I might have just read the best descrip­tion of how com­pa­nies should approach “Social Media” ever. My depart­ment has been con­stantly talk­ing about how best to reform their cur­ricu­lum to incor­po­rate social media. Great. The part the kills me is the floun­der­ing for a pur­pose or point. I’m not sure I have much steam left for the whole “We need to teach Twitter!” and “What is Twitter?” con­ver­sa­tion. Seri­ously? Teach Twit­ter? You set up and account, and then you type. I’m sure most 12 year olds can figure this one out pretty easily. Just make sure that once the accounts are set up, there’s a point to write about!

Anyway, Quote of the Week is cour­tesy of John C. Welch on Social Media:

If you make it more com­pli­cated than that as a con­cept, stop. You’re about to go off the cliff into New Media Douchebag­gery, and you don’t want that. Ever.

Perfect.

Sev­eral ver­sions of Word­Press ago, I started spo­rad­i­cally encoun­ter­ing a prob­lem while trying to use the Flash uploader in Word­Press. Every time I tried to upload some­thing using the Flash uploader, I would just get this HTTP Error message:

I searched for a solu­tion to the prob­lem and found that it was a bug in one of the older ver­sions of Word­Press. Now, sev­eral ver­sions later, it’s still hap­pen­ing. I’ve seen it on both Word­Press 2.7 and Word­Press 2.8. More Googling revealed sev­eral tips about about adding direc­tives to the .htac­cess file. I tried each of them, but with no success.

The most puz­zling part of this prob­lem for me was that I have sev­eral dif­fer­ent instal­la­tions of Word­Press on dif­fer­ent servers and dif­fer­ent ver­sions, but this error was only hap­pen­ing on some of them. After I actu­ally sat down and thought about the prob­lem, I real­ized that the error was only occur­ring on the Word­Press instal­la­tions that I had set to be pri­vate through the autho­riza­tion con­trol using my .htac­cess files. Those sites have an .htac­cess file in the root direc­tory which starts with some­thing like this:

AuthName "private site"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /home/private/.htpasswd
Require valid-user

This causes a dialog box to pop up when you try to go to the site. You have to spec­ify a cor­rect user­name and pass­word, as spec­i­fied in the .htpasswd file, in order to gain access to the site.

After real­iz­ing there might be a con­nec­tion with this, I tested using the flash uploader on one of my sites with the htac­cess authen­ti­ca­tion turned off. Sure enough, it worked like a charm. So after real­iz­ing that the HTTP Error was def­i­nitely related to this, a solu­tion was easier to find.

The solu­tion that worked for me was to create an .htaccess file in the wp-admin direc­tory. The htac­cess file should have the fol­low­ing rules in it:

AuthType Basic
AuthName share
Satisfy Any
Order deny,allow
Allow from all

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

Since adding this file, I’ve been using the image uploader on my pro­tected sites with­out a problem.

Excel­lent look­ing course syl­labus and overview for Internet-​Age Writ­ing. The class is ENG 371WR: Writ­ing for Non­read­ers in the Post­print Era.

Week 4 looks excellent:

Week 4: The Kindle Ques­tion

Is Amazon’s wire­less read­ing device the Segway of hand­held gad­gets? Should it be smaller, come with head­phones, and play MP3s instead of dis­play book text? Stu­dents will discuss.

Also not to be missed are the course electives.

Via Kot​tke.org.

Check out this amaz­ing stop motion video:

Ear­lier this month there was a post on Kot​tke.org about using the voice mod­u­la­tion tech­nol­ogy known as Auto-​Tune for some­thing more than pop songs. The Kottke posted links to two videos by the Gre­gory Broth­ers. Both videos are fan­tas­tic (see below).

The first is an Auto-​Tuned mish­mash of news clips. The Katie Couric part really is amazing:

And second is Win­ston Churchill backed by band from the future: