The spammers must be getting desperate today.

First there was an influx of comment spam to my blog. Each comment consisted of a random set of letters and numbers like: “kas8j398sdnsd9fDF7″. Akismet blocked many of them, but several dozen got through.

Then the webteam email at work received several email messages like this. Notice that there is no real ad, or even a link - just a spoofed email address (which I won’t post here for obvious reasons).

Hi,

My mother in law who I was really close to passed away unexpectedly. As sad as it was she left behind a litter of adorable bulldog puppies and parents.

These dogs are well trained, playful with kids and other home pets and they come with complete shots and worming.

Puppies are very playful and they do the funniest things and you just can’t get enough of their playful antics.

Please contact me only if you are interested in providing a loving and caring home for these pets.

Have a nice day.

Lauren.

Perhaps it has to do with this slashdot article.

I just discovered a strange clip from my presentation at the 2008 HighEdWeb conference:

The clip is only 30 seconds long, but for some reason contains about 2 minutes of footage at an increased speed. When hooked to the normal audio it makes me appear to dance around.

Love the 2-arm wave at 0:28. Hallelujah!

Just received the audience feedback from my 2008 HighEdWeb presentation and wanted to share. I thank everyone who attended. Got to love that last comment :)

Evaluation Summary

Comments

These are unedited

• This will help me to at least talk intelligently to the people who will actually do this.

• Great presentation!

• Very nice accessible plaer, lot of thought went into the development.

• Well received!

• Gabriel’s talk was really cool. A great talk on accessile Flash video.

• Would like to see this presentation again!

• I will definitely be sharing this information with our IT “media” guy. We don’t have tons of video yet but we’re working on it and I’m very interested in the use of a generic interface so that we spend our time on the video production NOT the web delivery.

• I’m in marketing, so definitely not technical. This was clearly geared more to technical people, but I would love to see a siilar workshop geared more to those as of us who are less technically savvy.

• Best presentation so far. Gabriel is very knowledgable and very giving of information and techniques. Presentation was extremely helpful. I will be implementing information ASAP.

• Very informative session and interesting! Going to look @ videos on my site again!

• Excellent!!!

• Awesome!

• Show your web site first or earlier. That way I can look at it as we go. It was good that he mentioned what was on the site so I didn’t have to take extensive notes.

• Nice that he provided example files!

• Excellent presnetation plus great resources and code online gives me nearly a plug-n-play solution.

• Me, I liked it. Flash all the way!

• Excellent. Thanks Gabriel!

• Wish had more time.

• I think thi was too technical fr UAD track, but not too technical for me

• Great Job!

• Most excellent.

• Good way to get started

• Well done.

• great job

• Thanks for sharing all of your source files!

• vey clear presentation friendly, communicative speaker

• Good Work!

• looks like I’ll just have to struggle with DragonSpeak….

• Too technical for my particular job description but very helpful in understanding the landscape of accessible video. Our institution has a similarly diverse of distance/infrastructure challenged constituency. Great ideas on accessibility and editabiity! -re distance learning. thanks!!

• Nicely done. Relevant.

• Great job explaining and illustrating the steps to take and the options you have available to consider when publishing an accessible video.

• a bit over my head, but a great presentation!

• Very knowledgable, charismatic, and well documented presentation with easy to follow slides.

• Great to have the presentation already available on his web site. good explanation of process and requirements.

• Very informative Liked it!

• Very God presentation

• Best presentation yet. Perfect balance and pacing.

• Nice nose ring!

Take a look at the two screen captures below.

Both are from the same parking services page. The first is in FireFox 3, the second is in IE 7. JavaScript is being used to change to HREF attribute of mailto links for @pcc.edu addresses. But, why is the inner HTML also changing when viewed in IE?

At first I thought it was a jQuery bug. Here is the code:
$(this).attr("href","http://www.pcc.edu/resources/web/forms/email/?to="+address);

But, after searching it turns out to be an IE bug.

If the text and url of a link match - then Internet Explorer decides to assign them both to the HREF attribute! So, if you alter the HREF then the text will also change… Here is an example:
<a href="http://www.google.com">google.com</a>  // fine - changing href will not change text
<a href="http://www.google.com">http://www.google.com</a> // bad - changing href will change the inner html text


Solutions

1) One answer is to keep the text different, but you may not be the only contributor to the site…

2) Another solution is to keep the HREF local:
$(this).attr("href","/resources/web/forms/email/?to="+address);

But, we have separate sub-domains and need all email to go to the www…

3) So, we are forced to store the inner html:
var linkHtml = $(this).html();
$(this).attr("href","http://www.pcc.edu/resources/web/forms/email/?to="+address).html(linkHtml);

Why am I still surprised by these IE bugs?

Currently siting in the Springfield airport, flight is delayed already, but still should leave in time. Randall is on the same flight. And… Traci just showed up! Hurray!

The last few days have been really crazy. Unfortunately,  managing the recorders took a lot of time so I missed several of the sessions and most of the meals. The ones that I got to were really good and Kyle Ford’s keynote was inspiring.

The discovery center was also very cool. Just look at the smile on my face.

Oh, and I won “best of” for my track! Which was great, because I really wanted that red stapler. It was also fun to do the presentation twice more. There were some really good questions the second and third time around.

Update:

Back at home now. We made our connecting flight, but just barely.  Turns out that both Randall and Traci ended up stuck in Denver for the night…

Chris Mills | Developer Relations Manager,Opera Software ASA

I had a few chances to talk to Chris and just had to make it to make it to this presentation.

Before starting he warns us that he is going to be “impossibly english” for the next 45minutes.

Opera’s MAMA project

• structural search engine
• has returned some shocking figures.
  • 2001, 0.71%
  • 2006, 2.58%
  • 2008, 4.15%
• Only 50% of sites with “standard compliant” badges validated.

Problems:

• Corporate lock-in
• Existing developers who don’t have the time to care
• Lack of respect in computer science AND design world
• Hobbyists

What can be done?

• Make better education available.
• Make changes slowly
• Filter outdated material
• High quality, free, in-one-place resources
• Resources: www.opera.com/wsc

Standard complaint sites have access to a larger market.

“Developers who don’t care” == THE BEST SLIDE EVER! (go see his slides)

WaSP web curriculum framework - Competency check lists.

I just signed up on dev.opera. I wonder how they moderate the submitted articles. It sounds like if you are interesting in submitting articles send them directly for Chris at this point. The will be redesigning the site soon to make the submission process easier.

I also had to give him a friendly jab that the first article I clicked on was just a placeholder.

Joel Doepker | Director of Public Relations and Communications, Ozarks Technical Community College

A fellow community college presenter!

His background was in TV news, photography and editing.

Key Partnerships:

• Administration (need buy in)
• Media services (former professionals)
• Web Services/IT

He shows a sample video that they made very recently when the governor came to visit. Very professionally produced. Events like that need to posted as quickly as possible. They posted it on their site, put it on facebook and sent a copy to the governor.

Each year they do a year in review. It contained many of the videos. They sent a copy out to the colleges constituents.

He conducts the interviews himself.

Real time for total production takes about 7 hour for 3 minutes. Longest time is editing, but transcripts also take a lot of time.

Media relations is also a big part of the job. Local TV stations love to get this kind of content. But, they need to trust the quality of the video. Make sure that you have those connections. Make it easy for then to link to you site and videos.

When doing student interviews, make sure you have some background (make sure that they are good students that you want to use as a representation).

News Releases in the Social Media Era
Matt Herzberger | Web Designer, Texas A&M University - College of Engineering

Not started yet, but his opening slide has (cc) on the bottom. I like this guy already. OK - here we go.

He shows the “old school” way of doing  things. Looks a lot like what we are doing now :(

• He highly reccomends WordPress and so do I.
• Social media press releases: www.socialmediarelease.org a good templat for doing modern press releases.
• Need to add links to digg, technorati, etc.

Make the news SEXY!

RSS - the plumbing that pulls it all together.

Your writers can be a problem if they are used to doing it the old-school way.

He leaves the comments open. Decreases barriers of entry. But, not everyone expect/knows that they have the ability to leave them. Make it obvious. I wonder if they have had any problems with racism, sexism and general internet asshats???

Getting images and multimedia can take a lot of work.

They use flip camcorders to grab video.

He shows a short video and then opens it up to comments. There are some really good comments.

Monica Martinez-Gallagher
Multimedia Technologist, Portland Community College

Monica was supposed to present yesterday. Unfortunatly she was stuck in Albany, so we switched her  to this morning. I feel a little bad for her. Not only because she was stranded, but also because the Tuesday morning sessions are a little sparse (I, for instance, ws out till 2am and barely made it in this morning).

So, I ended up rolling in to her presentation a little late. When I entered she was already showing a video demonstation.

Looks like the Oregon Community Colleges Island is up running and funded for at least the next year ($55,000).

• Recommends reading the starfish and the spider.
• Join second life educator’s list (SLED)
• Join RezEd on Ning
• Search for education events on Second life.

Or, What Happens When Your User-Agent Isn’t A Browser?
Jason Woodward | Assistant Director of IT, Administrative Computing, Cornell University

Uses wireshark to show what headers look like.

What is REST?

• Representational State Transfer
• Actions are performed independently of other actions.
• Do something to a resource and tell me if it worked.
• Demonstrates with a homemade restful program.
  • Sends info - just says 200OK (no extra data needed)
  • Gets info - it comes back. How it is stored is irrelevant.

The presentation is good, but way more technical then I ever could have expected. This is defanatly the most TPR session that I have been to in the TPR track.