illumio WordPress Widget
illumio is a desktop RSS reader that matches incoming articles to your interests and shows you the most relevant items. It presents the results using a newspaper metaphor, rendered in the browser. (Full disclosure: I’m on the illumio team). You can find more about illumio in its official website.
illumio is social, allowing you to ask questions to other illumio users and also to make comments on any article you see. Your comments are shown to any other illumio user that reads the article.
illumio provides a widget that shows the last 10 comments a person has made. It shows a snippet of the original article, the comment and a link to see the full article text in the illumio website. You can see this widget at the bottom right of this blog.
I packaged the illumio widget into a WordPress widget, which you can download below (right-click and “save link as” to download):
To use the widget follow these steps:
- Make sure you’re theme supports Widgets. I was using Hemingway and had to change to HemingwayEx, which supports widgets. BTW, HemingwayEx is nice!
- Copy the php file above into your widgets directory.
- Enable the widget.
- Use the widget placement UI in WordPress admin to place the widget in the right place.
- Configure the illumio comments widget. You need to specify the account id of the account whose public comments you want to show. (You can use this widget to show public accounts from any illumio user, but it probably makes the most sense to show your own).
To figure out your own illumio id, follow these steps:
- Log in to your account in www.illumio.com
- Click the My Account link
- Mouse over the “My illumio page” banner and look at the status bar. It will show a URL of the form <baseURL>_<accountId>.do. Extract your account id out of this URL, it will be a number.
That’s it. Visitors to your blog can now see the last 10 comments you’ve made on illumio.
Of course, there are other possibilities, like automatically creating blog entries from your illumio comments, serving your comments as an RSS feed, etc. If there’s demand for any of these, we can easily add them.
RWC School District Proposed Cuts, April 30 Meeting
The Redwood City School Board met last night to present to the community the first round of budget reductions relating to the General Fund (the next round on Categorical funds is TBD). This is a summary, not an editorial comment of the cuts and their meaning.
The meeting consisted mostly of a presentation and discussion of the proposal, which is contained in this excellent document:
April 30 Board Memo: preliminary budget recommendations for 2008/2009
There are no significant news from Sacramento and any expectations of any improvement in the May revision of the Governor’s budget seem extremely optimistic at this point.
So, the assumptions remain the same: the RWC School District will face a 6 million dollar reduction next year, 4.5 million reduced from the General Fund and 1.5 million from the Categorical Fund. Given the current reserves, the district is able to mitigate the impact of these cuts while maintaining the 6% reserve (3% required from the State and an extra 3% from our School Board). Even so, the District needs to make cuts of around 1.8M from the General Fund and 1.5M from the Categorical Funds.
The General Fund is used to pay for salaries, staff and basic services from the District. This meeting focused on what can be done to achieve these cuts with the over arching goal of minimal impact in the classroom.
The District made a point of explaining the process that originated the proposals. The Financial Advisory Committee worked with the District Business Office to put together a list of recommendations after much discussion. The recommendations were passed on to the Superintendent who then produced the final set of recommendations for the Board to consider.
The District identified three money saving areas:
- Budget Savings
- Budget Reductions (cuts)
- Other Possibilities Subject to Contingencies
