Recently, I had a conversation about blogging with my partner, who is a Montessori teacher.  Often times as we share a ride home from work, she will discuss some aspect of her work day that leaves me impressed with her knowledge and insight about teaching and child development.  More than once, I have suggested to her that she start a blog to share that knowledge and more than once she has shot down the idea, citing a number of reasons, my favorite of which goes something like “the thought of writing about work when I’m not at work literally makes me sick to my stomach!  Really sick!”  This got me to thinking about why I blog, often about things related to my work, and led me to come up with a typically offhanded formulation about why others do the same.

So what it is that distinguishes myself and others from the non-blogging majority?  I propose three basic prerequisites to blogging: time, community, and hubris.

Time

The first is pretty obvious so I will assume that time does not need much explanation.  Unless you are a professional blogger, you do it in your free time, and most of us don’t have enough of it to spend addressing a largely imaginary audience.

Community

Assuming one has time, I think you still need to feel like you are addressing or contributing to a community, broadly defined.  When I blog, I usually imagine it will be of some use or interest to someone.  Sometimes I know exactly who I am speaking to.  If I write a tutorial about WordPress or Omeka hacks, for example, I know I am speaking to others who, like me, are hacking their way through a particular project, often piecing together information from forums, Google searches, colleagues and friends.  I feel like that is a community (intermediate-level web developers?) of which I am part and whose needs I understand.  I cannot emphasize how important that community has been to my ability to work, and in writing a tutorial I am attempting to carry my weight and give something back.  In some ways, this is a reflection of my own belief in DIY and the punk rock spirit, two other topics (or is that just one topic?) that I’m likely to write about based largely on the idea that they are communities I value and to which I try to contribute.

Hubris

Okay, I know hubris is maybe a strange choice of words, but it got you reading this, right?  And I think it suggests a broad set of characteristics or personality traits that contribute to the “blogging state of mind.”  Twitter and other micro-blogging services typify this impetus in the extreme.  Look at any group of seasoned twitter users and you will see links, links, links, along with a smattering of reviews, smarmy comments, mini-editorials, and self-promotional status updates.  That’s what makes the form annoying/overwhelming for some people, but it’s also the essence of its greatness.  Blogs leave a bit more wiggle room for complexity and nuance, but suggest the same motivation.

Further, it may be no coincidence that librarians and developers love (micro-) blogging.  The fact that I am nominally both, I think, has much to do with why I blog (here, on Twitter, and elsewhere).  As a librarian, I value information and seek to share it with others.  It’s a big part of who I am and if I’m honest with myself I have to admit it’s because I’m kind of a know-it-all.  Most librarians are to varying degrees, though it doesn’t always show because we tend to be a mild bunch.  I like knowing I can find the answers to a wide array of questions and can synthesize them into something vaguely coherent.  It’s very much a desire to be helpful, but it also takes some hubris to assume the position of oracle.

There’s an interesting post over at Full Stop Interactive that describes the Myers-Briggs personality type of hackers and developers in much the same way many have described librarians: an apparently paradoxical mix of utopian ideology and sensible shoes practicality that brings forth the opinionated, the didactic, and the resourceful.  Despite what you think of Jungian psychology, it seems safe to assume that, while MBTI cannot fully classify the wholeness of personality, it seems to be onto something when you look at aggregate career-specific data.  Again, these two groups that often overlap and interact share personality type indicators and common interests that might contribute to their general blogginess.  I would never suggest these are the only two groups that blog, nor the only groupings of personality to succumb to the siren call of the know-it-all culture.  What my blog post presupposes is that those of us who blog share something in common with one another and maybe with one of these groups. With my partner, the non-blogging Montessori teacher, I share many things in common but apparently not the traits that lead to blogging, whatever they may be.

There you have it.  My cockamamy theory about blogging, complete with bloggerific abruptly non-conclusive ending.  What do you think?  Am I onto something?  Have you read or heard anything similar elsewhere?  Or is it total baloney?

Image Credit: made using Big Huge Labs’ Motivator

I’m not really going to get deep into the history of the cassette but I think it’s worth noting that tapes “changed everything” as they say.  Music became smaller, more portable, cheaper (actually, freer), more contentious, more ubiquitous, and both more and less intimate.

When considering cassette media, we need to ponder the hardware that was used to play it.  The cassette gave us The Walkman and the “boombox” – two devices that couldn’t be more different.  One, the Walkman, was meant to shut out the world, to bring the music closer, to retire into the imagination and the inner world of musical sensation.  The other, the boombox, or “ghetto blaster”, was meant to bring imagination and musical sensation into the outer world.  The Walkman is an extension of the teenage bedroom, domain of the vinyl LP.  The boombox is an extension of the club, the car, the party, and perhaps the penis – a manifestation of action, performance, and bravado.  Think Radio Raheem when you think boombox.  Whatever you do, do NOT think Lloyd Dobbler, that sappy new romantic who reappropriated his boombox as a two-way Walkman. The boombox was urban, evolving into the “system” – the window-rattling audio menaces one might encounter when stopping your car next to a ‘91 Civic with gold spinner rims.  The Walkman was suburban, evolving into the iPod – a tiny, consumer-fetishized personal technological wonder.  Culturally, I think these two very conflicting devices actually worked in tandem to create an atmosphere in which divisions of youth (and sub/counter) culture  became more distinct, more visible, more confrontational and also more accessible – a commodity-identity that could be easily recognized and digested and therefore easily bought and sold.

Still, the cassette was a continuation, as were its followers.  Like a vinyl album, it retained the “flipside.”  This was an essential component of musical media that was not removed until the birth of the CD,  a small (i.e. cassette-like?) disc (i.e. album-like?) media which was capable of high fidelity sound (i.e. album-like?).  The displacement of the CD by the mp3 removed the physicality of all prior formats but combined the reproducibility, portability, and low-fi impermanence of the cassette with the single serving goodness of the 7″ vinyl single/EP.  It was not until fairly recently that mp3 recordings began to match the high fidelity of CDs and vinyl LPs, and even still the mp3 is most often consumed one song at a time (rather than by the album).  The introduction of both the cassette and the mp3 format launched the recording industry into a hissyfit panic that some people might copy content instead of buying it, and both technologies came along right at a time when mainstream record labels were putting out the kind of banal garbage that helped make that true.

But even though the early mp3 resembled earlier formats in some senses, in others it was music/youth culture’s waterloo – the end of an era in which music was an all-powerful, awe-inspiring, cultural force; a refuge that was both in plain sight and deeply underground; equally technical and nebulous.  It signaled the beginning of a new era where music became a capitalist accessory, a component of yet more shallow spectacle, an economic asset used primarily to sell physical and sensory widgets.  Sure, we can look back to the late 1960s and see similarities in the commodification of hippy/beat culture, but nobody was using The Velvet Underground to sell car tires, mainly because ad execs (not to mention the general public) didn’t know who the VU were. (Yes, that linked ad is from 1993 – roughly “the year punk broke” to name another watershed moment – yet it still illustrates the music as advertising appliance approach that has become even more common since the late nineties/early aughts.)  Now, anyone with an internet connection can find, read about, and download that Moss Icon EP I searched for across several months within a matter of seconds.  When a thing becomes too easily accessible, it loses its value.  If diamonds grew on trees, nobody would be interested, except for their industrial value.

Which brings me back to the point of this little rant.  I am deeply sad, forlorn even, that music is meaning less to me these days.  Perhaps it is age, but I think it has even more to do with the ritual, culture, and physicality of the cassette, as contrasted with modern equivalents, which are far more casual, and it is on that theme that I shall continue to opine without further asides.

The mixtape, an icon of 80s and 90s culture, was (and is for some purists still) a deep symbol of friendship and even love, representing a ridiculously large commitment of time and energy.  I have given and received mixtapes that went through so may edits and overdubs that in the quiet between songs you could hear layer upon layer of other songs, some that didn’t fit the mix, some that made the cut but were moved elsewhere in the order, and others that were simply taped over for lack of a new and truly blank cassette.  Labels and covers were almost always handmade, with evidence of their own revision and improvisation.  I once received a mixtape recorded over a factory-issue Best of Chicago album that belonged to my friend’s father.  She just popped the overwrite-protection tab and taped right over “Saturday in the Park”, confirming that all was well in the world.  Unlike the burned CD, a sterile object of disinvestment only Stanley Kubrick could love, a great mixtape was a palimpsest of aural, cultural and emotional information.

Although the dubbed cassette was not as personalized as the mixtape, it could still be deeply personal.  The dubbed cassette was the lo-fi copy you got from your friend who had an album you didn’t own yet, or maybe had never even heard of before. My first dub was Appetite for Destruction (side A) and Eazy Duz It (side B).  The height of my dubbing excess came about a decade later, when I spent roughly a week digging through a new friend’s collection of obscure oi!, streetpunk, and viking rock, dubbing each album and transcribing the songs onto little pieces of notebook paper that I folded into the tape cases to serve as makeshift liner notes.  I honestly cannot imagine listening to any of that music on any other physical format and even though I would have loved to find my own original copies of some of that stuff (for bragging rights), part of me was always okay with just having the scammed copy.  A few years ago, my tape deck (a wood paneled top loader with 4 level sliders on the top) broke for the last time.  I put those tapes, and dozens more, out on the street in my densely populated urban neighborhood, hoping someone would find and cherish them.  Without my noticing, it rained heavily that day, soaking the box, the labels, and the covers.  Nobody, save for the garbage man, ever came for them.  A shameful moment indeed, but instructive.  The dubbed cassette was both a second class citizen and an object of desire and affection, the Sally Hemmings of your record collection.  It represented the inferior but also the exotic.  It was special and prized but also kept to the side,  segregated from your more conventionally desirable items, except for those moments when you were alone, when you traveled, or when you wanted to impress your savvier friends with your more obscure tastes.  In the end, unceremoniously abandoned.

I could go on some more about the importance of the cassette to DIY and punk culture, but I’ll leave that alone.  I could also talk about taping crappy pop songs off the radio so I could lip sync to them in my childhood living room, or how I once faced two single-deck boomboxes at each other in order to make a copy of Licensed to Ill, but I don’t want to spread the schlock too thick here.  Instead of grasping at the sky in agony over my lost passion for music, I’ve decided to reinvest myself in vinyl and try to set aside times to just listen to music – not on my phone, not while I’m walking down the street or in the elevator, but listening to music while I’m… listening to music (okay, I might read a magazine, but an analog one for sure).

As Steve Albini put it back in the day, “The future belongs to the analog loyalists. Fuck digital.”

Note: I “dubbed” the above image from the Internet and photoshopped in what may well be the real title of a real tape I may or may not have made for or received from a friend circa 1989.

Step One: Get the Lightbox Package

The first step is to get the latest LightBox 2 package here, where you will find a quick explanation of how it works and how to get started.

Step Two: Modify and Upload the LightBox Package

Once you have the package, make sure it’s in a folder called “lightbox” and upload it to your Omeka theme directory inside the “common” directory where your header and footer files are located. Take the image files and copy them to your theme’s “images” directory.

Inside common/lightbox/js directory, find the file called “lightbox.js” and set your configurations. This is where you set your lightbox behaviors (overlayOpacity, animate, resizeSpeed, borderSize, etc.) and also where you tell LightBox how to find the images and labels to display Close and Loading. When setting the former, you can fiddle with the defaults to get the style you need, it’s pretty easy to understand. For the latter (image locations), you can use either a relative or a direct URL. If a relative location (e.g. ‘../images/loading.gif’) does not work for you, try using the direct URL (e.g. ‘http://www.yoursite.com/omeka/themes/themename/images/loading.gif’). My impression is that Omeka requires the direct URL for some reason. You could probably leave the images in the “lightbox” directory and point to them there as well.

Step Three: Modify your Omeka Theme Header

Add the script to your theme header (be sure to modify with your actual theme name):

<!-- Start Lightbox includes -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo WEB_ROOT;?>/themes/themename/common/lightbox/js/prototype.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo WEB_ROOT;?>/themes/themename/common/lightbox/js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects,builder"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo WEB_ROOT;?>/themes/themename/common/lightbox/js/lightbox.js"></script>
<!-- End Lightbox includes -->

Pretty basic.

Also, you’ll want to either copy the LightBox CSS styles into your theme’s stylesheet or move it to the theme styles directory and link to it in your header. Either way, be sure to double check that your images are properly linked. I find that having the LightBox styles included in a single stylesheet is preferable, but if you want, you can use something like this after moving lightbox.css to your theme directory:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/lightbox.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

Step Four: Modify Your Omeka Items-Show Page

This is where I got hung up. The site I was working on has multiple file types — not just images, but also audio and video. I was lucky enough to find a starting point on the Omeka Dev Google Group as well as on the Omeka Forums, but the code was written for item pages with a single image file. Since I’m not great with arrays, it took me a while to come up with the imperfect code below.

	<!-- The following returns all of the files associated with an item. -->
	<div id="itemfiles" class="element">
	    <h3>Files</h3>
		<div class="element-text">
		    < ?php 
		    if (item_has_thumbnail()) 
					{
					echo '<p><em>Click the Image for Full Size</em>';
					echo display_files_for_item(array('linkAttributes'=>array('rel'=>'lightbox[group]'))); 
										}
			else
				{
				echo display_files_for_item();
				}
			?>
 
		</div>
 
	</div>

This script will test if the item has a thumbnail (i.e. “is it an image?”). If it does, it will display the files as square thumbnails and give them ‘rel=”lightbox[group]“‘ – clicking on images with the “lightbox” relation in the URL will prompt the light box; if there are two or more images associated with the file, the ‘[group]‘ part will kick in to add the Next and Previous buttons. If the item file is not an image, the script calls the generic Omeka function display_files_for_item(), which will automatically call the media player (for audio and video) if needed.

A pretty easy process when you have it all right in front of you. Hope this will be helpful to someone out there.

NOTE: I’ll continue to update this post with any improvements. If you have a problem, fix, or improvement to share, please add it in the comments or catch me on Twitter (@ebellempire). I’ve also cross-posted this tutorial in the documentation wiki at Omeka.org, so feel free to contribute there as well.

To begin with, I’m using Deanna Schneider’s very handy Blog Topics For WPMU. Basically, Blog Topics creates a field in the relevant Settings, Registration and BuddyPress areas in which your users choose from a drop-down of admin-defined topics.  They cannot create new topics, they must use the ones you set, so keep that in mind.  The Site Admin can manually set the Topic for any blog at any time; this might be necessary if you already have a handful of blogs on your site (or you could demand that your users do it themselves because this is all about being lazy).  Some users might misfile their site in the wrong category, but you can always go in and edit any blog’s Topic; they probably won’t even notice.

You might be wondering why I would write a tutorial for installing a plug-in.  Well, I’m not sure if the plug-in code has some deprecated elements or if it just doesn’t play nice with the new BuddyPress theme structure, but it’s actually a bit more complicated than just installing the plug-in. For whatever reason, the documentation for this plug-in is pretty weak and some of it just doesn’t seem to work without some tweaks.  That’s where I come in to sum up my hours of frustration with what now seems like an obvious process.

Here’s the drill…

1. Install the plug-in in your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it on your parent site.  The plug-in comes with a nice little widget for your MU child sites, but it won’t help you here so consider it optional.
2. Inside the wp-content/plugins/blog-topics directory, you will find the file cets_blog_topics_page.php (a WordPress page template).  Copy this file to the root of your site’s parent theme file. If you are using BuddyPress 1.1, that means themes/bp-sn-parent.
3. Now, take that file and mess it all up according to the instructions below. Unfortunately, in the plug-in’s current state (v. 0.3.2), the default file just doesn’t work, but after digging around in the code, I found some functions that work quite nicely and can be easily integrated into your BuddyPress directories. Again, you will need to save this to the root of your theme.
4. Create a page called Blog Topics Directory (or whatever) and apply the Blog Topics Page template you just created.

< ?php
/*
Template Name: Blog Topics Page
*/
?>
< ?php get_header(); ?>
 
	<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">
 
		< ?php do_action( 'bp_before_directory_blogs_content' ) ?>
 
		<div class="page" id="blog-page">
 
			< ?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
 
				<h2 class="pagetitle">< ?php the_title(); ?></h2>
 
                                <!--using anchors for long lists, or you could use something fancier to browse topics-->
 
					<ul id="topic-list">
					<li><a href="#topic1">Topic 1</a></li>
					<li><a href="#topic2">Topic 2</a></li>	
					<li><a href="#topic3">Topic 3</a></li>	
					<li><a href="#topic4">Topic 4</a></li>	
					<li><a href="#topic5">Topic 5</a></li>	
					</ul>					
 
<!--add the numeric Topic ID according to the models below-->	
 
<!--topic1-->
<a name="topic1"></a>
<h2 class="pagetitle">< ?php echo cets_get_topic_name('1') ?> Blogs</h2>  
< ?php echo cets_get_blogs_from_topic_id_html('1'); ?>
 
<!--topic2-->
<a name="topic2"></a>
<h2 class="pagetitle">< ?php echo cets_get_topic_name('2') ?> Blogs</h2>  
< ?php echo cets_get_blogs_from_topic_id_html('2'); ?>
 
<!--topic3-->
<a name="topic3"></a>
<h2 class="pagetitle">< ?php echo cets_get_topic_name('3') ?> Blogs</h2>  
< ?php echo cets_get_blogs_from_topic_id_html('3'); ?>
 
<!--topic4-->
<a name="topic4"></a>
<h2 class="pagetitle">< ?php echo cets_get_topic_name('4') ?> Blogs</h2>  
< ?php echo cets_get_blogs_from_topic_id_html('4'); ?>
 
<!--topic5-->
<a name="topic5"></a>
<h2 class="pagetitle">< ?php echo cets_get_topic_name('5') ?> Blogs</h2>  
< ?php echo cets_get_blogs_from_topic_id_html('5'); ?>
 
 
 
 
			< ?php endwhile; endif; ?>
 
		</div>
 
		< ?php do_action( 'bp_after_directory_blogs_content' ) ?>
 
	</div>
 
< ?php get_sidebar(); ?>
 
< ?php get_footer(); ?>

You could probably find any number of ways to integrate this into your theme’s Blog Directory. Although I might eventually change it, right now, I’ve just added a link to the Blog Directory sidebar which users can… use… to Browse Blogs by Topic. If it helps, here’s a link to the site where this code is being used. Again, it needs some tweaking but this should get you started. Hope this quick fix has helped.

If you’re wondering why this post has a giant image of Brak (among other notable “buddies”) at the top, or if you just need a break from all this BuddyPress nonsense, you might need to listen to this…

Brak sings Yeah Buddy (via brakbuddy.ytmnd.com)

“The only historically justified tactic is extremist innovation” – Debord & Wolman, A User’s Guide to Détournement (1956)

I’ve been thinking about the Situationists for about a decade now, after learning of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in some Propagandhi liner notes (I think) about a decade ago.  Sadly, after all that time, I’ve developed no great insights as to what the hell they were talking about.  I mean, I get the gist if that counts for anything, but I think to really grasp what they’re really getting at, one needs a graduate seminar and plenty of contextual knowledge.  Nevertheless, the shit is damn brilliant and informs my worldview in many ways (most of which are surely based on misreading).  Since presently, I do what one might call information work, and as a result have become heavily invested in the web and social networking, I’ll use this post to share some cool films by the Situationist International (SI), and briefly look at how the SI’s  ideas of spectacle, détournement, and separation apply to the social web.

Social networks as commodified existence…

I’ve always felt a certain ambivalence toward the Internet, particularly as it has become the prime mediator of social and professional interaction.  Obviously, we have experienced some real and perceived benefits due to our increasingly rapid adoption of technology (defining “technology” is problematic in many of the same ways as “information,” but let’s put that aside and assume I mean computers and electronics and stuff).  We have increased economic opportunities (for some), more free time (theoretically), greater safety and efficiency, instant production and communication without regard to geography, and access to unbelievable amounts of information.  But we can just as easily indict technology for it’s less benign social, political, and economic effects.  A short list of technology’s less celebrated effects might include: modern global warfare, loss of personal privacy, environmental devastation, and political (as well as social, economic, and cultural) hegemony — all brought to new heights by liberatory (at first glance) technology such as industrial automation; steam, electrical, and combustion power; the telephone; modern media; and any number of innovations in digital computing.  Of course, what we currently colloquially refer to as “technology” — the Internet — is equally hailed in alternation as a force for democracy and a catalyst for democracy’s demise.  Obviously, both are true in their own argumentation, but miss the larger point altogether.

With the relatively recent explosion of Web 2-point-oh!, social networks, etc., we see something notably different than what was experienced with earlier technologies.  Machines, electricity, cars, televisions, and the like, were all transformative and initially liberated in some sense; addressing (and inventing) needs, and conferring legitimacy and status to their early consumers.   In those regards, the Web is not different.  Where it departs from previous innovations is that it goes beyond creating, serving, and reinforcing consumer identity and consumer culture into actually displacing and disappearing the consumer as he exists in reality.  Debord identified this tendency in …the Spectacle as it relates to earlier (1960s) cultural conditions, but it is ripe for application to the 21st century, with it’s ravenous tech fetishism and fascination with identity construction and maintenence through social networks.

As you may have guessed, I recently picked up Society of the Spectacle for some rereading and found that basically the entirety of the first chapter is as effective a deconstruction of 21st c. new media culture as it was of television, films, and advertising in 1967.  Here’s a sample…

1

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

2

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.

3

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.

4

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

5

The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.

6

Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.

I could continue quoting ad nauseum (actually, you may already be throwing up), but I’ll leave it to the reader to read more if they choose.  In the end, I’m still not sure where I stand on this.  I like the internet.  It’s amusing and often useful.  And as a worker in information and technology, I am actually not alienated from my own work.  More than ever, I have a high degree of control over the products of my labor. While I see the potential harm of these evolving conditions, I mostly see them in the bizarrely onanistic tweets/status updates of others.  I, naturally, am able to rise above the unreality of mediated life — so much so that I’m thinking about purchasing an island timeshare in Second Life to serve as respite for my World of Warcraft guild.  This, of course, would be done as an act of serious-parodic détournement (not to be confused with shallow irony), and thus would not be lame.

Détournement…

So, what is détournement?  A quick but insufficient answer might be found reference to hip hop, web mashups, Marcel Duchamp, or Adbusters. “In détournement, an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message, often one opposed to the original” (Wikipedia).  A common example (though I’m not sure it was ever actually produced) would be to take the footage of The Birth of a Nation, and replace the text panels of that technical masterpiece with new music or text which would change (or détourne) the original meaning, from an egregiously racist historical lie, to something that crafts from the film’s intellectual content and technical strength an effective (and modern/correct/relevant) moral-political statement.  As Debord & Wolman point out (1956), if such a project merely attempts to negate the meaning through irony, counter-argument or comedic juxtaposition, it misses the opportunity and the point.  The best example I’ve seen, which serves as a better instruction than I can write, is René Viénet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks?.

Film: Can Dialectics Break Bricks?: René Viénet, 1973: via U B U W E B

I’m not a great fan of the Debord films, though they do nicely illustrate, literally, the idea of the spectacular as it permeates our collective media life.  As with social networks, academia and high culture, the images Debord détournes in Society of the Spectacle are, individually and collectively, simultaneously useful, beautiful, and inspiring, as well as banal, authoritarian and vacuous. Like all cultural products, their meanings are contextual and constructed and can serve many masters at once.  The same is true of new media products, services, and cultural tendencies.

Film: Society of the Spectacle, parts 1 & 2: Guy Debord, 1973: via U B U W E B

Although new media culture has some very deep differences from traditional media culture working in its favor (openness, decentralization, interactivity), it’s yet to be seen how that will change over time.  Likewise, will the ubiquity of web-mediated social interaction continue on its current trajectory (whatever that might be is actually unclear), or will it evolve into new and unexpected forms?  I’ve got this idea that the (social) web is the perfect vehicle for détournement, though I’m less convinced it’s a worthy venue for cultural resistance.  Any thoughts?

1. The homepage needed to look “homepagey” (i.e. not “bloggy”)
2. Client needed room for a short introductory text, which could be edited/updated on the fly without disrupting the homepage layout
3. The homepage needed to highlight the many features on the site, so that users could quickly scan the page, see what the site had to offer, and quickly find the latest update in each area.

This quick tutorial will share some code for reproducing something that meets all or some of those criteria.  You don’t need to know much code to complete this tutorial, but a little helps.  Once you create and implement your homepage template, you will need to use CSS to add styles and adjust the layout.

The Basics of Creating a Homepage Template

This is pretty well-documented elsewhere, but here’s what you need to know on the most basic level.  If you are using a prefab theme, find that theme’s page.php file.  Now take that file and make a copy called homepage.php (or really, whatever you like).  Next, add the five lines below to the very top of the page (before the header and sidebar calls):

< ?php
/*
Template Name: Home Page
*/
?>

Now, when you edit or create the page you want to use as Home, you can choose the Home Page template and set it as the static homepage for your site in Settings >> Reading.  But this won’t get you far.  As is, this template just replicates the behavior of any page on your site.  That’s not very exciting.  Instead, let’s try adding some dynamic content to the template.

Note on custom theme_excerpt() function used below

Before you get all crazy and just copy-paste from the homepage code below, note that I am using a custom function to generate post excerpts. To use that function you must first create a file called functions.php and add the following code:

< ?php
function theme_excerpt($num) {
	global $more;
	$more = 1;
	$link = get_permalink();
	$limit = $num+1;
	$excerpt = explode(' ', strip_tags(get_the_content()), $limit);
	array_pop($excerpt);
	$excerpt = implode(" ",$excerpt).'...';
	$excerpt = preg_replace('`\[[^\]]*\]`','',$excerpt);
	echo '<p>'.$excerpt.'';
	$more = 0;
}
?>

This will get you a more flexible excerpt function than the default WordPress one, the_excerpt(). I think I stole this from the Feed Me Seymour theme. You can call the function with theme_excerpt(n) where n is the number of words in the excerpt.

I’m going to break this up into sections, so if you are copy-pasting, you will need to copy all the sections below or pick and choose carefully, otherwise you might end up with some unclosed tags.

Preserving the Page text
Most of the text in a dynamic homepage is generated from feeds, posts, and database queries (i.e. not by adding it manually to the page called Home in your WordPress page list). In some cases, your Home page could be totally blank when accessed from the default page editor. However, you may want to give yourself the option of manually adding and updating text somewhere on your homepage. In the example below, we keep the WordPress page text intact by calling The Loop.

< ?php
/*
Template Name: Home Page
*/
?>
<!-- get the header and sidebar... though sometimes you might want to leave the sidebar out of a Home template.  It's here just for the sake of illustration--> 
< ?php get_header(); ?>
< ?php get_sidebar(); ?>
 
<div id="content">
 
<!-- Homepage text from the page editor using 'The Loop'-->
         < ?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
		<div class="post" id="main-entry"><div id="in-border">
 
			<div class="entry">
				< ?php the_content(); ?>
			</div>
				  < ?php endwhile; endif; ?>
		</div></div>
</div>

An Internal Category Feed
Below we have the latest one post from the ‘News’ category. You can repeat this with other categories as needed. This is especially useful if you use the Category Visibility plug-in or some other means to hide/show certain category posts in certain areas of your site. In a recent project, for example, we created additional page templates for displaying posts in certain categories (Calendar Events, Timeline Events, Lesson Plans), but excluded them from the blog loop.

<!-- An internal feed.-->
<!-- The latest one post from the 'News' category -->
<!-- You can repeat this with other categories as needed.  -->
 
 
<li>
<h2>News</h2>
         < ?php $my_query = new WP_Query('category_name=news&showposts=1'); while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>
 
                <!-- Link to the 'News' category -->
    		<div class="post">
    		<div id="link-contain">
                <p class="contread"><a href="<?php echo get_bloginfo('url'); ?>/news">All News &raquo;</a></p>  
                </div>
 
    		<h3>Latest News</h3>
 
                <!-- The post title -->
		<h3><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to < ?php the_title(); ?>">< ?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
			<div class="entry">
                <!-- The post excerpt using custom function from theme/function.php -->		
				< ?php echo theme_excerpt(30); ?> 
			</div>
		</div>
  < ?php endwhile; ?>
</li>

An External Feed
This code uses the WordPress core functionality that brings feeds into your Dashboard. I’m just pulling the title and link here, but you can do more. This is especially useful if your site incorporates another platform besides WordPress. In the example below, I use a feed from the Omeka platform (omeka.org), which I had tucked into my root directory, masquerading as a native section of the site.

<!-- An External Feed  -->
<!-- This is especially useful if your site incorporates another platform besides WordPress.-->
 
<li>
<h2>Collections &amp; Exhibits </h2>
    		<div class="post" id="omeka-feed">
    		<div id="link-contain"><p class="contread"><a href="<?php echo get_bloginfo('url'); ?>/omeka">View the Archive &raquo;</a></p></div>
			<div class="entry">
             <!-- This code uses the WordPress core functionality that brings feeds into your Dashboard-->
             <!-- I'm just pulling the title and link here, but you can do more-->
			< ?php  
			require_once (ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');  
			$rss = @fetch_rss('http://www.myurl.org/omeka/items/browse?output=rss2');  
			if ( isset($rss->items) && 0 != count($rss->items) ) {  
			?>  
			<h3>Latest Additions</h3>
			<ul>  
			< ?php  
			$rss->items = array_slice($rss->items, 0,7);  
			foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {  
 			?>  
			<li> 
			<a href="<?php echo wp_filter_kses($item['link']);?>">
			< ?php echo wp_specialchars($item['title']); ?>  
			</a>  
			</li>  
			< ?php } ?>  
			</ul>  
			< ?php } ?>  
			</div>
 
		</div>
  < ?php endwhile; ?>
</li>

A Special Plugin Feed (Simple:Press)
Lots of plugins generate their own feed. Here we have an internal feed from the Simple:Press forum plugin (simplepressforum.com). Such plug-ins generally use custom functions, such as the one below, the rules for which are defined in the plug-in documentation.

<!-- An internal feed from the Simple:Press forum plugin (simplepressforum.com)-->
<li>
<h2>Discussions</h2>
    		<div class="post" id="forum-posts">
    		<div id="link-contain"><p class="contread"><a href="<?php echo get_bloginfo('url'); ?>/forum">View Forums &raquo;</a></p></div>
			<div class="entry">
			<h3>Latest Topics</h3>
				<ul>
				< ?php sf_recent_posts_tag(3, false, true, true, true, 0, false); ?>
				</ul>
 
			</div>
 
		</div>
 
</li>

Listing all Pages
Normally, you should list all your pages in the header navigation, but in this case I had too many pages to list there, some of which didn’t belong in the navigation. I listed only the pages that were not part of the header navigation or the footer (About, Contact) in this section. You can find more info about wp_list_pages() here.

<!-- List all parent pages and first level of child pages -->
<li>
<h2>More</h2>
 
    	<div class="post" id="more-list">
			<ul>
			<h3>< ?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=2exclude=1,2,3,4,5,6') ;?></h3>
			</ul>
	</div>
</li>

If you are copy-pasting, don’t forget to add the footer to end your page

< ?php get_footer(); ?>

Of course, there are plenty more tricks out there. Frankly, these aren’t that special, but they seem fundamental. If this helps you, let us know in the comments.

I will rarely address current events on this site, but a friend of mine in PA sent me a link to a completely ridiculous story from KDKA TV News Pittsburgh, a CBS affiliate.  Hit the break for the video and the full story, annotated with my first hand clarifications.  If you think Fox News is the only one towing the right wing agenda, think again.  Luckily, these dupes are so roundly unconcerned with journalistic standards that their absurd inferences and tabloid commentary actually (almost) come across as satire.

Let me clarify a few understandable journalistic mistakes here, since I frequent the liberal terror underground (also known as Ikea).

1.  “Sources indicate that graffiti left under a downtown bridge was put there by G-20 protestors… [video shows graffiti reading "We the People..."]“

That was me.  It actually said “G-20 is a total dick, dude” before we changed our minds and went with an obscure quote from noted Anti-American radical, the US Constitutional Convention.

2.   “A fire at a local park was reportedly started by protestors staying in a tent… [video shows extinguished campfire hole]“

I’m not sure how they figured it out, since I left no apparent evidence, but that was also me.  Camping is one of the most extreme of all seditious acts, and provides a great ambience for toasting vegan s’mores and planning future acts of librul terror.

3.  “A young man, who did not want to be identified, says he’s been told protestors are renting South Side homes…. [video shows a conspicuously disguised hippy-surfer type listlessly exclaiming 'people are gonna die.']”

That was actually me, incognito of course, dressed as “a total duder from Portland.”  I will just say it now, I am an agent provocateur for the Securities and Exchange Commision.  The disguise was chosen by my case agent, who has been watching a lot of John From Cincinnati.

4.  “Sources indicate protestor advance teams have been spotted by police taking video and photographs of the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Omni William Penn Hotel, City Hall, County Courthouse, Fort Pitt and Liberty Tunnels… [video shows rapid fire montage of these and other buildings]“

After some extensive investigation, it appears this one was just Japanese tourists.

5.  “Sources indicate highly-organized protestor advance teams are mapping out possible attack points…”

The sources actually differ here, which was not disclosed by the crack team of KDKA investigative journalists.  While some observers report that the Anarchist Black Cross was behind this nefarious “mapping,” key detainees have claimed innocence, insisting they are geocaching enthusiasts caught up in the haze of espionage.  Others still insist that it was actually a roving band of GIS hacks building a geolocation iPod app for the PA Board of Tourism.

6.  The part about “stockpiling human waste.”

That’s totally true, but unrelated.

In all seriousness, our media continues to plumb the depths in pursuit of the ever-growing simpleton demographic.  My special lady fired off a nice letter to KDKA that sums it up nicely. If you are so inclined, you might do the same.

Dear Marty Griffin,

A friend of mine sent me link to your report about protesters at the G20 summit.  I must say that you made your channel and it’s staff look foolish and anti-American.  The tone of the entire piece treated protesters like terrorists.  Peaceful protest is LEGAL and it is a truly American act.  I am very curious as to how rigorous the source and fact checking was on your “feces throwing” accusations.  The graffiti you showed was a quote from the preamble of our constitution yet you treated it as if it came from some terrorist manifesto.  You gave no evidence that what was obviously the remains of a basic camp fire came from radical, pyromaniac agitators.  I am sick and tired of the scare tactics used by so many local news channels both in my hometown of Cleveland and in Pittsburgh.  You show little respect for your audience and appear to take for granted the freedom of speech that keeps you and other more serious journalists in business.

BackStory:  BackStory is one of my favorite podcasts in any genre.  “On each show, renowned U.S. historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths.”  In addition to the hosts’ impressive knowledge, the show has NPR quality production values and a great sense of humor and relevance. The show is a product of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, who produce a couple other shows (which I’ve yet to hear) through their VFH Radio project.

StuffYouMissedInHistoryClass: This one is produced by HowStuffWorks.com, which initially made me a bit skeptical.  I was quickly won over though.  Historians Candace Gibson and Jane McGrath investigate “the stories behind the lines of your textbooks.”  The topics range from esoteric (e.g. the history of happiness) to  topical (“Historically inaccurate movies”) to explanations (“How the Marshall Plan worked”) and conversations appropriate for younger students (“Did Betsy Ross really make the first American Flag?”).

BingeThinkingHistory:  While the previous two podcasts are conversational and focus on American history, this project – a one man show by Tony Cocks -  is oriented toward British and European history.  Since I know very little about European history, I am both intrigued and confounded by the subject matter.   Luckily the host has a dignified English voice and a knack for telling history in a narrative, documentary style that makes good use of music and background audio (e.g. the sounds of battlefield artillery).  So I like it, even though I don’t really know what he’s talking about.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has a wide selection of “eminent historians discussing major topics in American history”, which they release as audio podcasts.  My first impression of the project site was that this would be a stuffy, old-school academic series wherein pokey old coots discussed their own greatness by way of displaying their mad lecture skillz.  I also thought it would cater primarily to college students and other academics.  In fact, there are some really interesting and informative lectures here, and it serves as a really great resource for pretty much any group above maybe middle school.  I noticed a handful of  high school teacher comments on the project site, reminding me that some teachers actually challenge their students to do real historical thinking.  Imagine that.

HistoryPodcast/HistoryOnAir … “Jason Watts is the host of History Podcast and an amateur historian. It should be noted that he is not a professional.”  That’s what it says on the site, but ignore that (or sit and quietly appreciate it).  Jason does a good job of documenting his sources and telling historical stories, and has been doing it since 2005.  This is actually a nice little operation, and it looks like Jason is beginning to use video and visualization tools so this is one to watch.  Users can submit topics, ideas, and even scripts for new episodes.  Also of note is the provision of transcripts and citations for each episode, which is handy for students who might want to explore a topic in more detail.  There’s also a big list of additional podcasts you might want to check out.

So there’s a brief list.  I actually have a backlog of additional podcasts in my iTunes library that I haven’t had time to review, so I may add more to this post or continue the topic in a new post as I find more quality podcasts.   Please use the comments section to suggest some others you like.

Like any zealot, I spend weekends, evenings, social engagements, and holidays ranting about the things that really get on my nerves.  Today, July 4th, a day commemorating the birth of our glorious nation, I spent the early afternoon orating on the relative merits of the LMS in hopes of fomenting revolution.  I am currently taking an Information Architecture course, ironically offered only through BlackBoard, the arch-nemesis of all that is righteous and enlightened in higher education, a blithely tyrannical George III to Web 2.0’s promise of digital democracy, a naval blockade on usability and information seeking behavior, an unjust tax levied on the collective sanity of the student body.

Maybe I’m taking this too seriously, you say?  Well, what did you do to celebrate America today? Eat some hotdogs?  Listen to some Lee Greenwood tunes?  I think it’s clear who the real patriot is.  Hit the break for the full thread.  Names have been changed to protect the innocent, the neutral, and the obsequiously monarchical.

Click on the image for the full size view or scroll down for the transcript…

Click image for full size view

1. ME: Can we discuss the IA of Blackboard?  I’m not trying to complain.  I understand why it is useful for instructors, but it is pretty rough on student users (poor organization, poor labeling, poor navigation, seemingly no interest in student information needs/behaviors, etc.).   I think it might actually be an interesting case study.  Then again, I’ve been reading a lot of Jim Groom lately
2. STUDENT:I couldn’t agree with you more. Clunky and awkward at best isn’t it?
3. STUDENT:I agree, it could use a little better organization. Sometimes there are 2 left-hand navigation menus, that’s unusual.
4. STUDENT: Very good observation, because I was thinking about that when I first used the site. So context is covered, and content is covered, but it could be more USER friendly. This site is built for knot-item seeking. Once you learn the system, you can get to where you need to be and use the system.
5. INSTRUCTOR: It’s interesting to see what both student and faculty users have to say about Blackboard. I’ve yet to meet anyone who is thrilled with it. Here are a couple of items that might shed some light on why Blackboard is designed and arranged the way it is:1) The students don’t get to see this, but there are actually three sets of users who can interface with Blackboard: Course Designers, Instructors and Students. Depending upon roles to which you’ve been designated, there are three different “tabs” one could access: Build, Teach, and Student. Students don’t see these tabs because they only have one role — Student. All three roles/tabs have access to the same “Course Tools” (the first set of left-hand navigational choices). However, the next set of tools change depending upon the roles to which you have access. If you access the class as a designer, the bottom navigation is labeled “Designer Tools” and has a set of links unique to that role, if as an instructor, then “Instructor Tools”, if as a student then I believe it’s “My Tools.” Without knowing about the different roles, I can see how two, separate sets of global navigation would make no sense.2) Another part of Blackboard I think most users struggle with is the idea that the Course Tools don’t offer much other than a *completely* different way to access the content than offered through the Course Content home page. In building a class, the designer chooses the tools on the left, builds the assets, and then sets links to these assets in other places. Learning modules are sets of topical, sequential links to assets created using the other tools. Sound counter-intuitive? It is if you approach the course design and layout with a web/hyperlink mentality. And there’s the problem. This is elearning. We use the internet to access the training and we, as users, expect it to follow modicums similar to that of sites on the World Wide Web. And this is a fair expectation. However, Blackboard is instead arranged to give users access to the same material in a number of different ways, which is a good idea but read on.So based upon what we’ve been reading, why might users get frustrated with Blackboard. The first one is that even though it is a good idea to offer multiple roads to the same content, there is *no predominate organizational scheme*. Should I primarily use the global tools on the left because they never change? Should I navigate the course like a web site simply from the Course Content page? What is the main road? What if I’m serendipitous? How lost and confused could I become? Also the labels, while familiar, English words, may not be self-evident in their meaning. What is a “Learning module?” Where will that take me? I imagine that assignments will be part of the course content, but I’ve got this other button labeled “Course Content”, why should I choose one over the other?The good news is that the next iteration of Blackboard is seeking to address a number of these issues. Which is a good thing considering over 70% of all universities in the United States use Blackboard as their learning management system.
6. ME: There are many reasons why BlackBoard works for instructors and those listed are all relevant. I have designed courses, modules, and quizzes, and tracked student submissions, etc. in BlackBoard during my time as a graduate assistant for a professor who taught some “elearning” type courses.Aside from automating some administrative tasks (gradebooks, adding/tracking users, etc), I don’t see anything in BBs repertoire that justifies it’s poor usabiity and it’s high subscription cost to universities. For something so costly, you would think they would have invested in some user studies and maybe a post-1998 design upgrade. As far as I can tell, 95% of BBs functionality could be duplicated in WordPress (with a few plug-ins and maybe some creative use of GoogleDocs) or some other free/open source system. Of course, the university would have to support this with staff (maybe one guy and a server) and some minimal training for admins (probably less than what it takes to learn BB) and they would come out ahead over time (if not monetarily, then in staff development). Likewise, I’m not sure any LMS can devise a “learning environment” that suits real learning needs when they necessarily design around the generic admin/user. Plus, anecdotal evidence suggests that students are actually more engaged and interactive when they know they are working in the “open web” and not inside the BlackBoard blackbox.So I clearly have issues with BB that go beyond IA, but considering that I’m typing right now in a very tiny text box (maybe 80px high) with a broken editor (at least, using Firefox) inside a pop-up window, dreading the occasional BB-induced browser crash, etc.; the poor design just amplifies all the other issues I have with this system.I work in part as an educational technologist for the History Dept. (or at least for a few courses and workshops), so I know how hard it is to support unique projects and design around technological deficits (in software, user/admin ability, etc.), but I think we can do better than this.And again, I am not directing this at CSU (where I happily work) or the professor (who has limited, if any, choices when it comes to online course platforms). For anyone who is interested in exploring this topic, you can find some good debates online, many of which center around this guy:Jim Groom, Ed-Tech at Univ of Mary Washington, and inventor of “edupunk” movement. See his blog (http://bavatuesdays.com/) as well as interviews and stories in NYT and Chronicle of Higher Ed, among others. He of course is not the only person to voice dissatisfaction with BB, but he is by far the most visible.Sorry if I got carried away on this little side-topic, but I have seen many bright young minds crack under the weight of BlackBoard Happy 4th!