Free Technology Tutorials

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Figaro and Tori and family.

Note: Figaro is the old, ugly one Tori, joined our family in 2009, so it’ll be hard for 2010 to top that.

Note: The following is made available under GPL from http://codex.wordpress.org/GPL. It may be edited a little from its original form, but probably not a lot. There is no guarantee this information is accurate…use at your own risk.
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In WordPress 2.9, it’s super easy to embed videos, images, and other content into your WordPress site. Just type/past the url into your post/page and WordPress does the rest. Make sure that the URL is on its own line and not hyperlinked (clickable when viewing the post).

For example, all I did to add the video below was copy/past the the video url into this post…the url should be on its on line. In the past you would have just seen the link to the video, but from 2.9 onward, WordPress automatically embeds the video in the post.

You can also opt to wrap the URL in the embed shortcode. It will accomplish the same effect, but does not require the URL to be on its own line.

Note: It’s important to make sure the url isn’t hyerlinked when you type/past into the post/page. If so, then you will simply see the link, like below. This is also a good tip if, for some reason, you want to show the link and not the embed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nxXsROoBYs

Can I Use Any URL With This?

Not by default. For secutity reasons, WordPress will only embed URLs matching an internal whitelist. By default, WordPress will automatically embed from the following sites…this list will grow over time.

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• DailyMotio
• blip.tv
• Flickr (both videos and images)
• Viddler
• Hulu
• Qik
• Revision3
• Scribd
• Photobucket
• PollDaddy
• Google Video
• WordPress.tv (only VideoPress-type videos for the time being)

If you have upgraded to WordPress 2.9 and are running into problems, it’s usually due to incompatible plugins or themes. If you’ve upgraded and can’t login now, you can search this site for video tutorials on how to disable the plugins. If that doesn’t work, then you can try to ftp to your site and rename the current theme you are using–this will result in WP using the default theme. If that doesn’t work, then you can contact me and I’ll look at it for you for a small fee…if I can fix your site, you pay the fee–no more than $50–if I can’t fix your site, then you pay nothing. If interested, use the contact link in the nav bar.

WordPress 2.9 has just been released as stable. I upgraded this site and all seems to be well. See the following post for some of the cool new features.

http://educhalk.org/blog/wordpress-2-9-a-video-demonstration-of-new-features/

Saw a very interesting post in the moodle.org forums today titled: “Ridiculous $400/hr. for Moodle support with no guarantee”.

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=140152

Let me see if I understand this:

1. They build a product that for the past 9 years has been giving away virtually all personal information on every Moodle install in existence.
2. Once they are forced to address the problem and release what seems to be a broken upgrade that causes the OP in the thread above more major problems, then he’s quoted $400/hr to talk with a Moodle Partner with no guarantee of results.

…and I thought Angel was expensive…

Merry Christmas from the Moodle Business Partner “community”

PS: Just a thought…Blackboard bought Angel, but they don’t own the disciples…inside joke

In the following video I demonstrate three of, what I consider to be, the most useful new features coming out in WordPress 2.9 — Image Editing, Trash Bin, and Post Thumbnails. As of today, 2.9 is still in beta (beta-2), so the latest stable release is still 2.8.6, but I would expect (just a guess) 2.9 will be released as stable by the first of the year. When it’s released, I think the built-in Image Editor alone will be a very good incentive for a lot of users to upgrade.

Version 2 of my WordPress User’s Guide is now available for download. See the link in the Nav Bar or click the link below for the download page. This is an update of the 96-page Free WordPress User’s Guide. It’s now 159 pages and I’ve incorporated several of the suggestions from the comments on the download page. See the download page here:

http://educhalk.org/blog/free-wordpress-users-guide/

Moodle released an urgent upgrade notice today, two weeks after this post.

To upgrade your Moodle 1.9.x or 1.8.x branch installs, see the following information published today on moodle.org:

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Moodle_1.9.7_release_notes
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Moodle_1.8.11_release_notes

In addition, if you are among the tens of thousands of people using the 1.7 or 1.6 branches (which, as of today, are still being offered for download on moodle.org), it seems support has been discontinued for those branches and there is no fix for your sites. Upgrading is your only option.

Update: The following was posted to the web less than an hour after the “Advanced notice to admins” email was sent out.

http://gctefriends.blogspot.com/2009/11/urgent-moodle-releases-197-and-1811-are.html

http://pastebin.ca/raw/1687668

http://de.pastebin.ca/1687671

Just three of several places where this is already posted on the web. By this weekend, it will be all over the web.

Advanced email notice to moodle admins is a myth! It’s a nice theory, but doesn’t translate into practice.

Advanced email notice to Moodle admins, that, by Moodle’s own figures reach 0.001666% of the user-base does not work. Additionally, it’s Thanksgiving day in the US. If an admin in the US does get that email, he/she will probably read it 5 days from now on Monday.

If Moodle wants to send these notices out to an email list, that anyone can sign-up on with no verification of their identity, then that’s great, but in addition, these notices should be plastered across the moodle.org homepage…a place where Moodle users frequent! And every Moodle blogger should be encouraged to post this information to their blogs…blogs Moodle users read! Shouldn’t Moodle users be given at least as much advanced notice as hackers who may be subscribed to that “advanced notice” list?

Important information like this could be posted on the moodle.org homepage, right above the Moodle Business Partner advertisements. This is just a friendly (common sense) suggestion to consider if Moodle really wants to get this kind of urgent information out to as many of their users as possible in a timely manner.

This video introduces you to the new user password salting feature in Moodle and demonstrates how to add this to your site. If your Moodle site is older than the date of this blog post, then chances are your passwords are not secure…this video shows you how to add password salting to significantly improve the security of your site.

In the following video, I demonstrate how to turn an average, total, or any other value into a letter grade, based on your grading scale, in your MS Excel gradebook. This is only one of many applications of these very powerful Boolean functions in Excel.