I’m at the SRTTC conference in Greenville, North Carolina, the home of East Carolina University. I attended this very fine school in the 1970’s when it was known as the biggest party school in America — not that that has any pertinence to any thing. My administrators presentation on Web 2.0 yesterday was followed by some very good sessions about data driven decision making, surveillance cameras in schools, school safety — the last two being pretty depressing, though important. I’ll probably share more on that later, but for now…
As I was sitting with my wireless connected laptop out in the audience, I got an e-mail from my hosting company saying that they were getting ready to shut off my site. Citation Machine (being the end of the semester) was pushing right at double the CPU load that they allow for their customers. I wrote back immediately pleading for patience, and describing what I had done to share the load across two servers, and that it would take a few hours before the traffic gets separated.
The folks a Dreamhost, my hosting company, know what the service is about, and are going to keep it running for the time being — unless it starts crashing other customer sites. I must say that they have been heroically helpful.
At 3:00 AM, this morning, I woke up with a brainstorm, lightening and everything. I figured out a way to cut down, dramatically on the number of page loads. Citation Machine now remembers the last type of information source that you cited and puts that form back up. this way, if students are doing all of their citations for the bibliography, and they are citing lots of books, or lots of articles, then they do not have to click to reload the form each time. That should be a lot of reloads that will not need to happen and, hopefully, less CPU load. Keep your fingers crossed.
I also figured out a way to offer easier to use multiple author forms. I’ve implemented it for Books in MLA, but did not have time to do the same for APA and for other citations. That took a long time, and I do have to prepare for today’s presentations.
Just thought I’d say something, and this also gives me something to post today, as I demonstrate Blogging to Eastern North Carolina educators.
2¢ Worth
Hi David,
I love classblogmeister and have been using it for one year (thanks to Tom’s help). I am teaching Year One children (fulltime) and studying towards a Maters in Education (major in literacy). I have recently discovered your citation tool. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Yet again you have hit on a tool to make life easier for me, allowing for more time to read, reflect and BLOG!
Jody