• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  sites

    Moodle 2.0

    I’ve been experimenting with some of the new developmental stuff in Moodle 2.0. The first thing that struck me was that the navigation is much better. It’s uniform throughout the pages and it seems like a lot of attention was made to make the menus and how blocks appear and are laid out look and feel much better. There are also a number of new features for managing courses and blocks, including: Tagging Built-in Progress tracking Forced paths through a course Conditional course completion Enhanced testing and grading systems Built-in RSS aggregation Built-in blogging tool A backup program that was actually able to backup my whole Moodle environment Updated wiki…

  • public speaking,  sites

    Publish Screencasts to Twitter

    You can publish screencasts directly to your Twitter feed using screenr, a nice little website that is compatible with both Mac and Windows clients. It’s quick, easy and while it doesn’t have some of the more advanced features that a Podcast Producer type of solution would have it’s a great quick and easy solution for those getting started with screencasting!

  • sites

    Earth Album

    Earth Album is a great little site that allows you to merge Google Maps and Flickr. Search for a location in Google Maps and a number of images will appear that you can click on. Interesting little site: http://www.earthalbum.com

  • sites

    Spamming Web Logs

    There are so many types of spam I’m starting to loose track… I check the logs for my web site occasionally. I don’t typically have time to look more than once a week and I don’t have any time to correlate the logs against the articles or do any kind of statistical analysis. I just post what I am thinking about or working on and that’s basically what I have always felt a site like this should be. I guess looking at the logs is just looking for a little external validation… When I check the logs the number one thing I’m looking for is what sites are referrals coming…

  • Network Infrastructure,  sites,  Unix,  VMware

    Virtual Private Clouds

    VPN-Cubed was a solution that Amazon listed for some time, allowing users of EC2 or S3 cloud services to VPN their resources in Amazon’s cloud to their own offices. But Amazon recently went a step further with their own offering and now provide the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Pricing is based on a per-VPN connection, running at a nickel per hour that the VPN Connection is alive. Data transfer over the VPN is charged at a dime per gig into the cloud and between 10 and 17 cents per gig out of the cloud. There have been a number of concerns about security with regards to cloud services. The ability…

  • sites,  WordPress

    MagpieRSS, a PHP Based RSS Parser

    RSS is an incredibly powerful way to manage content. Using RSS you can provide a feed to users and your website simultaneously.  You can then have items your site, such as WordPress dynamically generate pages for browsers using items published in the feed and have users able to view the feed without seeing the rich media objects that you might also put on the site. A basic RSS feed might include something like the following: <item> <title>My Article</title> <link>http://https://krypted.com//article1</link> <description>Some article on my site.</description> </item> Each of the above items is a field that has been defined in the rss file that is used to view your feed, similar to…

  • sites

    Bing Cashback: Paid to Shop?

    You get rewards for buying things on credit cards, consistently shopping at the same chain of big box or other retail outlet; even buying gas from the same gas station chain. Well, now you can get rewards for searching for things to buy: from bing.com. Using Bing.com/Cashback. There are tons of sites that do this kind of thing, or at least there have been through the years. Bing Cashback is the old Live Search Cashback. Which means it’s just Microsoft moving something to try and rebrand it. The nice thing here though is that it’s merged with the standard shopping site, meaning that when search for something you’ll see some…