This Old Catfish

I pretty much gave up on writing about and hoping that writing about catfishing might have some impact (yup just checked, more than 2 years since last post on it). Of course that hardly means that … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Modernizing the Dog House: SSL & Gutenberg

I’m a bit late to getting this blog ready for the next era. But there is no time like now to get started. First, and frankly forced by Google for reasons I am not clear, this site is no longe… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Celebrating a 50 Year Old Demo

And readers think I may go on and on about my old technologies. This guy did a big demo 50 years ago that makes all other demos, including mine, look tiny. If you do not know about the Mother of Al… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Glen Gets the Treatment

I’d like to think it’s rather clear if anyone glances at this blog that despite it’s title, it does not sell dog products, and definitely is not in the genre of home improvement t… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

New Dimensions for WP-Dimension

What else to do on a chilly, blustery, snowy day, sitting on the couch, in front a warm fireplace, side by side blogging with my Cori… then to fiddle with my WordPress themes? Yeah, as she sa… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Canning The Can’ts

I’m fairly sure most thinking humans have an internal, mostly unsaid list of Can’ts. The list of things we have cemented a certainty that we can’t do. They are way down there in t… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Yes, We Do Give out SPLOT Lollies

While I’ve gotten used to sharing most of my code projects in GitHub for the most part my repos are a one dog band. Rarely, I get a message submitted via issues, but for the most part I’… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

WordPress Quick Fixing

Again I will spend more time writing up a blog post about some little thing I did than actually doing the little thing. Maybe it’s my vanity, or just trying to capture how I go about my work.… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

1 x 9 x 25: At a Distance

From way out here to there, here is my first every participating in a 9x9x25 blogging “thing” via the one being run at Ontario Extend led by Terry Greene. I may easily use up my 25 sent… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Shining Up Some SPLOTs

It was sure nice to see the way one of the SPLOTs hatched in 2014 is being used at Coventry University: When I can pry some time I enjoy diving into the code and improving, adding features. And rol… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Cori’s Superpower ~ Eyesight to the Blind

As I gaze out the window at snow falling on October 2, it may help to situate the reader who missed the story that this year I migrated from Arizona to the prairies of Saskatchewan, the call to mov… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Look At That? Is Google Images Showing Photo Credits Metadata?

One of the biggest hurdles in giving and getting attribution for shared photos is that the information that might provide this information is either not included in the photo metadata, or if it is,… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

One More TWU Portfolio Theme For the Road

I’m wrapping up my work with Colin Madland at Trinity Western University creating a collection of clonable WordPress sites with custom child themes intended for the electronic portfolios TWU … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

The Interstellar Bounce of Flickr Explore

Oh the mysteries of having a photo appearing in the flickr explore… The tell-tale sign is seeing a huge spike in the red dot notifications, but sometimes it’s a stream of a few folks wh… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Big Picture WordPress Theme Goes to Unexpected Places

Speaking of HTML5 Up Themes I’ve folded into WordPress ones, I have to say my favorite might be WP Big Picture. Check out the demo site. It has the lush design of the original HTML5up theme, … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Instead of Nothingness, Every New Open Tab Becomes a Public Domain Image Doorway of Curiosity

It won’t put much of a dent in the problematic aspects of the internet, but at least a reminder that it can still be that Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities. Often without much thinking, … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Twenty Five Years on Myst Island

Among the list of “wow it was 25 years ago” was this Fast Company article that came across my twitter stream, “Myst” at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies. In … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Announcing WP-Lens a new, simple WordPress Theme for Photographers

Here is another new experimenting in porting a Creative Commons licensed HTML5 Up template into a WordPress theme, say hello to WP-Lens. This joins my three previous HTML5 Up to WordPress themes, I… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Quick Peek at TWU Portfolios Project

Since August I’ve been working on an up to now unblogged WordPress as portfolio project with Colin Madland at Trinity Western University. Let’s dash the “un”. I remember hea… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Search, Serendipity, Semantically Silent

I opened up WordPress to write something. As often it goes, I got curious about something, fell into rabbit hole, and find myself writing a different post. This is my oft repeated experience on the… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Nobody Makes It Easier to Install a WordPress Calling Card Site, NOBODY

It’s rather exciting to finally see this available on my Reclaim Hosting cpanel… One of the biggest conceptual hurdles IMHO with getting your first domain is understanding that as a mas… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

You Can’t Always Get The Features You Want…

A call came in from Aaron Davis on the coding request line came through for my Export Posts to CSV WordPress plugin. He microblogged today a mention A plugin of mine he had a plan I knew he might n… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

The Pechaflickr Goes On and On (even if the twitter widget does not)

I probably said elsewhere that something else I made online was my favorite thing, but today I am going to say it’s the pechaflickr site I made that combines random images from flickr with pe… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

People (a term used loosely) Who Are Professional Spammers like Gary The Listicle Offerer Miss the Stop Sign in His Face

Oh Gary. Sending out blog comment spam must be wearying if a professional like you manages to miss a rather clear statement that appears in the footer of every page on this blog. Here, as promised,… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

At the End of My Summer of Ontario Extend

The beaches have emptied, the life guards off duty back to their “real jobs”, and I’m just the lone guy on the shore walking around with a metal detector. Today marks the end of m… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

WordPress CSV Export Plugin Now With Date Bookends

My motivation for adding features to stuff I code is increased by all the following: praise, a coin in the top jar, and when it also fits my own needs. I’ve got a little WordPress plugin (my … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Constellations. Metaphors. SPLOT? It’s in the Stars.

I’ve been working on a prototype web site I was asked to do for Tannis Morgan at JIBC. Beyond getting into some new code tricks, the best part of this was how she first approached me on it. W… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Letters Sent, Beaches in the Sky

Dear Mom and Dad, where ever you are, I know you cannot send letters any more, but trust you know what’s in mine. Maybe you can read blogs? These August 27s keep rolling by, extending the tim… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Cleaning Up The WordPress AdminBar New Menu

Tonight the WordPress tinkering I was doing was way down in the weeds, but it never fails me how the codebase let’s you manipulate almost every thing in the interface. So a current project I … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

My 15 Year Old Web Tool Still Works (and was just updated)

It’s become a regular internet FOL (Fact of Life) that web sites, both information ones and web tools, seem to have a shorter and shorter shelf life. There was some good go arounds recently o… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Stick This Podcast on the Refrigerator Door

Better than getting an A on the geometry test, it’s more exciting to use a magnet to attach Episode 218 of the Teaching in Higher Education podcast to the front of my fridge. I was excited wh… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

The Internet Can’t Be That Bad When An Alpaca Blabberizes to You

All this moaning and groaning of how bad, vile, deceptive, awful, broken the internet has become. Yeah parts are, but not all. Not all. Let me shed some alternative light your way. More than 10 yea… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

My Twitter Reach is Directly Proportional to Silliness

I’ve been tweeting since January 2007 (and am infasionable not yet a Deleter). Big deal. For all the times I have crafted a tweet thinking it would put some ripples in the pond, or make comme… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

At Almost Ten Years Old, Five Card Flickr Tells Its Survival Story

Among my fleet of creaky old hand coded web sites like Feed2JS one of my favorite is the Five Card Flickr stories site that is just a few stories short of being 10 years old. I cannot even recall l… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Coding Tiny WordPress Inner Tweaks Nobody May Ever Notice

That shift from using a tool for a task to reshaping it for a future one is maybe the thing I love most about my efforts at coding (given my lesser skills with real hand tools). Quite often I find … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

SPLOT and Calling Card One Click Installs Ignited at Reclaim Hosting

Coming soon to a cpanel near you (if you are hosted by Reclaim Hosting) My favorite work over the last few years, spawned by the Open Learning Fellowship at TRU set up for me by Brian Lamb, has bee… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Gertrude Hammer’s Signature

The memory is dim, like the fuzzy signal of an old analog TV set. The kind you would try and rotate the antenna to get it clear. I’m maybe 5? 7? and enter the Baltimore apartment of a close f… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Making Sense of Blog Post Content Data? My Own Spanner Found in the Bottom of the Toolbox

For the obviously obvious statement, Wordpress is built on a database. The question is, besides data like visitor counts, what can you infer from the data in the posts and metadata itself? The ques… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

We Did a Thing (a month ago)

A lot of things in my life have played out in this blog, in flickr photos, in tweets. But that’s not everything. Not by far. A wonderful new part of my life, that has been in development offl… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Ideating for July’s @ontarioextend Domain Camp

It’s way late in the day before a long weekend, but just to jog some notes down to pick up next week. Besides spawning an Ontario Extend Daily Extend challenge for July I have more plans for … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Pechasplot? Crude Duct Taped WordPress Random Image API

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do with Tom Woodward on building sites that draw content from Wordpress ones via the API but I’ve got reason and interest to start. This has been a back… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Sunday! Sunday! Sergeant Hulka on Duty for the @OntarioExtend Daily Extend 31 Day Challenge

He talks tough, but he just wants you to be creative and join a challenge to do all 31 Daily Extends in July. Don’t let him scare you. He just wants you and maybe a few more people to join in… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Dave Has a Better Magic RSS Box

One of the biggest speed bumps in doing a connected course in the Feed Wordpress style approach is having people figure out the arcane URL for their Blog’s RSS Feed. It’s relatively eas… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Unmasking the Masking Used for an @ontarioextend Daily Extend

A core of the ethos from my years participating and teaching ds106 is the importance of not only creating media, but sharing the behind the scenes “how”. Typically the idea of doing a D… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

The Indispensable Feed Reader Now an @Ontarioextend Curator Module Activity

Call me a web old fogey, I don’t care. I cannot blog enough about the value of using an RSS Reader for tracking a set of blogs, web site sources that are important to your work. I just added … | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Inserting Images When You Cannot Upload Them

I’m a big proponent of using images with my online writing, all of my blog posts start with an image before I even write. But sometimes you do not have access to upload images, but with a lit… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Picking a Noticing Pattern: I’ve Logged 469 Photos of 106’s

The diagnosis is likely on the spectrum of an obsession. In the buildup to the first open version of the open digital storytelling course, the one, the only, DS106, I first saw a sign with a 106 on… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago

Alt-ing Images: Describing Tweeted Photos

Twitter recently enabled features to add descriptions to uploaded images, a huge boon for accessibility. That’s a feature, how do you make it a habit? Well, by doing it. I’ve been tryin… | Continue reading


@cogdogblog.com | 6 years ago