.

The Non-Programistan Manifestoon

The Manifesto (Animated and Mashed Up)

Mashups: Towards a definition

Comrade Sue Teller defines the Mashup for Non-Programistanis throughout the World Wide Internet…

Mashing Up Japanese Internment

The Non-Programistan Mash Up is not about filthy programming and sordid data, it is about fomenting the revolution fo student creativity and imagination!

For example, Capitalist lies about Japanese Internment on YouTube, originally uploaded to the Internet archive*, finds way into student blog post at the People’s University of Mary Washington…

*Original video was on the Internet archive here, <strike>yet as of March 30th, 2008 the page was giving an error –further suggesting the value of rsources like YouTube for archining resources for presentation and reuse</strike> it is back up as April 3, 2008.

It soon becomes part of a rap song created by students in this class explaining the “mashed up situation” of Japanese Internment, re-mixing and incorporating tracks from the video.

Listen to the song below.
Download Japanese Internment Rap Song

Or, see video and song mashed up. First come excerpt from archival video then students’ song from the People’s University of Mary Washington:

Mashups: The Future of the Past?

“History is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” Karl Marx

If true, then the possibilities of a digital history class at the People’s University of Mary Washington have made such a pursuit of one’s aims increasingly easier. As government agencies like the Virginia Department of Historical Resources utilize user-friendly, popular, and somewhat open applications like Google Maps to share resources, Non-Progamistani everywhere can simply copy and paste geo-tagged embed code for just about any historical marker located in Virginia. So students not program, students think and create while smart government programs.

Historical Markers Group Project for Prof Jeff McClurken’s Adventures in Digital History course.

UMW Centennial Blog

Flickr + WordPress = Easy Pulishing and Presentation of Photos to everybody in Non-Programistan. Plugins provide the modular functionality key to an open, flexible framework for presenting your loyalties to the rich and illustrious history of the People’s University of Mary Washington.

As you can see, by putting images on Flickr, the possibilities for embedding become rich and great with free and easy tools made for and by the people, such as flickrSLidR (featured below) highlighting the grand history of the “Long Revolution” at Mary Washington.

Ingredients: Flickr, Flickr Photo Album plugin, and WPMu

Aggregating Blogs as Educational Community Mashup

Front page of UMW Blogs, interdisciplinary RSS feed driven mashup of blog posts from around People’s University of Mary Washington, tracing minds from around the university as a collective feed of insight, strength, and intellectual power free for the world to enjoy. And thanks to honorary Programmer citizen of Non-Programistan, Andre Malan, citizens are free to enter this revolutionary stream of rhetoric as they see fit –for the power must be in the hands of the people!

Ingredients: BDPRSS Aggregator Plugin, Andre Malan’s BDP RSS Add Feed widget, WPMu

SPAM, RSS, Aggregation, and the Mashable Blog

Non-Programistani believe in ease of sharing; difficulty makes for struggle over scarcity leading to information strife and famine. Tony Hirst at the Open University is honorary citizen of Non-Programistan (despite his tremendous programming prowess), for his mashed up code makes life easier for people of Non-Programistan. Take for example the RSS feeds he fashioned for the courses in the OpenLearn OER, which when re-syndicated with a spam plugin (such as WP-O-Matic or FeedPress) create beautiful, wonderful resource below in a minutes time with no code!

Once the resource is cleanly removed from the repository and re-published in WordPress, it becomes a simple process to both augment and Mash Up this resource to suit the needs of various courses and contexts. WordPress as educational spammer, and easy mashup machine!

Ingredients: A RSS feed from Open University’s OpenLearn OER, WP-O-Matic Plugin (or FeedWordPress plugin), and WPMu

Non-Programistan Rating

Open:

Not only is it open source, but the community is strong and the extensibility of the platform to incorporate third-party plugins that are shared freely throughout the “World Wide Internets” and make the sharing and mashing up of ideas amongst the citizens of Non-Programistan that much more likely. Openness is a virtue, not a technology!

Friendly:

Perhaps the strongest feature of WordPress as Mashup Machine is its simplicity. Compared to most publishing engines, it is extremely user-friendly, providing powerful tools for integrating and presenting from a wide range of web-based applications like YouTube, Flickr, RSS, etc. with the click of a button. The promise od ease of use, an elusive beast in the online world, is by far the greatest asset of this model.

Portable:

The model depends up bringing data easily into and out of Wordpress easily, and for that it proves a highly portable application for mashing up various resources and presenting them. Yet, ability to export all your data from an Application like WordPress and re-import it elsewhere is still in need of some fine tuning, and while strong, it must work harder to ensure its positive Non-Progamistan rating.

This is as far as any self-respecting Non-Programistani will go with Popfly. Once one realizes that you have to compromise all dignity and get a Windows Live ID, this tool (no matter how good it may have been) becomes irrelevant to the masses.

Non-Programistan Rating

Open: What do you think?

Friendly: Perhaps, much like Vista!

Portable: Sure, anything you say…

Quote from Brian Lamb’s essay on the problems of this word, and offer a reading that the more inclusive and suggestive, the better…

Comrade Jim has recently returned to his headquarters at the University of Mary Washington, after a failed re-education process in Richmond. His interests include WordPress, WordPressMu, and, any future incarnations of what WordPress may become.

Where to Contact:

• jimgroom.net (framing the revolution)
• bavatuesdays (writing the revolution)
• del.icio.us (bookmarking the revolution)
• Twitter (tweeting the revolution)
• UMW Blogs (fomenting the revolution)

Image by boeke.

Yahoo! Pipes is not yet a tool for the citizens of Non-Programistan! Here’s why…

(Click on any of the following images for larger version.)

Linguistic Mystification: Pipes is not designed for and by the people. One look at the Options interface reaffirms their refusal to extend a helping hand to the working class. Words and descriptions like Sub-element, truncate, Union, Unique, Regex immediately aliente the worker from the means of mashup production, resulting in capitalist mystification of production viz-a-viz programming language.

A Menace to the Masses: The pursuit of the Non-Progmmistan holy Grail (eduglu) was very hopeful with the introduction of Pipes more than a year ago. But since its much anticipated arrival, it has failed to deliver the tools necessary to foment the revolution. Case in point, filtering a feed by tags or categories from a blog has never been easily accessible through pipes. And while you can filter by author, description, link, date, and title, these elements often vary wildly in an open system, and rarely provide any useful means of categorizing content. As Comrade Cathy said here over a year ago, a sentiment we still find relevant today, “Pipes is an innovative project but it does need to become more user friendly before the masses will even try to use it.” Yes, indeed, Cathy, and the Masses are the heart & Soul of Non-Programmistan.

The Revolution Won’t be Parsed: If Yahoo! Pipes is not willing and able to parse the feeds from the revolution, than the revolution must parse ways with it. In short, the auto-discovery for feeds I tried on several different WPMu blogs balked, making it somewhat irrelevant to many of the projects I might encourage other to undertake. The Mashedup web is certainly the future of Non-Programmistan, but its faith in the solution being housed so neatly within a one-stop shopping interface like Pipes is another question all together.

Non-Programistan Rating

Open:

Friendly:

Portable:

Tom Woodward has been a deep cover agent for Non-Programistan his entire life. His loyalty is beyond question. Any programming he may or may not have done has always been in service to his motherland and in furtherance of her glorious goals.

Comrade Woodward has currently infiltrated the University of Richmond where he is waging a campaign of liberation. The truth inherent in Non-Programistan is already winning the hearts and minds of the people. Soon all of their code heavy applications will be replaced with tools that would make the people of Non-Programistan proud!

Long live Non-Programistan!

Other operations by this agent:

• Revolutionary Writing: Bionicteaching.com
• Revolutionary Bookmarking: Bionicteacher
• Current Cover: Richmond
• Status Updates: Twitter

I had seen for years the richness of interactive web sites! I hungered for them. My eyes teared when I saw interactive maps plotted with data from afar. I knew they were built on the backs of code slavery yet still they called to me.

Finally, I found Exhibit. My salvation. Exhibit an amazing tool of Non-Programistani progress. It gives the common man/woman/child/animatronic bear the power to create interactive web pages with every bell and whistle an educator could desire.

Exhibit Elements:

• Alternate views of the same data
• Interactive customizable time lines
• Interactive maps using the Google Maps API
• Sortable column headers for table layouts
• Data restriction by maker defined categories
• Really interesting data visualization options

Examples and Other Related Ideas

• Exhibit Level 1 - the simplest integration of Exhibit with sort-able, search-able, omit-able data
• Exhibit Level 2 - the next level of Exhibit with images added for a more visual interface
• Exhibit Level 3 - adding an interactive map
• Exhibit Level 4 - adding an interactive timeline
• Submit Tools for the Revolution - this allows the people to contribute information via Google Spreadsheets

Non-Programistan Rating

Open:

Not only is it open source, it is all about open data formats. To top it all off, any Exhibit site gives any viewer the option to rip all the data in a variety of open formats.

Friendly:

It does not require code but it does require you do use some HTML (and some CSS if you want to make it look prettier). Exhibit can also easily lead you to wanting to code things. That is why this tool is dangerous.

Portable:

It allows the information to go where you want it. You can put it up as pure web pages or embed it in blogs (and that pretty much covers the web, right?).

*Exceptions will be made for those that use their programming powers for the greater glory of the Non-Programistan movement.