iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Here’s a word cloud for 2011 at MattClare.ca – mostly my blog (biased towards the end of the year):

Here’s my Twitter feed for 2011:

I think the insight there is that I use twitter to get a hold of Giulia a lot.

As my ThinkUp installation at mattclare.ca/thinkup gains way more data than my previous archives had I think 2012 will bring with it some real insight.

I had a great time at the Sakai Conference 2011 in Los Angeles.

My presentation this year was titled LMS-Based Teaching Hacks: A Collection of Simple Ideas to Tweak Your Teaching Within an LMS. It was well received and the room was standing room only.

Much as the development community would use the term, these teaching hacks were intended to be pragmatics solutions about using a resource not as it was originally intended to be used.

I shared a collection of simple ideas that can magnify the impact of an instructor’s teaching through the use of an LMS labelling them “Teaching Hacks”. Some of the teaching hacks addressed concerns with student attendance and communications, others with facilitating collaboration and other elements of active learning.

Not only were there a lot of good questions, but I also was given some great feedback that I’ve already incorporated.

Here’s the collection and other resources now posted at the Sakai Confluence Wiki site: confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF2011/2011-16-15+LMS-Based+Teaching+Hacks

I enjoyed main of the other sessions focussing on Sakai’s future with OAE, it’s strong base with CLE.

I was able to engage in some interesting discussions that informed what I’m interested in with Isaak/Sakai at Brock University. The sessions on Turnitin integration with Assignments(2) were useful, and I think the Sakai community is close to addressing a long standing issue with its help files (although not there yet) – I promise to help.

Good conference.

Here are the results you’ve been waiting for: the results of RimCount.com tracking of the Roll Up The Win Campaign from a large Canadian Coffee and Donut chain.

RimCount.com collected tweets with the hastag #rolluptherim and extracted ratios and recorded them.

The site really took off when it started tweeting back with the Twitter account twitter.com/rimcountdotcom . The site automated the awarding and notification of “badges” for different items like drinking more than one “rim” a day, or tweeting about it more than once a day. Of course the best and worst record holders were notified. I was also contacted by the author of the Facebook App “My Rollups” apps.facebook.com/myrollups to compare notes – looks like Facebook users are a little luckier.

Here they are, as unscientifically tracked on Twitter, in 2011 there were:

• 21552 rims
• 4181 wins
• 17439 losses
• 13007 tweets
• 5853 Total tweet’ers

Here’s a Wordle of the top 150 words tweeted with the hastag #rolluptherim (without that tag)

Here’s looking forward to next year!

My little hobby web site for tracking your luck with a large Canaidan coffee and donuts chain’s roll-up promotion is back!

My previous attempt was Drupal-based, and required an account. I was never very happy with the account requirement, and played with it being a facebook App but ultimately took the site down (described in this blog post). This time there’s no need for an account as it’s Twitter-based. This also helps with the promotional side of things.

I had hoped to partner with the www.rimrollerapp.com – but that Twitter based iPhone App needed a technical update, and for other reasons, it’s now removed from the App Store. It’s too bad, but you don’t need anything beyond a Twitter account to enjoy RimCount.com.

Simply tweet with the tag #RollUpTheRim to have your tweet listed on RimCount.com. The site tracks results posted to Twitter in the format of wins/rims (and unofficially, a few other formats).

You can visit the main page for the latest, the scoreboard for the best and worst ratios rimcount.com/scoreboard. There’s also a rapidly growing list of Twitter users who have tweeted with the hashtag #RollUpTheRim rimcount.com/list

The site is no longer Drupal-based, but some of the PHP from the Drupal module I wrote and the MySQL data structure were migrated to the new site which is otherwise built from scratch.

As many developers have indicated, working with Twitter.com‘s non-standard API is quite a joy. I was able to get things rolling (pun intended) quite quickly based on the simple twitter searches through Twitter’s search service’s RSS feed and looking-up someone’s Twitter details via an XML call is easy too.
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While my wife was getting a valuable two hours of sleep before she was woken with contractions signaling the birth of our first born child 19 hours later, I was not quite tired enough to sleep. UnknowingIy missing out on my last chance to sleep for a while, I was typing away at a PHP script to allow us to share pictures of our new baby – whenever he was going to arrive – with our friends and family privately with nothing more complex than the ability to eMail photos from my iPhone.

It was important to us to be able to share these pictures of our new child, but also to protect our child’s image from the very public exposure of the public internet and the still too public (or at least, un-trustable privacy of) Facebook.

Here’s how I was able to achieve this with a web server, some PHP, a GMail account and my iPhone:

Creating Galleries
First off I created a folder with standard Apache Basic Auth settings and let our friends and family know the simple username and password. I also turned on WebDAV access for the geekier viewers. In order to construct interesting galleries I placed a copy of Qdig, a Quick Digital Image Gallery PHP script to create galleries and thumbnails on the fly (and secured it against the WebDAV access). I had to increase the amount of RAM PHP could use, but otherwise it was very easy to implement.

Getting eMail Attachements from GMail with PHP

I created a new GMail account (specifically through my Google Apps domain) to receive all of these cute baby pictures via eMail from my iPhone. The next step was to check it automatically and store the attached pictures in a specific folder.
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