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Tag: web

Republishing ePortfolio from Graduate School

It is hard to believe that it has been ten years since I completed my graduate studies at Kent State. It feels like it can’t possibly have been that long, but at the same time in reviewing my old portfolio, I know that I have grown a great deal as a higher education professional since…

Life Update 2017-18

It’s been quite some time since my last post, but hopefully I will be back to posting regularly again. Much has changed in the past year. I left my position at Ashland University last fall due to family circumstances. I spent late 2017 and the first half of 2018 helping as an in-home caregiver for…

WordCamp Kent

I had a great time at WordCamp Kent in June, where I was inspired to do new things with this site and other websites that I run. This WordCamp was quite affordable (just $40) and included plenty of speakers presenting on great WordPress topics, great conversations between sessions and in the hallways with presenters, vendors, and other attendees, and plenty of great food. As an alum of Kent State University, it was also wonderful to be back in Kent, see how some parts of the downtown and the campus has changed and grown since I graduated, and visit some of my old stomping grounds again.

Which Tech Giant Would I Drop?

Which Tech Giant Would You Drop? (nytimes.com)

The Big Five tech companies increasingly dominate our lives. Could you ditch them?

In the linked interactive feature, the New York Times posed the question:

If an evil monarch forced you to choose, in what order would you give up these inescapable giants of tech?

The first is an easy pick for me. Apple, the seller of shiny, overpriced products, powered by a buggy cloud, with a mobile operating system on which things are either dumbed down to 5-year old simplicity or completely impossible. I have owned Apple products in the past, including an iPod Touch I still use occasionally, but in my personal opinion Apple operating systems are inferior to other options and build quality of Apple products is not significantly above that of their competitors to justify the incredible price markup. I hate iTunes with a burning passion and frequently will not purchase music I intend to purchase if it is not available from Amazon or Google Play.

A Guide to Mastodon

A beginner's guide to microblogging on Mastodon (opensource.com)

Meet Mastodon, the open source Twitter alternative that's spreading like wildfire.

Reading A beginner’s guide to microblogging on Mastodon by Seth Kenlon and testing the “Link” WordPress Format and the “Like” IndieWeb Post Kind. I’ve been trying out Mastodon as a Twitter alternative for a few days and find it pretty interesting, although I find myself following nearly as many GNU Social users as I do…

ThinkUp on OpenShift: Easy as Pie

I’ve been interested in setting up my own instance of the open-source social networking analysis tool ThinkUp for awhile now, but I have tried a few things without success:

  • I have a shared hosting account with Dreamhost, and I tried to install ThinkUp as a subdomain there, but unfortunately the shared hosting plan is known to be incompatible with busy ThinkUp accounts (and the initial crawl is a pretty busy process).
  • I tried installing ThinkUp on a LAMP stack on a VPS, but apparently I missed something in the setup process and MySQL would not allow ThinkUp to connect. (I’m sure I was making a noob error somewhere in there – probably skipped a simple step – but I couldn’t figure out what I was missing despite extensive Googling.)
  • I also tried installing ThinkUp on top of a Docker-based LAMP stack, but something timed out in the initial crawl there again.

Yeah, I’m a bit of a hack at this. But even a hack like me was able to find something I could get to work: