If you’ve not downloaded and upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress, you should. Man is it interesting!

If you’re reading this, then the upgrade worked!

Sorry to break such a long streak of linkblogging, but hey, this warranted something other than.

2 Comments »

I feel silly. I’m not sure how I missed it but it turns out Wikispaces did respond to my initial post. I guess I didn’t recognize the name and didn’t see the signature as I was reading the comments. I’m sorry about that..

Here is what they said:

Hi Chris,

We’re sorry to hear we contributed to what sounds like a very rough day. Here are a few things we’ve got in store at Wikispaces we think will help a lot:

1. Allowing guest page creations. This makes good sense. We’ll add it as an option in the manage space section, defaulting to “off”. The reason we haven’t had this in the past is that it’s something spammers pounce on — but with active space organizers and our spam protection systems, we think it will be useful for many wikis.

2. Account creation for schools. Every week, we create thousands of accounts on behalf of teachers for students who don’t have email addresses. Right now, we do this based on requests sent to us, but we’ve got plans to streamline this process for organizers. We want you to be able to create 20 accounts for your wiki in a heartbeat — ideally, in the time it takes to go from Plan A to Plan B while your students are in the room.

3. Our editor. We’ve got some frequently-requested formatting features we’re testing right now. We think you’ll love them, and find they fill some gaps without making the editor overly complicated (or slow!).

As always, we’re here to help and listen to any suggestions you might have: help@wikispaces.com. We’ve gotten to where we are thanks to thousands of passionate people like you — a huge percentage of them teachers — who tell us where we’ve gone wrong and what we can do better.

Best,
James
jbyers@wikispaces.com

Thanks guys! I’m glad to see that these changes are under way!

Chris

Tagged with: wikispaces
2 Comments »

On the official Get Satisfaction page, the founder and CEO of PbWiki responded to my inquiry.

Hi! This is a tough issue. We’ve had a lot of teachers emailing us asking for us to make sure an address gets entered before proceeding so they know which students are making which changes, so several months ago we started asking that *some* address be provided. It sounds like you’ve just discovered that that solution doesn’t work well for you. Can you help us think of a setup that would work better?

What do you think? I can understand the need for some teachers to record at least a name, but I think requiring an email address is too much.

My suggestion to him will be, require a first name (and I think it’s important to note first name only needed) and make the email address not required. I think if kids are not doing this appropriately then it’s more of a classroom management issue and one not necessarily designed to be handled by software.

Or, make it where the user can decide? In some setting somewhere, make it where I can say, “I do not want my contributors to have to share their email address”, etc.

My thoughts, what are yours?

Chris

Tagged with: pbwiki
3 Comments »

Oh boy has this been a heck of a day.

I had an amazing day planned for my kids, with two days of the computer lab blocked off for our use. I was planning for us to spend our time exploring Ancient Rome in Google Earth and making placemarks, adding descriptions, reading the included Wikipedia articles. Notice I said I was planning…

I got to the computer lab to find out that Google Earth was not available to students. My workaround to that had been “fixed” so now I had no workaround.

And 20 students with nothing to do.

I scrambled and put together a project where they research in Wikipedia (rebellious, eh?) and then put their information into a PowerPoint presentation.

Not much else they can access.

I made sure to talk about the basics of good PowerPoint design, I ruled out clip art use and cheesy backgrounds, and ended up teaching a good design lesson.

It’s still not Google Earth.

I then switched gears after lunch and decided to pilot a wiki-based research project and created a new pbwiki. It used to be that as long as I gave the kids the wiki password they could edit until their hearts were content.

No more.

The recent changes in PbWiki’s login procedures have made it where they have to have a wiki invite key and then enter a name and email address.

Sigh.

Even when I told them the wiki invite key and told them to make up a name and email address I was frought with problems with the software not allowing kids through. A lot of the kids simply didn’t know the basic syntax of an email address. Of course, you can’t not include a name and email address.

I asked for help in pbwiki’s Get Satisfaction page, but as of yet there’s been no answer.

So I switched to Wikispaces. I threw together a new wiki that didn’t have ads and had them go to work. I created new pages for each group and had them edit their own pages. Naturally, there’s a chance someone could edit someone else’s, but hey, it’s a reasonable risk.

Except that I wanted them to create a new page for each of the places I asked them to research.

They can’t create pages. Drat!

So back to the drawing board, they can’t create pages and I don’t have the brain power amidst answering a slew of questions to create five pages for each group (and there are roughly ten groups per block). That would be counterproductive.

They progressed nicely once we got up and running, although I had loads of trouble with them typing in the wiki address.

exploringancientrome.wikispaces.com

How hard is that? Most of them typed exploring ancient rome wiki spaces into the address bar.

This tells me more and more than they know how to play but basic operations are beyond them, at times.

So, I implore you, pbwiki, let my kids edit with only an invite key. Let that happen on the free version.

As for you, wikispaces, please let my kids create new pages. Or let that be something I decide in the manage space section.

And for goodness sake, Wikispaces, it’s time for a more robust WYSIWYG editor. One of the reasons I love pbwiki is due to their integration of FCKEditor. My kids prefer it, too, since it lets you control your text so much more nicely and more fine-grained.

Ok there’s my rant. Am I missing something here?

Chris

Tagged with: google earth • pbwiki • Wiki • wikispaces
6 Comments »

I love me some Skitch, and I use Jing on the PC. Jing takes a while to load and can be a memory hog when it’s loaded, and then there’s that creepy orb staring me in the face. What if I want to take a quick screenshot (using the work PC), annotate it and go!

Enter Fireshot. It allows you to take quick screenshots, add the requisite arrows and text and save it as a PNG, JPG, or more. I know Jing is against JPG as a format, but Fireshot embraces it.

Here is a quick one I did a few minutes ago…(click to see bigger version)

I like that it integrates seamlessly with Firefox, adding a Superman-esque S in the top right corner of the browser window. There’s no Flickr integration like Skitch, but it’s an easy upload anyway.

Way to go Fireshot! I’ll be keeping this one around.

4 Comments »

I am posting this using the extremely nice looking Airpress, a new blogging client based on Adobe AIR. It’s an early release, currently in 0.3 beta.

It’s a bit clunky, and I think the Mac Dock-style animation is a bit much and distracting. In times like this, functionality needs to rule.

So I’ll keep it installed, just to see where it progresses.

No Comments »

Some time ago I got my hands on a copy of Filezilla that was a nightly build that worked on the Mac. Being a nightly build, however, meant dealing with an unofficial release that was buggy.

When they announced that Filezilla 3.0 had been released, I fired on the Windows machine to download it. Once the dust settled (it’s been a while since XP has run in anything other that the virtual sense) I was liking me some new Filezilla.

I checked to see if a Mac version was available and found the build server to be down. I sighed, and forgot about it.

I checked a few days later to no avail, but today, lo and behold, it works!

So check me out, runnin’ Filezilla on the Mac. And it looks and acts just like the PC counterpart, save for the fact that the download is 12 megs for Mac and only 2.6 for the PC (or thereabouts).

Either way, you can download Filezilla here. Of course it’s available for all PC, Mac, and Linux.

No Comments »

So I saw this post by lifehacker some time ago and as is my habit, I marked it to view later and decided to check into it when I had some time.

Today, I had a little time.

I have figured out (after reading page 2 of this article) how to create password-protected pdf files using a free script and Automator. Here is how I did it…

NB: I am not a command-line junkie, so I went with the automator scripting style, if you love the command control, read here for how to work that out.

Start by downloading this script.

Then just double click to extract the installation package and double click that to install the package itself.

Easy, right?

Next you need to hit up Automator to set up the workflow. Check out this giant skitch’ed screenshot of how to set it up. It should be fairly straightforward, but let me know if it’s confusing. (click pic for full size)

So try it out once you’ve got it set up! It worked great for me once I tweaked it like you see it.

I also have the workflow here for you to download, set up just like I have it, if you’d like.

add_password_to_pdf.zip

So the simple, easy set up works like this…

1. Download pdfauxinfo. Install same.

2. Download my Automator workflow.

3. Run the workflow, select the file, and click run. Done.

On a side note, I did try this on both my mac and my pc, and both platforms ask for a password before opening and limit access, depending on how you configure it.

I am not calling this method foolproof and I am sure it is easily hacked. Truth is I am happy to have learned more about Automator. Have fun!

All screenshots are done using Skitch.

3 Comments »

Ok so I’ve been playing with this Jing software for a bit now and don’t really like it. At least, not in comparison to screencast-o-matic.com, that is. Here’s why…

1. The files it saves are as a .swf file. What the heck am I going to do with that? I am sure there is a magical way to convert it, but I couldn’t figure it out, at least not in the few minutes I browsed Zamzar and media-convert.com.

2. It runs in a kind of weird way. When I finally got it going, it showed up as a little gold orb in the top right. I had to force it to use a menu bar so I’d know what the heck to do.

So Jing gets temporarily discarded from the list of cool tools, at least for me. If I wasn’t so web-based I might consider using it. Oh yeah, and a less than two minute screen capture weighs in at over 20 mb. Yeesh!

No Comments »

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. This just may be the answer. The problem is I am having loads of trouble with OS X and desparately need a reinstall when I get back to the states. I install the program and then it won’t run. Surely this is a problem with my system.

Some Mac junkie go try this, huh?

Oh, it’s also available for Windows, but I’ve used Camstudio for a long time and it works nicely.

Jing Project: Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows.

Update: Linktribution: Cybernetnews.

1 Comment »