If you are interested in the semantic web and linked data, data.ac.uk looks like a site worth investigating.

“This is a landmark site for academia providing a single point of contact for linked open data development. It not only provides access to the know-how and tools to discuss and create linked data and data aggregation sites, but also enables access to, and the creation of, large aggregated data sets providing powerful and flexible collections of information. Here at Data.ac.uk we’re working to inform national standards and assist in the development of national data aggregation subdomains.”

The cost to attend the conference is $10 which includes breakfast and lunch.  To register, visit: http://sixthannualslcec.eventbrite.com.

You can also attend the conference for FREE by signing up for a volunteer position at http://www.volunteersignup.org/YW8DY

We hope to see you there!

New browsers like Internet Explorer 10 have advanced touch experiences using gesture events.  There are a few first steps you can do to make sure to help your site become touch-friendly yet also have it work well across many input devices while supporting many modern browsers.   In this article, I’ll show you how.

A lot of us around here have blogs and a lot of us use FeedBurner to "host" our RSS feeds. I thought it was worth talking about what might happen if we lose FeedBurner, which seems especially likely these days with the impending doom of Google Reader.

Why did we use FeedBurner in the first place?

Most likely, it was so that we could track subscriptions. We wanted to know how many people subscribed to our RSS feeds and FeedBurner was the best and easiest way to do that. To be comprehensive about it, we didn't just offer FeedBurner URL's but often redirected all requests for the native feeds to FeedBurner.

It may have also been to inject ads to help monetize an otherwise difficult to monetize content stream.

It may have been to reduce our server load. Feed reading services poll (request at certain intervals) feeds for changes so the thought of thousands of subscriptions hitting out sites hourly (or faster?) may have driven us to a hosted service.

It may have been the thought that FeedBurner "normalizes" our feed so if we make small mistakes FeedBurner would hopefully correct them so the RSS feed was digestable by all.

There were some pretty compelling reasons to use FeedBurner. None of us were dumb to use it.

What are the signs they are shutting it down?

There has been no official word that that FeedBurner will be shutting down, but:

• They closed down the API in October 2012.
• They closed down Google Reader, a (probably) much larger and more beloved RSS service, citing that they want to focus resources.
• The product has seemed untouched for years.
• There was a redesign of it you could opt in to that has disappeared.

How will Google shut it down, if they do?

They could just up and shut it off overnight. They won't, because that would turn what is already going to be a bad PR day into a really nightmarish one. Most likely we'll get a few months of warning and an official date.

When you create a new FeedBurner feed, you give it an "Original Feed" URL value. I suspect we will be given a date where requests to FeedBurner URLs will respond with a 301 (Moved Permanently) redirect response to our "Original Feed" URLs. Then another date where the service shuts down completely and the URL's 404.

What should we do ON THE DAY?

Speaking for myself, I'm probably going to hang onto FeedBurner with the optimism it sticks around or they handle the shutdown nicely. Perhaps I'll rue the day, but I hope not. If it does shut down, and assuming a graceful shutdown procedure, we should:

1. Remove all links on our site to the FeedBurner URL's, replacing with an alternative URL - most likely the RSS feed URL our own sites generate.
2. Remove all feed redirects that may be in place.
3. If Google doesn't automatically do 301 redirects, do whatever steps are needed to get that in place.
4. Hope that our readers feed reading services honor the redirects and keep them subscribed.

If you are less optimistic than me, you can get started on this sooner than later by deleting your FeedBurner feed now. They say as you're deleting a feed:

You have the option for this feed address to permanently redirect to the currently configured source feed.

So that's encouraging.

How are feed reading services going to handle this?

Popular RSS readers like Feedly and Reeder, as I write, simply sync with Google Reader. Since that's going away, they are going to need to either do their own feed fetching or find/build a new middle man. Apparently this is pretty hard, but I'm sure someone will step up. Feedly seems to be the most likely with their soft-announced Normandy API which proports to be a clone of the Google Reader API (although it's funny how they say it also runs on another Google service in the same breath).

I use and like Feedly. I've already started using it and am totally off Google Reader. I imagine that Feedly already has all my subscriptions saved in preparation for their "seamless" transition to Normandy.

The hope is that by the time FeedBurner shuts down (if it does), Normandy (or whatever is the prevailing new feed fetcher) is a really strong and stable service. And most importantly, it is smart enough so that when it gets the 301 redirect, it doesn't keep hitting the old feed, but updates the subscription to hit the new URL from now on. I highly suspect it will.

The only thing that we we lose as feed publishers are readers using weird RSS reader apps that don't update or don't honor the redirects.

Here's to hoping that if this happens it will be fairly painless! #RSS4LYFE

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Let’s Say FeedBurner Shuts Down… is a post from CSS-Tricks

Blogging is an activity that many undertake, some for the fun of it and others to build a presence online. In this article we cover ten tips to get your blog noticed and ranking highly in the search engines.

Eclipse Templates are stored blocks of code or text that can be accessed quickly via a key combination. They can save you a lot of time when coding by eliminating the need to type the same lines of code over and over again. Rob Gravelle shows how to use Eclipse's predefined templates as well as how to create your own.

On Saturday, April 20, the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum will unveil a wax figure of Freeman Hrabowski during a ceremony at Morgan State University.  The figure is part of a salute to educators, and Hrabowski’s likeness will be joined by figures of Mary Jane McLeod Bethune, the founder of Bethune-Cookman University and the National Council of Negro Women; Benjamin Mays, the former president of Morehouse College; and Benjamin Quarles, the former chair of the history department at Morgan State University.

For more information about the event, including information on ordering tickets click here.

The UMBC English department’s composition course redesign was recently profiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“In an age when many educators are promoting active learning by “flipping” classrooms, instructors here are rotating them instead. In a novel twist, they are providing composition instruction in three distinct venues.

Previously the classes, of 24 students each, met twice a week in a classroom for 75-minute sessions. The instruction was lecture-based, with time allotted for small-group activities.

Now each section, of two dozen students, meets as a group only once a week. On the other day of class, a dozen students gather in the university’s new writing lab, where they work on short assignments or revisions, guided by a trained undergraduate writing tutor. Meanwhile, the other 12 meet four at a time with their instructor. The schedule rotates so all students have a regular small-group meeting every other week,” the Chronicle reports.

The full story can be read here.