How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change | Allan Savory

This talk gives me chills every time I watch it.

Slideshare defaults new Account Type from default!

Slideshare apparently added new Account Type options to improve users profiles. A drop down menu at the head of Personal Information pages offers choices of Default, Company, Event Organizer, and four more. That's all well and good, if one of the types fits you better than the default.

The problem is, on first login since Slideshare's update, I found a hot-linked organizational name glaring from the top corner of the display, which opened My Slidespace when I clicked on it. Though the slidespace then announced "Hello, [+ username]!" at the top right, the "Welcome back, ..." message in the sidebar to the left still displayed the organizational name.

The work around to get back to me required:

1. Opening the user profile page for editing (Edit profile),
2. Switching the Account Type to Default, and
3. Saving the changes.

Talk about a make work proposition for users not seeking to usurp an entire organization's Slideshare identity! Why is it that web site builders seem to think they know better than users do what users' identities and preferences are?

Spring into Summer

At long last, I've got Spring Widgets working again. The exasperation was unbearable. It has taken almost a year to get to where I almost was last spring. That is, to:

• Display more than one feed in one widget, if any at all, and
• Get one logo to display at the head of more than one feed in the widget.

Work-arounds among Feedburner, SpringWidgets, Firefox, and Safari finally succeeded! Though I'm not sure I can replicate, or even remember the steps, an RSS Reader near the top of the sidebar now displays feeds from two Edublogs:

1. The Language Learner Development Project Blog (my newest), and
   
2. The Language Teacher Development Project Blog (oldest, second only to pab's potpourri).

Saving the logo separately for each feed in Feedburner seemed to do the trick for the display, but had to be done for both before getting the widget code for either blog from Spring Widgets. The bar divider between SpringWidget blog feeds worked in Safari, today. I should have tried that instead of Firefox months ago, when I first encounter scripting errors while trying to retrieve widget code through Firefox.

Yet just now, drafting this post in Safari, I was unable to use standard copy and paste keyboard commands. So I saved this post there, opened it again here in Firefox, et voilà!