Once you begin developing web content, it doesn’t take you long to figure out that how your web site appears to people is, to a lesser or greater degree, a matter of which browser they are using. It’s to a lesser degree if your readers are using a browser that supports current web standards, such …read more…
Blog Archive
Creating GIFT Questions in Moodle
One of Moodle’s greatest strengths is that you can create banks of questions that you can use in a variety of ways. (I’ll be examining some of those ways in future tutorials.) The flip side is that creating these questions can be a tedious and often frustrating experience. Fortunately, there is an easier way. With …read more…
Duplicating Activities in Moodle
One of Moodle’s most useful, yet most often underutilized features is the ability to back up an entire course. This feature has almost endless possibilities. You can, for instance, create a course in a localhost environment and upload it to your website when it is finished, which saves bandwidth if that is an issue. You …read more…
Using Firefox as an RSS Feed Reader
I’m online a lot: there are probably two dozen or so websites that I read regularly; another fifty or so that I read intermittently, and several hundred that I keep an eye on. Yes, you read that correctly: several hundred. Of course, I don’t have the time or energy to go through each one every …read more…
How to Change a Light Bulb: Using Moodle’s Lesson Module
Moodle is a powerful CMS (course management system), because it allows a high degree of interactivity, both between students enrolled in a course and between students and the course itself. Interactivity between students occurs largely in the Forum, Database, Wiki, and Glossary modules, whereas interactivity between students and the course occurs in the Lesson module. …read more…
“He’s Dead, Jim” Plugin for WordPress
If you like the spirit of Matt’s “Hello Dolly” plugin, which adds a line from Louis Armstrong’s song “Hello, Dolly” to the top of your WordPress backend, but feel that it doesn’t do much for your inner geek, I give you the “He’s Dead, Jim” plugin for WordPress. “He’s Dead, Jim” works like “Hello Dolly,” …read more…
Using Firefox Add-ons
One of the nice things about using Firefox as a web browser is that it is extensible—you can add things to it that help you do things you otherwise couldn’t. Firefox calls these add-ons. To get to them, go to your “Tools” menu and select “Add-ons”: Or, as the picture suggests, you can also press …read more…
Disable your WordPress Plugins
Like children, plugins don’t always play nicely together. Plugins can conflict with one another, with your theme, or even with WordPress, and those conflicts are often the result of an upgrade. A lot of the issues I see with WordPress can be traced back to plugin conflicts. Most people don’t even think of plugins when …read more…
The iTunes Conundrum, part 2
In my first spreadsheet tutorial, I described how I wanted to take this information from iTunes: and calculate the average song length. If you read that tutorial, you know that the average length of each item in my iTunes library (including podcasts) turned out to be 246.9675647 seconds. In this tutorial, we’ll find out how …read more…
