Ranting from the coal-face of Higher Education in the United Kingdom.
Apologies: I'm moving physical house tomorrow which also entails a move of vitual home space so housekeeping-wise I'll finally have to get a proper web host ... this may take some time! Until then, au revoir...
Update 20/Aug/2007: House-move has happened and I'll be sticking with Blogspot for a while...
Nice list of yet more MySQL tips here courtesy of Fabulous Entertainment (entertaining indeed!) who cites a talk on Google Video by Jay Pipes which I must look at...
Nice data illustrating users' scrolling behaviour from ClickTale on their blog. It helps to dispel the myth that users don't scroll (but Nielsen himself reported this in his 1997 Changes in Web Usability Since 1994). I love the histograms -- it's great to see data (plus they look like meteorological Talagrand diagrams, aka rank histograms, which I used to work on!) Interesting... plus the software uses JavaScript (it's client-side after all).
Just trying to adapt an RSS feed with an XSLT stylesheet: Works fine in IE6 :-) but lo! Firefox ignores the XSLT and renders the feed itself :-(
Seems I'm not the only one (but at least a year behind the rest!): Bugzilla #338621 includes the following suggestion (and a lot of discussion!)
The emerging workaround for this problem (which isn't new to us, since we're using the same heuristic that IE7 betas have been using for months) is to put in a comment ranting about the evils of sniffing web content and overriding the desires of web developers which is long enough to move "<rss" or "<feed" out of the first 512 bytes, since that's all we sniff.
There's no way we can tell the difference between XSLT intended to style a feed into something that's not a feed, like yours, and XSLT intended to just keep people with earlier browsers from having to look at raw XML, so I think this is WONTFIX. With more than 99% of the feeds with stylesheets just trying to do what we're doing, but without the knowledge of what aggregators the user actually uses and without the chrome privileges to subscribe them, not using our transformation on feeds that have a stylesheet would just make for a worse and less consistent experience for our users.
BTW, pasting that text into a comment in the XSLT after the XML prolog works ;-)
There are times when I love working in the University sector: we benefit from flexible attitudes to working and CPD (sometimes! Depends on management, budgets etc.)
Today I got my ticket for @media Ajax November 19th — 20th, 2007 at The Church House Conference Centre, in Westminster, London SW1P 3NZ, UK.]: The @media Ajax conference brings together some of the leading figures in the field to explain how to best exploit this "magic", from concept and design through to the underlying code.
— sounds great! … now just gotta get my classes covered on those days!
Maybe not a typical student in HE (we hope they reach the "enlightenment" stage before the 1st year!) and unlikely to be from the UK, but a good story detailing the journey from a compulsory-education-slacker to an empowered, independent learner. Hopefully inspiring stuff for other students: http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/2007/05/graduate.html
I recently received a mail via Facebook from a former student who graduated a while ago and has since started to work at the BBC ... it's nice to hear that we made a difference (eventually?!) and/or that they're getting on well :-)
London's @media 2007 was last week. Good content as ever, oddly the venue had no public WiFi (as usual!) Emotional "goodbyes" from Molly Holzschlag and Joe Clark at the start and end, respectively, bumped-up the emotion (I'll miss their talks: they've both had an influence on my web development educational practices.)
I particularly liked it when the "Hot Topics" panel (chaired and hopefully podcasted & transcribed by Jeremy Keith) aired my question about the relevance of higher education to web dev. careers versus "self education", which seems to be the most common. An ex-university audience-member said that courses responded too slowly and were taught by arrogant, uninterested lecturers to reflect current practices! Happily a chap from Salford, IIRC, jumped-up to say that not all lecturers were disinterested in standards-based education — it was why he was there — but that he believed he was probably alone. I was sorry not to be brave enough to leap up and shout "You're not alone!" & then missed him as he left ... ah well, perhaps he'll appear on the attendees list at microformats.org??
Added: A useful set of summaries and links from AlastairC & technorati atmedia2007 tags...
OK, so I'm late for the Facebook party but, in the words of Monty Python, I'm 37 ... I'm not old!
;-)
Most amusing thing so far (other than: where do people find the time?) is the following found on the YOU KNOW YOU'VE BEEN IN UNIVERSITY TOO LONG WHEN... group:
BEFORE I CAME TO UNIVERSITY, I WISH I HAD KNOWN...
That Psychology is really Biology, that Biology is really Chemistry, that Chemistry is really Physics and that Physics is really Maths.
;-) how true: A-levels don't prepare you for that!
