Child themes seem perplexing to a lot of people. I recently answered a question on the WordPress support forums (which you can read here) in which I summarized a lot of what I have been explaining to people about child themes over the last few years. (At this point, all the websites I design using …read more…
Criteria for Choosing WordPress Plugins
One of the nice things about WordPress is that it’s easily extensible though plugins. In fact, it’s so easy to add plugins that many people do so willy-nilly, and suffer the consequences. (Not all plugins are good plugins, and even the good ones don’t always play nice with one another, with your theme, or with …read more…
Troubleshoot your WordPress Blog
Quite often, I see messages on a message board that something has “suddenly” happened with the poster’s WordPress blog. Their level of concern ranges anywhere from mildly amused to (usually) panicked. In reality, nothing ever happens “all of a sudden”. When pushed or prodded, it usually turns out that the poster had installed a new …read more…
Charge Your Devices on the Go
You really should charge your portable devices every night. This is especially important with smart phones and tablets, that wear out their batteries faster than ordinary mobile phones. Of course, there are days when I forget to do this. On those days, my iGo portable charger is invaluable. I keep it out my keychain and …read more…
Web Development and the End of Internet Explorer
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…
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…
