Tim Owens

clouds
April 15, 2013

To The Cloud!

I’ve had a lot of fun over the past few weeks playing more and more with cloud services and seeing how they can extend the functionality you normally get with a shared hosting plan. I blogged about my adventures setting up Amazon Cloudfront as a CDN (Content Delivery Network) using W3 Total Cache (which is one hell of a plugin the more I play with it). Tonight I decided to really mix things up and get a Rackspace account to see how the services differed and what they had to offer. - Read More -

githuboctacat
April 9, 2013

Exploring GitHub

I have to confess I’ve been vaguely following the GitHub scene for awhile now but always considered it a place for hardcore programmers. I had heard that people were using it for other interesting things, most recently last year when App Dot Net put their Terms of Service out there and encouraged folks to fork it and offer their suggestions for modifications. When Alan posted recently about moving Feed2JS over there I decided to follow his lead and start actively using my account to explore the space. I’ll second his recommendation to go through the free CodeSchool lesson on Git to get a general feel for the terminology and how things work. - Read More -

oie_615157vhEiVr0q
April 5, 2013

An Update on Reclaiming Efforts

A few weeks ago when Google announced the discontinuation of Google Reader effective July 1st what began as a moderate approach to reclaiming things here and there that were important to me was sent into a tailspin. Maybe that seems dramatic but the Reader shutdown really hits home to me possibly because it’s one of the first services to shut its doors on me that I personally used every single day, often several times a day. It’s hard to trust a company after something like that and more importantly it raised larger issues about what the RSS landscape looked like before a heavy like Google came in and wiped out the competition only to bow out now. I had briefly flirted with the idea of getting off Google servers but now it was personal. So here’s what I’ve done in the meantime: - Read More -

0365079001364302684
March 26, 2013

Unified Syndication of a Domain of One’s Own

In my last post I outlined a bit of what our vision is for syndicating all of the work happening in disaggregate spaces through Domain of One’s Own. When you use WordPress Multisite it’s pretty easy to get a unified feed of all the work that is happening since everything is in your database and can be called pretty easily alongside approaches like Sitewide Tags. With our new setup on UMW Domains each individual has their own self-hosted WordPress install in their own space. In fact many have 2-3 installs in a variety of subdomains, and it’s not even guaranteed that they’re using WordPress (although the majority do). So how can we syndicate all that work into a central hub that could allow us to parse that data by a variety of factors like course, category/tag, content type, etc? I spent the last two days hacking away at this and I’ve got the first step to a solution.

- Read More -

bus
March 24, 2013

Building a Syndication Framework for the Domain of One’s Own

I have to admit I feel a little bit like an amateur cook that has a lot of really fancy ingredients in front of him and no idea how to make them sing. I’ve been playing with a lot of different tools lately and they all seem very powerful in their own way. And yet for my specific need I can’t seem to put them together in a way that works, yet. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to put all this into a blog post and shop it around to people much smarter than I am for further insight. I’ll break it down into three sections: The Scenario, The Tools, and The Duct Tape. - Read More -

Older Posts