Ryan Collins

Following lots of people on Twitter? You need ReadTwit

// January 12th, 2010 // No Comments » // Online Tools, Software, Time Management

photo credit: fifikins

A couple of months ago I decided to expand my use of Twitter, and began following more and more people in the education community. This was awesome, until I realized I could not keep up with the barrage of data that I was being given. In November I started brainstorming ideas on how to keep up. I noticed in any of my twitter clients that they were not grabbing all the tweets that had been posted from the last time I checked. The reason being is the API only gives you the last 200 tweets, and for me that was about 40 minutes worth.

My first course of action was to write some software that would grab the tweets from my @mr_rcollins timeline, parse the info and store it in a MySQL database. Besides pulling out the data I was interested in of each tweet, I also stored the complete tweet. This became impractical, since in a month the complete tweets themselves occupied 4.2GB! I stopped storing the complete tweets which left me with a 20MB database after a 5 weeks of collecting, which was a lot more manageable.

The next step was to start parsing the tweet’s text for urls, resolve any shortened urls, and dump them into another table for me to peruse. While I got that software working, I came across ReadTwit.com. This is a great service that will take your timeline, parse out the urls, resolve shortened links, and give you a RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite RSS reader (I use Google Reader. Now I just go through Reader like normal, and am able to tag/star important sites that are posted to my Twitter timeline.

Facebook’s new privacy settings

// December 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // Online Tools, RC Tips, Security

photo credit: ekurvine

Facebook has begun rolling out new settings for who can see your Facebook profile and what they can see on your profile. I suggest you double-check what is viewable about you. I try to keep my personal FB totally separate from my Facebook Page, so my profile is pretty much locked down. Over at Digital Inspiration they’ve written an article on How to Cross-Check Your Facebook Privacy Settings.

Setup a Facebook Page instead of using your personal FB account

// December 6th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // 21st Century Skills, Featured, Online Tools, Web 2.0

Unfortunately, your created page has a very unwieldy url. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ryan-Collins/181385642299. What I’ve done is setup a redirect from my website to point ryancollins.org/facebook to my Facebook Page. Be sure to become a friend when you visit!

One common question I see asked all the time is whether or not teachers should friend students on Facebook. Although you can set your privacy settings on Facebook to hide certain aspects of your life from groups of friends, this isn’t fool proof. Friending everyone including students and parents simply begins breaking down yet another wall between your professional life and personal life.

What you can do is create a Facebook Page for yourself. This gives you a presence on Facebook that can be used professionally which is totally separated from your person life.

“A Facebook Page is a public profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users. Create one in a few minutes with our simple interface.”

Unfortunately, your created page has a very unwieldy url. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ryan-Collins/181385642299. What I’ve done is setup a redirect from my website to point http://ryancollins.org/facebook to my Facebook Page. Be sure to become a friend when you visit!

Facebook Pages are not limited to people either, you could also create a Page for each class you teacher or other departments within your organization.

More information about creating a Facebook Page:

• How to: Create a Facebook Fan Page
• 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page
• How To Create and Promote Your Facebook Fan Page

Group Twitterbot is broken. :-(

// May 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // Online Tools, Software

Twitter updated how direct messages are emailed, so my Group Twitterbot code is now broken. I’m hopefully going to be able to work on it this week. I’m planning on fixed this problem and set it up so it’s more stand alone, you’ll be able to use it anywhere you can have a php based web page.

Online collaboration with EtherPad

// May 7th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Online Tools, Software, Web 2.0

Etherpad, which was open to users, then closed, appears to now be open again. It is an online collaborative text editor usable by anyone with an Internet connection, a browser, and Javascript. There is no sign up required, you just share a unique URL with the people you want to collaborate with. Each user is color coded and there is a chat box. You can use the random URL assigned or make one up just by appending the name of the document to the end of the url:

http://etherpad.com/NAMEOFDOCUMENT

It has a couple of advantages of using the word processing aspect of Google Docs. For starters, it’s dead simple to get people involved just by sharing the url. It is also realtime, you see the edits of the other people as they make them. There is also a chat box to discuss changes as you make them.

They also offer a private hosted version, but there isn’t any pricing available on the website.

Although some school districts will be wary of using a product that would allow their students to chat throughout the district, I think the advantages would outweigh these concerns.

Uses in the school include after hour editing assistance, a student could send the link to a document they’re working on to their teacher, and both can work on the document. Also, any group projects could use it for notes, planning, todo lists, etc., available to all the members of the group.

Google Spreadsheet Forms for class/meeting sign-ups

// February 9th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Online Tools, Professional Development, Software, Web 2.0

I was trying to think of a quick and easy way to have my staff sign up for classes. Right before I sat down to whip something up with a little php/mysql I realized I could just use a google form.

To get started, log into Google Docs and under the New button, one of the options is Form.

From there you can create your form. I only needed two pieces of information, their name and which class. For the user to enter their name I created the first item as a text field in which they would enter their name (and Google makes this easy for you since that’s what the first item defaults to. I did set it to be a required field though. For the class list I used a dropdown field. Each choice I labeled with the date of the class, the class title, and the time of the class. I didn’t go into great depths like a description of the class since that is emailed to the staff and available on the Technology Staff Development site in Moodle. Now the staff can easily sign up for classes, I can quickly find out how many people are in each class, and I can remove the class when the sign up deadline is past or when the class is full. The spreadsheet can also be used to take attendance.

Group Twitter bot

// January 16th, 2009 // 4 Comments » // 21st Century Skills, Online Tools, Software

Chris Hamady had the idea that at the eTech Ohio State Technology Conference we should be able to use Twitter to communicate great things that individuals see throughout the conference. It needed to be set up easy enough for people that have not been using Twitter to use. After discussions with John Schinker, they contacted me and I came up with the idea of a twitter bot that people would follow, and direct messages to that bot would be sent to all the bot’s followers. This way most people can just follow the bot and get updates, and those that wanted to send out an update would only need to send a direct message to the bot with the update.

The way the bot works is off of the emails that Twitter sends out when a Twitter account receives a notification of a new follower or a direct message. The requirements for the bot are:
• A twitter account (in this case it is etechohio09)
• An email account with POP3 access (in this case a gmail account is used. This email account address needs to be secret because there isn’t any checking on the validity of where an email came from so this would allow people without even a Twitter account to spam the bot)
• a unix based host with php at the command line (I use Ubuntu, but it should work in OS X)
• fetchmail also needs to be available

The process to set up the bot is as follows:
1. An email account is set up at gmail. This account must of pop3 turned on, which you can do from the gmail settings.
2. Create a Twitter account, using the above email account. In Twitter be sure to go to Settings -> Notices and have the notices for followers and direct messages checked.
3. Set up an account on the unix host for the bot.
4. Login to the account on the unix host.
5. Create the .fetchmailrc:

     nano -w .fetchmailrc

6. Enter the following lines to that file:

     set logfile /home/UNIXACCOUNT/fetchmail.log

     poll "pop.gmail.com" proto POP3 timeout 100 no uidl
     no envelope user "BOTACCOUNT@gmail.com"
     password "BOTPASSWORD" fetchlimit 100 ssl

7. Create the logfile:

     touch fetchmail.log

8. Create the .forward file:

     nano -w .forward

9. Enter the following line:

     |"/home/UNIXACCOUNT/twitterbot.php"

10. Download twitterbot.php, and make it executable:

     chmod +x twitterbot.php

11. Edit twitterbot.php and enter your Twitter username and password:

     nano twitterbot.php

12. Start up fetchmail in daemon mode and your bot should be functional.

     fetchmail -d 60

What will happen is that fetchmail will check the email account every 60 seconds. Any email will be downloaded and each message passed to twitterbot.php. twitterbot.php will examing the headers for the twitter command and then act accordingly. If it is a new follower, twitterbot will start following that person. If it is a direct message, twitterbot will then post that message to the bot’s timeline for all its followers to read.

The email class used for this twitterbot came from phpclasses.org, modified to pull out a few of the X-headers that Twitter adds so the bot can figure out the type of message and who is sending it.

Free access to Encyclopedia Britannica articles

// April 19th, 2008 // No Comments » // Online Tools

Encyclopedia Britannica, through their Encyclopedia Britannica Webshare program allows web publishers free online access to the encyclopedia and the ability to give their readers free access to an article in its entirety.

A special program for web publishers, including bloggers, webmasters, and anyone who writes for the Internet. You get complimentary access to the Encyclopaedia Britannica online and, if you like, an easy way to give your readers background of the topics you write about with links to complete Britannica articles.

I don’t see anything in the FAQ about limiting access to educational institutions, but they do check any who is applying to see if they really have a blog and publish regularly (left up to them whether you qualify).

This free access is in no doubt related to the popularity of Wikipedia (for every page view on EB online, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia). I applaud their effort to stay relevant and to offer this ability to Internet users.

And what a great motivational tool to get teachers blogging!

Online XHTML character encoder

// November 15th, 2007 // No Comments » // Online Tools

Need a quick an easy way to convert html code to the html entities so you can post online? Check out the online XHTML Character Encoder. It will let you take something like this:

<h1>This is a test</h1>

into something like this that you can post:

<h1>This is a test</h1>

Websites to create newsletters, brochures, albums, and cards

// September 21st, 2007 // No Comments » // Online Tools, Web 2.0

From the NCS-Tech blog: Meet your “Maker” – Newsletters, Brochures, Albums and Postcards

Thanks to a tip from my friend and colleague Nancy Sharoff, I am pleased to tell you about these VERY cool and FREE of course services offering fast and easy creation of professional looking newsletters, brochures, photo albums and postcards Who needs Microsoft Publisher??

• http://www.mynewslettermaker.com/
• http://www.mybrochuremaker.com/
• http://www.myalbummaker.com/
• http://www.mycardmaker.com/