CogDogBlog
Alan Levine — Educator, web developer, and open web advocate
Alan Levine barks about and plays with stuff here
cogdogblog.comI am not looking for facts and answers, I am looking for serendipity and stuff I am not expecting.
Alan Levine has been blogging since 2003 — one of the true old-timers of the indie web. CogDogBlog is a sprawling, playful archive of web experiments, photography, open education projects, and musings on digital culture. Alan builds things, documents things, and follows his curiosity wherever it leads, from WordPress themes to web serendipity to his latest puppy.
Written by Alan Levine since 2003.
Very Active
Publishes multiple times per week
3
Independent Blog
English
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Perfectly Imperfect
I typo [often] therefore I am [human]1. I never learned good technique. Sorry Mavis, but back at Milford Mill High School in the late 1970s, I waved off the opportunity to take a typewriter class. I must have said something like, “in what alternative universe am I ever going to be spending time typing?” I had bigger plans. Or different ones. Hardly the first time nor last I am full stop wrong. Thus I have somehow gotten here in the field of educational technology using a mostly...
Being Less / No Silos
Actually I am just making the images. I am not quite getting to the No Silo stage, just trying to make a stance. Just a weak, wavering stance. But as I gaze around this old web, seeing even more adherence to putting ones words, media, messages into web silos, as aptly described in a comment from my last post by Grant Potter people being drawn to “frictionless consumption and fragmented attention”, I just felt the need to find a photo of a silo and put a red slash through it. M...
On “Building” Community I Got Bubkis
Another of the quarter baked drafts that have been bounding around the noggin that now has a reason to see some light. Or maybe it is an excuse to give my pal Todd Conaway a Plain Old Telephone Call so we can rehash a long going topic. As I edit this long/unfinished draft, I can see my grand plan for communicating my ideas disintegrating into the usual tangents of distraction bordering on incoherence. So in an attempt to summarize: “Building Community” conjures something diffe...
This [is/was] For Everyone
I’m here for the first check mark for my effort of counter Tsundoku or reducing that pile on unfinished books. This is hardly a book report or detailed analysis, really I could just say, I’m done” and move on to the next. As an eager web fan boy, I put my order in for Tim Berner-Lee’s book This is for Everyone. Given the web has been the arc of my career, and ow much I enjoy back stories and “the making of” style of writing, I had high hopes to learn more i...
Yes! You Can Fix (some/many) dead links with the Wayback Link Fixer
Sadly link rot is a growth industry. Most every effort these days of looking things up to find references ends up with a visit to the Wayback Machine. If that is not in your web tool belt, you are missing out. In combing through my own rubble pile of posts here, I nearly always come across dead links I feel obliged to fix with a wayback link, manually (the dead tweet embeds are hopeless). I have even added my own bit of CSS to make it clear a link is to an archive. A Little Bit of CSS Sh...
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If you miss the days when the web was about discovery and play rather than algorithms and metrics, Alan's blog is a reminder that spirit never actually left.