog. Check them out.

BDP RSS 0.6.2: I have talked at length about this slick aggregator plugin for WordPress here. And I recently checked back at the OzPolitics blog to find out that Bryan has updated this brilliant WP plugin. And the upgrades are pretty major, namely he has created updated the aggregator so that it is widget ready! How, pray tell? It took me a little bit to figure it out, but you can actually load feeds into the aggregator, configure it accordingly (the ability to configure BDP RSS is unparalleled as far as I can tell) to create a single feeds for any combination of blogs you choose. For example, I installed the latest version of BDP RSS on here, and I am currently aggregating a unique combination of ELS Blogs and comments into the sidebar of this blog. This is something now that students and faculty have the ability out of the box to do, and while it is not as dead simple as Wp-Autoblog, it makes up for the amount of customization a more experienced user may want to play with. it is really an impressive addition for allowing users to work through their own unique aggregation possibilities. I’m still a huge fan of this plugin. We are using BDP RSS to aggregate the all blog posts and comments into the Sitewide Content page here.

King RSS WordPress Widget: Now, it gets interesting, the King RSS plugin (powered by SimplePie)allows you to get really specific with where and how you want to place your feeds. And once you get the collated feeds from BDP RSS, you can plug that feed url into King RSS and decide where you want to particular aggregated elements to show up on your blog. That’s right, customize where the aggregation shows up in the sidebar from page to page -sick, right! This plugin will take a little bit getting used to, for it is not totally used friendly just yet, despite its being a widget and all, but these three plugins for WPMu in combination begin to suggest some unbelievably interesting way to feed, aggregate, and re-combine posts to create a rich, connected, and constantly evolving network of connections with one simple WPMu install.

Upgrading to WPMu 1.2.3: The bestest thing about this whole post is that Gardner and I upgraded WPMu from version 1 to version 1.2.3 to see if it might fix some database bugs (the verdict is still out on that, fingers crossed), and it went as smooth as upgrading a single WP installation. Can you believe that? Almost 100 blogs, and not a hiccup with the upgrade, I know 100 blogs is nothing by WPMu standards, but try upgrading a 100 single installs manually -even if via Fantastico.

Ok, this post is almost over, and if you made it this far I commend you. Andy Rush had mentioned to me today that the ELS Blogs site seemed a bit cluttered (oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a colleague’s ingratitude!). Which made me think, is this site completely undecipherable to the unacquainted user? Well, got to ELS blogs and take a look and let me know what you think. More than that, give me any recommendations you may have to make it better.

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Original post by jimgroom