Rick Klau is slowly rekindling my love for blogger

Rick is actually not even aware that he's been influencing me. Rather my newly rekindled love for blogger has come from following Rick's Google Reader shares and contemplating the challenges I face. Here are a two of the salient ones from this past month:

• Building Websites with Blogger: This is an ebook. It's not that I can't figure blogger out on my own. Rather, it's just nice to be able to reference someone else's coherent strategy and compare my own with it. I almost always learn something new this way. The book is only $9.95 (approximate cost of the Facebook Effect but of infinitely more practical import in my current circumstance).
• Insert Youtube Videos: Finally, easy sharing between Google infrastructure behemoths. Make no doubt about it, Google's key strategic advantage comes from infrastructure. Hosting videos on Youtube is like getting a CDN for free, similarly for Picasa web albums. Where Google has lagged is in making it easy for you to just link stuff together.

And two non-Rick items which feel like they've come from him anyway:

• Mobile templates for blogger: Finally. Google clearly gets mobile use cases. Blogger has been, to put it politely, a bit behind the times.
• Blogger's somewhat unbelievable 100% uptime for the last two months: (courtesy of Louis Gray). I'm convinced that almost no one should self-host their blog. That said, it comes down to hosting platform. Uptime, speed, and flexibility are the essential ingredients here.

Adventures in grading student blogs using gdata python

This post is about how Google's gdata python API helped convince me to use blogger for my student class blog. The screenshot, simple as it is, shows a blog evaluation framework available on no other platform (see the page updated daily here). I created it in about a week starting from scratch with the pretty much only intermediate python development skills. Read on for a narrative about my high level strategy in getting it all to work and where I think I'm going with it.

Introduction

I've been incorporating blogging in my courses since 2004. A typical blogging pattern is for students to generate 3 to five posts per week, with their blogging activity accounting for 30% of their grade. There have been three persistent issues with student blogging:

• Hosting support
• Student tracking
• Analyzing student posts

Motivation for starting with the blogger API

I've used all of the major platforms with a preference toward sixapart's offerings, mainly because I knew them, and movabletype seemed to offer significant customization features. However, about a year ago, I decided I simply had to stop hosting the blogs on my own server. If nothing else, combatting spam and bad guys was getting beyond me. Since then, I've been itinerant across a couple of hosting services.

In my classes, we currently use a group blog (in the end, it's just easier) with between 50 and 70 participants. There is no hosted blogging service that offers a convenient way to track the activities of that many group blog participants (blogger is particularly egregious in this regard but also the easiest for adding participants). Plus, my needs were unique. I wanted to know how many posts students had written and whether these posts met certain criteria.

I had always heard about the blogger api and was becoming increasingly impressed with the gdata python api in general through my brushes with it in various youtube projects. So, last December, as the holiday break was nearing I decided I should take a run at seeing whether the gdata python api would allow me to overcome the limitations of the blogger platform and perhaps go beyond anything I could do on any platform.

Initial Results

My timeframe was one week while my wife and kids were away visiting her father. I downloaded the python gdata V2 archive and started in. I would describe myself as a novice/intermediate python programmer.

Within the week, I had basically achieved what you see here:

http://biggerbuybutton.com/university/results.html

that I'm using to track this blog:

http://winter2010.biggerbuybutton.com/

I'll admit the current approach is rather basic, but it fulfills the role of tracking where students are and indicating posts they may want to work to improve. As shown in this screenshot providing the detail for my own posts, edit links are provided in cases where posts are not up to snuff, and the posts that need work are clearly highlighted with little messages as to what's missing.

Future Plans

What I find most intellectually engaging and spent spring break working on is useful ways to summarize the content of student posts both individually and across the group:

• Using semantic analysis services from the likes of opencalais, zemanta, and evri (to give just a sample), what are an individual students most common themes?
  
• What are the themes shared across students?
  
• What is the evolution of themes over time?
  
• Who are connecting the most with their peers and over what topics? (post content is supposed to be 80% class related, and true personal posting is vanishingly infrequent).
  
• Who is discovering the most new external resources?
  
• What are the biggest search keywords and how do they relate to themes raised by the group?

From an operational perspective:

• How can I share this code?
• When should I share it?
• What is the best approach for dealing with unreliable third party services and how should I bullet proof against that?
• I need to think of adding unit tests as this grows beyond a quick hacking experiment.

This has been long. Thanks for reading this far if you actually made it. I'm interested to hear your thoughts in comments.

Hiding the nav bar in blogger should be easier

Rick Klau, blogger's product manager, will tell you that it just takes a bit of css to hide the blogger nav bar on your blogger hosted blog. That's true, but aspects are not obvious. Before going into all that below though, here's one css rule, shown in the screenshot, that does it:

#navbar-iframe {visibility:hidden}

That rule hides the contents of the nav bar while leaving its box intact. In other words, there's still a space at the top of the screen where the nav bar would have been even though the nav bar itself is not showing. I like that space, so this is the approach I used.

An alternative is to remove the nav bar and eliminate the space it occupies. The rule that does that is:

#navbar-iframe {display:none}

So, what's the difficulty in this? There are three things:

• First off, you have to know css, and even if you do, you have to know multiple options.
  
• You have to know which element to select. I initially used webkit's "select element" tool to see a DOM based representation of the page, so I could determine which element to target with my css rules. That led to my initial erroneous selection of an element with the ID navbar-b. It was only after I did display source that I figured out what the correct element was.
  
• Finally, you have to know where to look to add custom css. If you're using the new blogger template designer it's under the advanced tab at the very bottom with the heading "Add CSS".
  

Here's what I'd like: The ability in layout to say I don't want the nav bar at all. I'd like to be able to add elements of the nav bar into my blog's side bar. Particularly suspect in the nav bar is the "next blog" link. I'd like it if that could turn into a list of potentially related blogs that I would know about in advance.