Moving my blog to tomcaswell.com/blog

I have decided to move my main blog over to tomcaswell.com/blog. That means everyone who has been following my blog may want to change your feed readers to point the new blog location. All three of you. Part of the reason is because I want to use WordPress so I can have a bit more control over my blog. The other reason is that I was starting to get some Google pagerank on this blog and frankly, I would rather keep my blog obscure so I don't have to worry as much about anyone reading what I write :-)

Rapid web client development/deployment with Bungee Builder

From the FamilySearch Conference:
(but it deserves its own post)
Matt Misbach (Bungee Labs): Rapid web client development/deployment

• https://builder.bungeeconnect.com/
• The buider IDE itself is a bungee application
• No data management included, but this can plug into S3 (it runs on EC3).
• The IDE will always be free to developers
• Business model: it will eventually be billed based on a utility model (a combination of server memory footprint, bandwidth, and CPU). For this year (the beta period) it will be free.
  
• Create an account and email your username to matt[at]bungeelabs[dot]com, then he'll invite you to his developer group with the bungee FamilySearch API.
• treeseek.com is an example of what you can do with the FamilySearch API
• WideLens is a more general example app that combines into a single calendar, SalesForce, GoogleCalendar, etc, etc.

FamilySearch Developer Conference Notes

I'll be adding some notes throughout the day...

Keynote
Ransom Love: “Brave New Platform: Changing the World of Genealogy”
http://devnet.familysearch.org/support/roadmap-for-new-developers (It's nice to see that FamilySearch is using plone)


Duane Kuehne: API Overview
They do not yet have load metrics on any of the API calls they outlined. They expect to have an SLA (service level agreement) with this information at some point. One thing that surprised the API dev team was the large size of individual records once you combine all the duplicates into a central location. Some individuals can be on the order of a hundred MB or more.


Ryan Heaton: Family Tree Read
REST-enabled
Resource Types: XML, JSON, can be gzipped
Resource Locations: Via ID or Identifying parameters
You can read a person/place by ID, name, etc, etc, etc.

Data Definition
XML Schema Location:
"{module}/{version}/schema"
https://api.familysearch.org/familytree/v1/schema

persons - contains data about a person
searches - contains data about searches
users - contains data about users
matches - contains data about matches
personas - contains data about a persona

person (nested in familytree/persons)

• information (ids, gender, etc)
• assertions (the data that makes up the person (names, events, facts,relationships, etc)
• summary (most relevant name, gender, birth, death, spouse, and parents)
• values (grouping assertions by value)
• composition (a view of what persona make up this person)

search (nested in familytree/search)

• this is different from the person data above
• score (relative to other search elements)
• ref (the id of the person)
• person/parent/spouse

authorities

• places
• dates
• names

Testing it out (you need to have an API key first):
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/login?key=TEST_KEY

Get all data on a particular person using their id:
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?sessionId=...

Query for values and summary:
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?view=values&view=summary&sessionId=...

Get user data on a particular person:
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/user/KWCD-QBC&sessionId=...

Get summary view of 2 generations of ancestors for a particular person
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?view=summary&ancestors=2&sessionId=...

Get JSON data for a particular person (not sure if I got this one right):
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?view=summary&dataFormat=application=json&sessionId=...


Matt Misbach (Bungee Labs): Rapid web client development/deployment

• https://builder.bungeeconnect.com/
• The buider IDE itself is a bungee application
• No data management included, but this can plug into S3 (it runs on EC3).
• The IDE will always be free to developers
• Business model: it will eventually be billed based on a utility model (a combination of server memory footprint, bandwidth, and CPU). For this year (the beta period) it will be free.
  
• Create an account and email your username to matt[at]bungeelabs[dot]com, then he'll invite you to his developer group with the bungee FamilySearch API.
• treeseek.com is an example of what you can do with the FamilySearch API
• WideLens is a more general example app that combines into a single calendar, SalesForce, GoogleCalendar, etc, etc.
  

Rob Lyon: FamilyTree Combine/Separate
Tree cleaning (removing duplicates) - someone needs to develop an app to handle this better.

A pub and a baptism...

This has been a great week! Earlier this week I got my first "pub." An article I wrote with Shelley Henson Johnson, Marion Jensen, and David Wiley was published in The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. It is called, "Open Educational Resources: Enabling Universal Education," and is available online. When the editor of the journal wrote me to tell me our article had been accepted, she called me Professor Caswell. That was weird! I think I'll just go by Tom, even after I graduate.

The other great thing that happened this weekend was my son Jordan's baptism. Even though the snowy weather made it hard for some family to come, it was a special day. I'll get some pics up on my flickr page soon.

I'm joining the Flickr Sheds Group!

OK, I think this may be the most random email I have received. Ever. And I have received over 18,000 emails in the last couple years, according to Gmail. Apparently someone saw the picture of the 2 sheds I posted on a page meant to help me sell my house (tomcaswell.com/home), and now they want me to join their "shed club." I am pretty sure I will be the first Logan member of the "Flickr Sheds group." I may even enter the contest for the coolest shed photo. Some day I hope to have enough free time to start my own groups. Like the "Coolest paint stain on my pants" group. Anyway, here is the email I got...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: uncle Wilco (no reply) <DO-NOT-REPLY-FLICKR@yahoo.com>
Date: 19 Jan 2008 21:12:03 +0000
Subject: [Flickr] Your shed


You've been sent a Flickr Mail from unclewilco:

------------------------------

------------------------------

:: Your shed


Love your picture of the shed

If it's your own shed, do you fancy "sharing" it with our
sheddies on www.readersheds.co.uk

Basically you would put some information up about it and
maybe add a picture or two..

you can share your shed at

http://www.readersheds.co.uk/shedme.cfm

We are community mainly based in the UK, but we love to see
sheds from all round the world!


We also have a Group on Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/groups/sheds/

We will be running a competition for the best shed photo
later in the year

thanks Wilco

Improving USU's Instructional Technology Department

So far the USU Instructional Technology department has done a poor job convincing me that I matter as a PhD student within the department. (No, this has nothing to do with COSL or my choice of program chair.) I've been at it for a couple years, and I'm not even in the student directory on the INST web page. Other departments I have seen have walls with photos of their students, including their names, where they are from, and when they started the program. We have an online version, and it is completely outdated and boring. But I have a suggestion.

When I visit other departments I see photos of their grad students on their walls. It's cool to look at, and it sends a message. "Our students matter." Something like would help us put names with faces. I see the need for both an offline and an online version. And with our online version we could do much better. Why not add rich student profiles to the department's web page? Like personal blogs, LinkedIn profiles, flickr or Google image accounts, and other things we want to share as part of our online identity? Do you think this would be hard to build? It's already done. It's called Ozmozr, and it was built right here in the USU Instructional Technology department. But I bet not many people in the department even know about it.

Don't get me wrong, I will succeed at my goals regardless of my "headless" department. This is not about students wanting to see their own photos in the hall in front of the Instructional Technology office. It's about interacting with faculty and grad students and sharing ideas. So an important question for any new department chair should be, "How do we convince students that they are a major focus of this department?" Start with a major overhaul of the INST website. Make the new site compelling and interactive for current students as well as alumni, with rich member profiles that leverage existing (free) online services and encourage sharing and interacting. And, just for old time's sake, put some student pictures up in the hall as well.

Obey the Google Bot

I wish I had a screenshot to prove it, but not long after I copied a recent geofacts article I wrote over to this blog my Google pagerank dropped from 6 to 2!

Lesson from Wise and All Powerful Google Bot: Never self-plagiarize!