Hammering at OPC (Other People’s Code)

I’m not an elegant programmer. My stuff is verbose and rarely, if ever “refactored” (meaning I know it’s a term but fuzzy on the meaning). What follows is a recap of my wand… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Ontario Extend mOOC: the soft opening

Yes, life gets curse-like interesting when after mocking something you end up using it. But here we go, the edX hosted mOOC (medium sized Open Online Course) I’ve been working on is getting i… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

A Plugin For Your Blogged Past

Once you have a few years of blogging in your archives, you thus have some history (doh). And I made a little plugin to make it more visible, to generate a list of previous year’s post publis… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Episode 8: Baby, It’s Cold!

Talking to Antonio in December he made it sound like he was in a scene from The Day After… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Digging into an obscure WordPress Error; not quite Brain Surgery

You are working on some project and just decide to look at an older WordPress site that should be just sitting there humming along, and see this… Fatal error message on thoughtvectors.net Fat… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Turning Up the SPLOTbox Amp to 11.5: New Features

It’s felt like maybe as long as a week since I blogged something about SPLOTs… that’s a long span ;-) But in that time I have been doing some major banging on the tubes and pedals… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

The #Netnarr Team is Back for 2019

One of the most rewarding things I have gotten to do the last few years (and this may be a blog post lacking mention of SPLOTs, hah!) has been teaching co-teaching the Networked Narratives open cou… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Free (as in discard at will) Advice for #PressEdConf

Last March I was fortunate to have participated in the uniquely formatted PressEd Conference. Unique it was because there was no air travel, no hotels, no rows of chairs under fluorescent lighting,… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Wrenching a Font Awesome 5 Menu Plugin

Sometimes in technology you just have to whack a wrench at something to make it work. Way back when I started at the Maricopa Community Colleges, there was a surly old guy named “Bill” … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

A Year Reflects Through the Lens

The sound calendar flipping comes with it the rounds of The People That Still Blog writing their summaries of the flipped year and/or the hopes/promises of the year being flipped to. Without resort… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Is Will in the Right Place?

“Will”, someone I don’t know, spends his finite time on this planet emailing strangers asking the not so philosophical question, “Am I In the Right Place?” Hi Alan,Wil… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Reviving the 1990s EduWeb: Teaching & Learning on WWW site

All of my web work from 1992-2006 at the Maricopa Community Colleges was wiped from the web after I left. It was big pile of stuff for sure but it was the first of several experiences which informe… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

I sometimes tell people that when technology evangelists espouse that their tool saves you time, that it’s a red flag warning / code talk for “I am lying”. But here, I share my on… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Does Adding Accessibility Features Make the Good Ship Instagram Accessible?

Even before a tl;dr (as if I do them anyhow), I am about as far from a web accessibility expert as my dog. But I’ve taken a curious interest since summer 2018 when Twitter made a big deal of … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Another SPLOT Needs a Parental [Theme] Fix

I thought myself rather clever to make a post about dealing with WordPress theme changes related to the parent theme that powers the TRU Writer SPLOT. But then it happened again.  Yes, my work are … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Is That My Photo?

Best days are when the Internet is not full of poop but provides a funny little surprise. I live for them. I’ll drop the spoiler first. This happened. I’ve had several times of searchin… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Try That Burger Again

 Okay, I have been grumpy about the new WordPress Gutenberg “editing experience” I did give it a try a month ago but am so comfortable in my writing flow, that I found it really getting… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Oh The Irony of Driving This Train

Sometimes your own blogging can turn around and nip at ya. One of my favorite tags of posts has been moocmocking. Now I’m riding the train, gimme an “M”… That’s right,… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

What to do When Your WordPress Parents Change? Important Update for TRU Writer SPLOT

Things can go crazy for you when your parents go changing… especially when that’s a change in a WordPress parent theme. This might be important for you if you have used the TRU Writer S… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

This is not the SEO You Were Looking For

Yes, I know what SEO is, a term I don’t profess any useful knowledge (or interest) in. My simple approach has been- you want a lot of people to see your stuff? Write/publish a lot of it, shar… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Englebarting Convergence

I consider myself so fortunate to have had a few Doug Engelbart convergences in my career. That featured image at the top was made by me after he was a guest at a 2006 NMC Board Meeting. I took my … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Improvisieren mit Zufälligen Fotos: Pechaflickr Jumps the Language Shark

This was a nice surprise to see early in my Twitter gazing this morning. So yes, check out pechaflickr.de (yikes just checked and its not working, hope it comes back) That’s a rather impressi… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

The Proverbial Why Blog Post (and is it a Howitzer?)

Blogging about blogging is a repeated trope inside this blog and I’d bet commonly elsewhere. Why do it again? It seems appropriate for my last (and consistently late, but one of the things ab… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

If All You Have is the Web, Everything Looks Like a SPLOT

I tried really hard, really hard, to turn make cleaver use of Maslow’s Hammer as this post’s metaphoric title “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” And… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

It Took All Summer To Publish Two PR Connection Podcasts and All Fall to Blog About It

And it’s all worth it. Especially as Antonio Vantaggiato stay in touch through the interwebs. As he reminded me in September, it was a year since we started our plan to share his and students… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Kidding Around With the WordPress Customizer

In my last post I mentioned making a child WordPress theme mainly to offer customization to parts of theme footer that is usually hard coded. Maybe it’s too much detail, but I thought it a sm… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 5 years ago

Reclaiming My Presentation Archive Nuked By Wikispaces

There is a pattern to my blogging where I think I am sitting down to write a post, then referring back to an older one, and finding it has a reference or link into it that links to one of my wikisp… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Doing/Making Dailies

Someone has to make the donuts dailies every day, and few do it better than Terry The Baker Greene (who does it with sauce). This is close to Terry’s method: Or as he 9x9x25-ed: If I were ask… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Multiple Days of Thanks

Friends and family from the US have been sending Happy Thanksgiving messages, which are appreciated, and thanked, also with a notice that since I now live in Canada, our Thanksgiving was a month a … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

When a WordPress Child Theme Becomes a Parent

Kids grow up and become parents, or at least stand alone adults, so what happens when a WordPress child theme can absorb their parent? Is this metaphor slipping down a slipper slope? So here is the… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Now With Previews: TRU Collector SPLOT

Coming soon, well now, to a SPLOT near you- the ability to preview content before you submit it. Try a beta version now at — or see this mini screen capture video: Because it was aimed at lon… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Sure, Third Party Service, I Will Give You Permission to Delete My Calendar (?)

Pretend you don’t know me. To save you some manual effort you surely won’t mind giving me permission to not only add things to your calendar, but also, you are okay with me sharing your… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Making It a Regular Habit: Writing Image Descriptions

It just takes repetition for new habits to become ingrained ones. That seems logical, but heck, in 2018, logic is not what it used to be (let’s save this tangent for an offline rant). For thi… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Double SPLOT: 2 New One Click Installs at Reclaim Hosting

If you host your web sites on Reclaim Hosting you are not only going with the best service going, you get things like one click installs via cpanel of a suite of tools you won’t find elsewher… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Instagram Adpot: #count6 numbers decreasing

Mystery numbers. It was a Lost thing, not lost on data fueled advertising. It was back in March 2016 I started noticing first the presence, than the patterned appearance of what Instagram calls … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Since I Had Not Shaved This Month… Movember it is

When working at home one can get lax with the shaving schedule… as it was I was scrubbly already when Cori asked me if I was participating in Movember. Why not? I found I already had an accou… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Talking Sharing With Ken Bauer on Episode 21 of Flipped Learning Podcast

Nobody is anto-sharing, are they? Still it’s something I end up talking about alot. Recently, I got a chance to talk openly about it with friend and colleague Ken Bauer, as an episode of a po… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

I have blogged not to bury flickr nor to praise it…

I’ve had a 14+ year loving relationship with flickr since joining in maybe March 2004. I’ve seen all of the prognostications of its death after its sale to Yahoo and absorption into Yah… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Bringing the Doghouse and WordPress Portfolios to ETUG18

Thanks to Colin Madland I got to co-present out work on creating a system for WordPress hosted portfolios for over 500 new students at Trinity Western University. I was unable to attend in person, … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Non Content Video

Yikes. Guess who is a week behind in 9x9x25 blogging. Good thing no one is keeping count. Right Terry? Mine was triggered by reading a 9x9x25 post by JR Dingwell, A different approach to the ‘video… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

dis-now

When someone loves you fully they often read you better than you think you know yourself. I’m blessed to have that in my life now. In a recent dinner conversation where I was sharing with Cor… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Stepping on a WordPress Password Bug

Pesky WordPress bugs, this is how we take care of them. It’s all about isolating the problem, some keyword searching, and a smattering of luck. This post just for my own reference. I’m … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

A Few More Discs for SPLOTbox

A good jukebox can always stand a few more kinds of music put into the rotation, right? I’ve just made some updates to the SPLOTbox media collector in response to a request from Dave Quinn. I… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Twitter Life Cycle reclaimed from Wikispaces Self Annihilation

There’s little end in sight for fixing all the dead links I have to Content Previously Housed on Wikispaces since they went and pooped their own web bed. Another one today when Ken Bauer twee… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Creative Commons Irony for 500, Alex

It was one thing to be in a discussion about Creative Commons license and then right after, get an email request to use one of my CC licensed flickr photos for a music group’s release, but la… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

The Road to Sharing is Not Paved With Licenses

I’ll always take “Serendipity for 500”, Alex. There was a healthy, many pathed Twitter conversation yesterday started with a statement by Robin DeRosa I’ve posted more than … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

A Few More Switches and Gizmos for SPLOTs

Actually it’s just switches, like things to turn on and off. When I wrote the title, “switches” by itself sounded like things were changing. So imagine the gizmos. As it likely ha… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

For Her Birthday, another episode of Granny’s Stories

The calendar reminder notifies me that yesterday would have been my grandmother’s 113th birthday. If I could talk to her, I’d tease about that being a lucky number. She would laugh that… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago