it bfitz me

You get pretty used to seeing, and ignoring, banner advertisements on the internet. However, there are places you expect to see them and places you do not. It struck me as odd today to see multiple banner ads right on the front page of EA.com. EA isn’t exactly a band of struggling bloggers trying to make a little drink money from their web site. They are probably the largest video game company and probably have hundreds of trucks outside lined up to dump the money that is coming in. So why the banner ads?

I couldn’t stand watching this guy last year during the ALCS and now the Red Sox have gone and picked him up. I realize the Sox pitching needs some help, but blech..

It’s been a concern since the first hyperlink was created in an HTML document. How do track what links are still good and which ones have gone bad. There are a lot of applications out there that can help you verify links on your web site as well as reports in tools like Dreamweaver that will let you hunt down link rot throughout your site.

One of the best utilities that I have found recently is the LinkChecker add-on for Firefox by Kevin Freitas. Once installed, a single click sends the link checker through the page you are looking at highlighting links as green (good), yellow (forwarded) or red (rotten). It makes it super easy to find and remove bad links.

I’m not going to call it that (maybe I just did), but the week school starts and the two weeks preceding are some of the toughest of the school year. This year, school starts on August 20th, which puts this week right dab in the middle of this insane period. What does it mean for me?

• A couple of high school web site launches.
• A couple dozen elementary school design refreshes.
• Some middle school site upgrades.
• A brand new web application to assess adeptness with educational technology.
• Many, many required fixes to our content management system
• Ongoing improvement of our new community (blog) site
• Wrap up work on the framework of a new department site
• A new contribute theme that matches the new high school sites
• and what ever contribute or other web-related tickets come stumbling into my email box

I’m looking forward to the feeling of accomplishment when this time has passed and these jobs are completed, but until then please sit down and fasten your seat belts. Reports of rough skies ahead…

We are one day and 46 minutes into the three-day web community camp at LPS and we have already seen and discussed some great topics. I enjoyed the video from Nebraska Education Secretary Christensen. I was impressed with his ability to discuss the role of technology in education today and going forward. We also talked about ethical (and self-defense) issues in using social networks and technologies when working with students and representing our organization. It’s funny how one person sees the computing services department as big brother watching their every move, while the next person hopes we are watching their every move so that we can be their big brother when they are challenged.

Drupal rollout yesterday afternoon was tricky as the authentication server sputtered, but we are up and running now. Bring on the blogs and the tools discussion!

I’m trying to get the activity stream module setup in our drupal installation. This is a test of it… Sorry!

Sure, you could do the following with a quick find-and-replace, but it wouldn’t be nearly as fun and exciting.

http://www.screencast.com/users/cynomyso/folders/Jing/media/edec21f6-53ab-4dff-b323-b76a41d2cc45

Amanda and I met working at camp Carol Joy Holling. We don’t get back there as often as we tell ourselves we should but there is one day every year when everybody comes back: Quilt Auction. Today was the 20th and it was a good one. $170,000ish raised (one went for $20,000 and someone matched it!).

Liam and I escaped to do some hiking. Here’s some picts from our adventure. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s Rush playing ‘Tom Sayer’…