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Don Knuth, another of my heroes, recently gave the 2011 Turing Lecture at the IET in Savoy Place using an interesting approach: “Ask me Anything!”. I wish I’d been there.

Turing Lecture 2011: An evening with Don Knuth – all questions answered

Professor Don Knuth

This years Turing Lecture is delivered by Donald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University.   2011-01-26 00:00:00.0 IT Channel

>> go to webcast >> recommend to friend

In London, Don was struggling with a cough but manfully answered all the questions. A week later, he repeated the performance at Machester and seems much more relaxed — not only in his dress. So there is clearly some benefit to being up north (if on the wrong side of the Pennines).

I saw Downes’ commentary Networked Blogs ~ CCK11 on the CCK11 discussion page which talks about someone who suggested in the CCK11 Facebook group that NetworkedBlogs could syndicate from my Blog to the CCK11 group. So I thought I’d set it up as a trial. If it has worked, this post should appear on my Facebook wall, in my Twitter stream and in the CCK11 group.

This may not be so useful if the NetworkedBlogs app only works in the FB walled garden because, as Downes says in a comment to his original thread on getting RSS feeds out of Facebook for syndication into the CCK11 MOOC: “This is the major problem with Facebook – data goes in, but it never comes out.”

I’ve been gorging on new technology this week. It all started with Episode 6 of Doug Crockford’s “Crockford on JavaScript“, an excellent series of evening Yahoo! technical talks that on the history of programming and the JavaScript language that originally ran between January and March 2010. Episode 6, “Loopage”, recorded last August, is a sequel of sorts that covers the JavaScript event-loop, (one of my heros) Grace Murray Hopper, and the problems of concurrency and network latency.

The JavaScript even-loop is an important part of the web browser and it is now available on the server courtesy of Google’s open-source V8 JavaScript engine, developed for Chrome, and the new Node.js library. Following this I watched several other episodes of the collection of technical talks from the YUI Theatre collection, including interesting a couple of talks on the benefits of running JavaScript on the server and client, node.js itself, HTML5, and YUI3. There’s a nice retrospective of the YUI Theatre collection for 2010 in net.tuts+ and a good series of screencasts by Pedro Teixeira on a new site called NodeTuts.

Yahoo! may be suffering from an identity crisis at the top, but its team of web developers and JavaScript evangelists are second to none and the quality of their offerings on the Yahoo! Tech Dev web site and YUI theatre are excellent. Tech heads should go along and expect to spend a while there. Highly recommended.

My personal highlights (in some kind of thematic order are):

• Douglas Crockford — the whole of Crockford on JavaScript (so good it has its own website).
• Ryan Dahl — Node.js Roadmap.
• Douglas Crockford — Crockford on JavaScriptScene 6: Loopage.
• Dav Glass — Node.js + YUI 3.
• Matt Taylor — YUI 3 & Node.js for JavaScript View Rendering on Client or Server.
• Allen Rabinovich — The Many Hats of the Frontend Engineers.
• Tantek Çelik — HTML5: Right Here, Right Now.

There are so many more to watch that I’m in nerd heaven.

I have moved my blog using the instructions How to Move from blogger to wordpress with permanent 301 redirection provided by Aaslin Sathrak on SenseHow.com.

In outline, I created a special template page on http://blog.cpjobling.org that redirects to a special WordPress page. This page interprets the redirected URL and finds the reference to the original blogger page permalink that was stored in the page metadata when I exported my blogger pages to WordPress. This is used to look-up the wordpress permalink for the relocated page and then WordPress is asked to issue an HTTP 301 Moved Permanently reponse that tells Google and others that the original blogger URL has now moved to WordPress. If all works well, I’ll be changing the title of this blog to Fresh and Crispy in a week or so. In the meantime, please let me know if you find any broken links.

Just a quick post to remind you that Fresh and Crispy is moving to this self-hosted WordPress blog  Fresh and Crispy II (blog.cpjobling.me) on Monday 28th February.

Using the resources of Google, I’ve discovered a way to set up redirection so that regular visitors will hardly notice the move. (I’ll post a how-to after the move.) Discussions have also been redirected.

However, if you are following me via RSS or Google Friend Connect you may have to make some adjustments. The new RSS feed link is feeds2.feedburner.com/FreshAndCrispy2. Google Friends Connect followers will need to follow me here (look for the gadget in the right-hand side bar).

This statement from Eric Schmidt’s keynote at the Mobile World Congress 2011 as quoted by Charles Arthur in the Guardian Tech Blog as some key implications for the future of internet app development. He said some other things too, but this stood out for me.

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/eIu1B9

In my move from Blogger.com to this self-hosted WordPress there are a couple of things that I have had to do that I thought would be worth documenting. These fall into the general headings of Comments, Permalinks, Feeds, and Categories and Tags.

1. Comments. I was using disqus.com as my commenting system. There’s a WordPress plugin for this but to move the threads to the new blog I had to use the URL mapping method. See Using the Migration tools from the disqus knowledge base.
2. Permalinks. I prefer the rich permalinks to the default http://blog.cpjobling.me/?p=2 format. Plus they are closer to the permalinks used in Blogger.
3. Feeds. I was using feedburner on my previous blog to manage my feeds. I added the Fd Feedburner Plugin to redirect my atom and comments feeds to feedburner.
4. Categories and tags. When I transferred my posts from blogger.com (using the WordPress Blogger to WP tool) tags from blogger became categories in WordPress. I’ve been swapping these over gradually, but I have an awful lot of uncategorized posts to go over! The nice thing about WordPress categories is that if you are careful, you can arrange the main topics of your site into easy to find high-level headings. Each category can be a top-level menu item. So far I’ve got Blog, Tools, Teaching, Courses, Podcasts, Research and Free Time.

I’ll post more on this topic as I come across things worth reporting.

I’m planning to move Fresh and Crispyy to this blog on the 1st March 2011. Consider this an early warning. Inspired by Jim Groom’s Digital Story Telling Course (DS106), I purchased this domain and it hosts my own WordPress blog.

I’ve already exported my posts from Blogger.com and moved my disqus.com discussion threads over. Now it only remains to cut the cord.

Until the cut-off point, I’ll be blogging in both places in parallel. After the 1st March, I’ll be posting only over here. I’ll keep the domain blog.cpjobling.org active as a historical record, at least until the domain comes up for renewal in a year’s time.

My thanks to blogger.com for 7 years stirling service.

I’ve just imported my posts from Fresh and Crispy on Blogspot using the WordPress Blogger blogs importer tool. Seems to have worked fine, but the comments in disqus.com where not carried over. I wonder if i) disqus.com can be used to manage comments in WordPress ii) If not, can comments be exported? In any case, I’m not yet ready to cut the cord!

Answers i) Yes there’s a disqus plugin for wordpress and there’s a domain transfer tool. So that’s OK!

Back in November, member of my social network Alan Cann asked me to participate in a project he was doing with the International Centre for Guidance Studies for the Research Information Network on Social Media for researchers.

A few days later, I met online in Skype Chat with researcher Konstantia Dimitrou and we discussed my attitudes to social networking and its use in my teaching and scholarship. The report Social Media: A Guide for Researchers has now been released and you can read part of what I had to say on page 38 and in full on the Web at http://www.rin.ac.uk/node/1015.

The report itself is well worth a look, particularly if you think research should be done the way it has always been done. Social media may be a way to raise your REF impact numbers if nothing else.