Monthly Archives: January 2005

Building custom searches for Firefox

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Here is a pretty simple little Firefox hack that nearly any semi-geeky person could implement. If you are using Firefox you may have noticed that the search window that is built into the browser can be extended to include a variety of search engines and Web sites. The screenshot below shows the list of search plugins that I have installed in my copy of Firefox. If your school Web site has a search form, there is a good chance that you could build a plugin that students, staff, and parents could use in their own browsers.

Screenshot of Firefox search plugin list

There are hundreds of little search plugins that can be downloaded from the Mozdev site. After doing a little reading in the documentation, I discovered that it is remarkably easy to create custom search plugins. I immediately made one that allows our tech support people to do searches in Request Tracker, our tech support ticketing system. Since none of you can search our trouble ticketing system, I thought I would show you the code for a plugin to search the WordPress support forum. It looks like this:

# WordPress Support Forum Search by Tim Wilson
# Created: Jan 20, 2005
#
<search
 version="7.1"
 name="WordPress Support Forum"
 description="WordPress Support Forum - Search forum threads and posts"
 action="http://wordpress.org/support/search.php"
 searchForm="http://wordpress.org/support/"
 method="GET">
 <input name="q" user>
 <input name="sourceid" value="Mozilla-search">
</search>

This technique only works with search engines that use GET to send the queries, but that seems to cover most of the interesting ones. Once you get this code, just add a 16×16 pixel image for the menu and put the two files in your Firefox search plugin directory. (See these instructions to find the proper directory on your computer.) If you want to get really fancy, you can create a Web page that includes a little Javascript so that the search plugin will be installed automatically with a single mouse click. I did that for our tech support staff so the install would be the same whether they are running Windows or OS X.

This little hack and the dozens of other extensions make Firefox the most customizable browser available and a great choice for schools.

Fighting comment spam with rel=”nofollow”

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Comment spam is much more annoying than standard email spam because it’s splattered all over a public Web site. I can deal with the occasional offer for a low interest mortgages, online gambling, and assorted male “enhancements,” but neither I nor any teachers in my district want to put up with that garbage on a public blog. Like regular email spam, comment spam proliferates because it’s effective. In the case of comment spam the chief aim of the spammers seems to be to elevate their Web sites’ listings in the various search engines by littering blog comments with links to their sites.

The folks at Google have come up with what appeas to be a pretty clever solution to the problem. Instead of continuing the comment spam arms race, the Google team suggests adding the attribute (rel="nofollow") on all hyperlinks that are including in blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. The “nofollow” will tell Google’s Web indexing spider to disregard the link when it calculates the target site’s Page Rank. This solution seeks to take away the comment spammers’ incentive to create comment spam in the first place without harming the innocent bloggers.

To their credit, MSN Search and Yahoo! immediately agreed to follow Google’s lead and stop crediting sites that are linked with the “nofollow” attribute. The key to making this work is the support of the blogging software creators. Six Apart immediately announced that they would implement “nofollow” in MovableType and at TypePad and LiveJournal. The “nofollow” will be added automatically by the blogging software. I expect every piece of blogging software to support this feature in their next release.

So what are the downsides? Not every link in blog comments are spam, and automatically adding “nofollow” to those links will effectively punish the linked site. (Sort of punishment by omission, I guess.) Here’s a quote by PantherMachina on the WordPress support forum:

When I post on other people’s blogs I’m not creating spam, I’m posting my viewpoint to be shared with people, and if people like it they click through for other things that I’ve said on other subjects. If all goes well, then the incestous [sic] blog community works and my blog gets more popular while the people whose blogs I comment on also get more popular, everybody wins and when I search for my name, I get ranked higher.

Of course, this really doesn’t affect my site much. I make it a habit of closing comments a week or so after each post. Some basic text filtering has stopped 95% of the comment spam from ever getting posted in the first place. But for the millions of bloggers who don’t exercise that level of supervision, “nofollow” sounds like a winner to me.

Serialize books via RSS

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RSS technology continues to inspire creative ideas. Russell Beattie wonders what it would be like to read long texts a chunk at a time by having portions delivered regularly to your favorite RSS aggregator:

I just had an idea for a system where you could choose any one of the public domain eBooks out there and have a small chunk delivered daily via RSS. Many of us are too busy to read classic books out there, instead choosing “page turners” or books that are more applicable to our every day lives (like a some new marketing book). But we do have time to zip through our aggregator daily, right? So by taking a 500 page novel and distributing it, a few pages at a time, via RSS, we could read a new book in a month or so without even trying.

I wasn’t familiar with Russell’s blog or work until now, but he’s created a site called Mobdex which appears to be a more user friendly interface Project Gutenberg etexts. You can subscribe to all of the Mobdex texts via RSS. I just subscribed to The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois.

Teaching tech-savvy students

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In an article (subscription only) in today’s Wall Street Journal, reporter Kevin Delaney highlights some of the really cool work that a couple Hopkins teachers have been doing with online forums over the last year or so. John Unruh-Friesen and Molly Wieland have been engaging their students in authentic and engaging conversations about things that really matter.

Meanwhile, students in John Unruh-Friesen’s advanced-placement government class at Hopkins High School conduct running debates on an online forum outside of the classroom. The students, mostly 12th-graders, tackle issues including the presidential election, the possibility of a military draft and the Middle East conflict.

What the reporter doesn’t mention is that John’s students’ work on the forum is extra-curricular. Here’s an example (from memory): Last year at one point, posting on the forum hit a bit of a lull. One of the students wanted to ignite some debate so he posted a new thread entitled “Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the 20th Century.” Not surprisingly, a number of students took the “bait” and a lively discussion ensued. What did surprise me was the nature of the debate. One pro-Reagan student found an interesting graphic showing the growth of the U.S. economy during the Reagan years and used it to support his argument. Soon after, another student posted a graphic showing the growth of the U.S. debt during the same period. That’s the kind of learning and thinking that doesn’t take place during a regular class period.

Thanks to the language support built into Moodle, the online learning tool that our teachers use to supplement their face-to-face courses, Molly’s French students interact in a forum where even the menus are in French.

The fact that they’re writing for an audience larger than just their teacher makes a difference, and what they’re saying tends to be more conversational and relevant to the students’ lives. A recent exchange between the students involved college choices and the wisdom of rooming with your best friend in the dorm—all in French.

I know that Molly’s students write more now that they’re writing for each other and not just their teacher.

I have to say that it was pretty cool to be interviewed for an article in a national newspaper. Congrats, too, to my blogging colleagues Will, Tim, and Thor who were also interviewed.

Protecting your home network

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I was chatting with a couple teachers tonight after school who were having a bit of trouble getting their laptops to connect to the Internet from their home broadband connections. Although this is a bit of a departure from what I usually post here I thought it would be useful to post some information that might help others who find themselves with a similar problem. The fix is simple and relatively cheap, especially when you consider some of the other benefits.

The problem stems from a relatively recent change in policy by most of the major broadband Internet providers. It’s always been the case that standard residential broadband service has included service for a single computer only, but most providers happily doled out multiple IP addresses for any customer who had more than one computer trying to access the Internet. Now many customers are finding that once one computer gets online, none of the rest of the machines in the house can get connected.

The solution is to buy a separate firewall/router device for your home network. One of the most popular, and my favorite choice for the average home user, is the Linksys WRT54GS which can be purchased online or at one of the major computer retailers for around $50. The device has multiple functions. It’s a router to allow multiple machines to access the same broadband Internet connection, a firewall to protect your home network from the bad guys, and a wireless access point to get you online from the comfort of your recliner. Maybe the most important feature in these virus- and spyware-infested times is the firewall. I can’t emphasize this enough. No computer should be connected directly to a cable modem without a firewall. Even if you only have one computer in your house and don’t need all the features of this router, get one or something like it for the firewall alone. A separate firewall like this will protect you from many of the risks associated with a broadband Internet connection.

National Education Technology Plan to be unveiled Friday

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Secretary of Education Rod Paige will unveil the third National Education Technology Plan on Friday, Jan. 7th at 3:00 p.m. in Washington, D.C. Development of a new NETP was a requirement of the No Child Left Behind
Act. The unveiling will be webcast live at KidzOnline. According to the NETP Web page:

The Plan will establish a national strategy supporting the effective use of technology to improve student academic achievement and prepare them for the 21st century. It provides an opportunity to reflect on the progress our nation has made as a result of a decade of increased federal, state, local and private investments in connecting classrooms to the Internet, providing students with computers, and equipping teachers with the skills they need to use technology as an instructional tool.

Will the plan deliver? I will be interested to see how relevant it is to the world I work in every day.

NetNewsWire does podcasting

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NetNewsWire, my favorite RSS aggregator, supports podcasts in its latest beta version. Until now I’d been using NetNewsWire for my daily RSS feeding frenzy and iPodder or iPodderX for my podcast downloads. The new version of NNW downloads RSS enclosures and automatically imports MP3s into iTunes. If you run OS X, check out the new NNW beta.