Tools to help administer your Facebook Groups
May 20, 2014Open source tools to export and analyze Facebook Group data for admins frustrated by the lack of built-in analytics.
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Open source tools to export and analyze Facebook Group data for admins frustrated by the lack of built-in analytics.
Using Docker to bundle static sites with Nginx into atomic, deployable images that run anywhere.
Leaving Pantheon after two years to freelance and work through a backlog of side projects and books.
Chesterton's fence: understand why something exists before destroying it.
Never outsource a core competency. As a knowledge worker, defining what my work is shouldn't depend on poor-fitting tools.
Building a real-time group chatroom for Drupal using Node.js, Backbone.js, Socket.io, and Redis.
Designing a GTD app with automatic garbage collection for abandoned tasks, built for speed and forgiveness.
Eric Hoffer on how the learned find themselves equipped for a world that no longer exists.
Faith in God is confidence that He will do what He says. Understanding Him and having faith in Him is one and the same.
Using LaTeX to create a beautiful resume that looks miles better than any Word template.
John Boyd on why mental images must be destroyed and rebuilt to match new realities or chaos results.
From The Organization Man: the true executive remains most suspicious of The Organization and wants to dominate, not be dominated.
A Drupal module integrating with Mixpanel for powerful event-based analytics and user segmentation.
Announcing the end of my work on Eduglu after being unable to find a sustainable business model.
Reflections on Tempo, Nietzsche, and the paradoxical tension between contemplation and action.
The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not. The prepared mind finds something important.
Admiral Stockdale on maintaining faith in success while confronting the brutal facts of current reality.
How to create a Drupal CCK field that saves autogenerated data without displaying a form widget to users.
Killer platforms need killer apps. Eduglu needs compelling applications that make it indispensable for learning.
New Eduglu release with quiz feature, searchable member directory, and group admin tools.
Thomas Huxley on the ideal university and why enthusiasm for truth is greater than much learning.
OG Mailinglist brings Google Groups-like email integration to Drupal Organic Groups sites.
People buy solutions to specific problems, not general-purpose tools. Narrower focus and deeper pain wins.
Eduglu alpha 2 with discussion boards, polls, wikis, and plans for hosted version.
Michael Oakeshott on conversation as an endless, unrehearsed intellectual adventure.
Envisioning an app store for learning tools with one-click install and interoperability between LMSs.
Howard Rheingold on digital literacy, social media in education, and the socialmediaclassroom.com tool.
First alpha release of Eduglu, my Drupal social learning distribution, with installation screencast.
Announcing Eduglu, a Drupal install profile combining a social learning engine with pluggable educational tools.
Schools must shift from mechanistic preparation to electronic preparation: pattern recognition over data classification.
Marshall McLuhan predicted that newspapers would fold if an alternative to classified ads emerged.
Launch broad then deep, help learners climb the participation curve, and focus on creating value.
McLuhan's prescient analysis: students live mythically in an electronic world but schools still teach data classification.
Detailed case study of running a student-directed micro-lab course at BYU using learning contracts and peer feedback.
Micro-labs as an alternative to courses: small learning communities that adapt to students through demand-pull learning.
Watching others learn is an act of learning. How transparent learning through social media accelerates progress.
How to filter iCal feeds by taxonomy terms in Drupal by overriding the Calendar module's URL generation.
How making private interactions public and permanent creates powerful effects, from Blogger to Flickr to classroom discussions.
Why small pilots fail for social software: scale is the oxygen that feeds collaboration. Launch broadly first, then go deep.
Great teachers don't scale. We need to identify their successful patterns and build simplified technology around them.
Video and slides from my OpenEd 2009 talk on designing and using group software through patterns.
On the feeling that calling your company a 'company' is a lie when you're working from a messy apartment.
My Drupalcon DC 2009 presentation on building effective social networks using social object theory.
Video and photos from my Ignite Salt Lake 2 presentation on building social networks at universities.
Slides from my Ignite Salt Lake talk on social networking in the classroom at BYU.
Define the objects, name the verbs, network the objects: a framework for designing social networking sites.
Social objects are the reasons people talk to each other. They bind us together and shape our behavior.
Exploring trade-offs in social media design: following ideas vs people, search vs browse, forums vs social networks.
Slides from my Information Systems class presentation on Enterprise 2.0.
Thomas Aquinas on why even uncertain knowledge of higher things surpasses certain knowledge of lesser things.
Clay Shirky and Paul Graham on the hidden costs of bureaucratic checks and processes in organizations.
My Knight News Challenge application to bring the Memetracker and Content Recommendation Engine modules to production.
A proposal for a self-directed learning course where students design their own projects and teach what they learn.
Professors should guide students into communities of practice, teaching tacit knowledge that Google cannot provide.
Why knowledge management fails: tools can't create a culture of sharing. Open source communities show how it's done.
Web Dev News covers my Drupal memetracker module built during Google Summer of Code.
Why smart people with bad grades may be the most creative: they learn what they want, not what they're told.
Proposing conversations per student per day as the key metric for measuring eLearning success.
How writing unit tests for my Drupal memetracker module helped me catch a subtle validation bug.
First alpha release of my Drupal memetracker module, a smart aggregator that groups content by topic and interestingness.
Your blog as an authentic, unfakeable alternative to a resume that lets employers see who you really are.
Announcing my acceptance to Google Summer of Code to build memetracking software for Drupal.
Curated links on social learning theory, expertise, Web 2.0 in education, wikis, and the psychology of willpower.
My Google Summer of Code proposal to build a memetracker module for Drupal using machine learning to surface interesting content.
Using web analytics to measure behavior, outcomes, and experience on eLearning sites to drive continuous improvement.
Paul Graham's approach to innovation: simple solutions to overlooked problems, delivered informally and iterated rapidly.
Analyzing student participation data from an eLearning site reveals power law distributions in comments and visits.
A Drupal community learning site for BYU that aggregates student blogs with expert feeds using FeedAPI.
A curated list of essential papers on Enterprise 2.0 from Jim McGee.
Ten practical strategies for expanding your professional network through introductions, collaboration, and trust-building.
Links to case studies on Enterprise 2.0 implementations including wiki adoption at DrKW.
Update on recent projects including e-commerce sites with Drupal, a t-shirt company, and eLearning research at BYU.
Evan Williams on how new ideas are stumbled upon accidentally, hard to explain, and obvious in retrospect.
Using blogging as a signaling mechanism to demonstrate skills and ideas to potential employers when grades won't impress.
Why communities don't scale like audiences, and the importance of designing social software that supports genuine connections.
Announcing a new focus on social software and eLearning 2.0 research at BYU's eBusiness center.
John Gardner on how political extremism grows from believing in limitless virtue of one's cause and doubting others' morality.
How Apple's iPhone proved Seth Godin's Purple Cow case study about boring phones wrong.
Three reasons to adopt a wiki: enabling participation, creating organizational knowledge repositories, and low cost.
How to use the DISPLAY environment variable to launch GUI applications from cron jobs in Ubuntu Linux.
The three key factors that determine search engine rankings: domain strength, links, and title tags.
A comprehensive guide to Enterprise 2.0 tools including wikis, blogs, CRMs, and project management software for organizational collaboration.
How journaling helps us discover our personal story and gives life meaning, purpose, and direction.
Why I quit my job to teach myself web development and start a business, inspired by advice that taking risks opens options.
Three criteria for evaluating tests: measuring something valuable, reliability and validity, and providing correct incentives for learning.
Notes on upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft, including faster boot times, lower memory usage, and essential Linux programs.
Reflections on how quickly Roman economic sophistication collapsed, and what it suggests about the fragility of modern prosperity.
How C. Wright Mills' concept of 'intellectual craftsmanship' inspired me to blog as a way to develop habits of mind through writing.
My first blog post, celebrating the joy of joining the global conversation after five years of reading blogs.