Drupal school site finally up!

After all that planning, my school department’s Drupal-based web portal is finally up! Its present design is based on the SpreadFirefox theme and the only “community” part of it is the forums section. Judging from the content of some of the posts though, it looks like many are quickly reverting to SMS-style “language”. Urgh! Now, the question is: to moderate or not to moderate??

Comments working again

Almost went crazy when I realised that comments couldn’t seem to be posted properly on this blog shortly after upgrading to WordPress 1.5.1.3. After a little swearing and 2 almost-clean installs of WordPress (everything fresh except the MySQL database itself), I was just about to consider the possibility that perhaps it was time to start the blog anew (on hindsight, I’m not sure why I even considered this – I must have used and reinstalled Windows far too many times!) when I googled upon this really helpful blog entry. Turns out that a “blank” user was somehow created during the upgrade procedure; deleted it, and now comments work properly again. Phew!

U-Blog? WordPress hosting…in Singapore!

After reading about it in today’s papers about blog hosting by a local web hosting provider, I simply couldn’t resist checking out the details.

Lo and behold, Usonyx‘s marketed blog solution U-Blog is based on WordPress! Which really says a lot about WordPress’ ease of use, really.

The U-Blog page looks really good, especially the screenshots, and makes everything look so inviting to anyone wanting a simple-to-use blog solution. I think it’s also nice that they’ve made an effort to spruce things up by pre-packaging some of the best themes available for WordPress, as well as some really functional plugins.

Perhaps the day will soon come when local web hosting providers start marketing and pre-packaging more open source solutions to further differentiate their services. After all, pricing alone isn’t enough to attract more customers for this type of services: most potential customers really need to be convinced why exactly they ought to be paying for their own webhosting when there’re lots of brand-name free services abound. Telling them “You have one-click install option for WordPress, Coppermine and Mambo” will only evoke blank “Huh?”s. USonyx’s efforts are in my opinion definitely a step in the right direction.

Giving podcasting a chance

I’ve heard about podcasts and applications like iPodderX that supposedly make it really easy to transfer podcasts over into your iPod. But somehow the idea of listening to some fellow’s scratchy recording of his rambling or rantings simply didn’t appeal at all to me.

So I greeted the news that iTunes now has integrated podcasts capability with a yawn. In fact, I was more intrigued by the news that the 20GB iPod now comes with colour screens too..hehe.. (must…resist….upgrade bug!!)

For a while, it seemed that I wasn’t wrong to yawn. Why bother, really?

But yesterday I actually browsed through iTunes’ directories of podcasts and became very very intrigued by what I saw. Gasp, the BBC and Disney actually have podcasts too! I think I’ll be listening to my iPod a lot more in the next few weeks, looking for interesting shows.

I do wish that more podcasters would read up on ways to make effective podcasts, though. Till then, looks like I’ll have to endure the occasional scratchy ranting and rambling as I sift through the podcast directories.

Huge blogging post

Haven’t posted about blogging for a while, so here’s a huge one.

Despite a lot of talk about blogging in the classroom by many edublog-type sites, it is clear that the idea of actually assessing blogwork for assignments is still a new and evolving one. I personally haven’t really tried to go beyond looking at the blogs as a form of portfolio or journal to track the progress of a project.

Nonetheless, the web is hardly lacking in excellent student-written blogs, the type of which many teachers would like their own students to emulate. Here are a few:

• The best of Berkeley Blogs
• BBC – Essex Student Bloggers
• AustraLearn Student Bloggers
• The Write Weblog

Of course, the above blogs can also help to inspire teachers about the potential of student blogging. And after perhaps a “bad day” of student blogging, it’d also help to remind ourselves of the reasons why students should blog.

Finally, I can’t say I was surprised to read about this Blogger problem. I’ve actually had the experience of a difficult-to-explain blog link appearing on screen during a demo of Blogger to students, and I’ve been wary of it since. This, along with news of Blogger outages not too long ago, makes me really glad that I’d made the move to WordPress at the start of this year.