guide to using your Mac in school

guide to using your Mac in school

Because fellow Mac using teachers at the MUGS forums have requested for it, I thought I’d put up this simple guide on getting your OS X Mac working with your school network. Yes, internet access is automatic via an access point in the staff room (well at least in mine anyhow), so I shan’t cover that, but using the networked printers and folders requires a little sleuthing and configuration. So here goes! Go into Applications –>Utilities–>Directory Access. Highlight SMB and…

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multi-blog systems for schools

multi-blog systems for schools

Unsuprisingly, it looks like I’m far from the first person to look into implementing a multiple-user blog for school use, and there sure seems to be a lot of interest in it. I do wish that I’d found this article on Google or something before I did my own research, but I doubt it’d have affected my decision to roll out pLog for some of my students or the (hopefully) imminent weblogs for teachers (just waiting for release 1.0 to…

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SPG in WordPress

SPG in WordPress

No, I’m not talking about Sarong Party Girls 😀 but Simple PHP Gallery. A little too simple perhaps, since it’s a script that doesn’t really do anything other than display a gallery of pictures uploaded into directories on the server. Also, since it doesn’t have any way to upload pictures, you’ll have to upload them on your own via FTP – which might be a little limiting for some people. Anyway, anyone looking to integrate a light gallery into a…

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Other notable blogging systems

Other notable blogging systems

Although I’d set up a demo site for Plume CMS after quite a bit of research, I continued to try out other multi-blog systems to see see which would be best for deployment at my school. The one I’ve found to be the most promising is pLog. Sure, its user interface (and available templates so far) might not be as pretty as Plume CMS’, but it has some nifty features including a summary page. I’ve even deployed it for some…

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Site tweaks redux

Site tweaks redux

Turns out that there’s an even easier way to customise a Kubrick header! Just follow these steps: Prepare an image file of dimensions 760×200 and name it personalheader.jpg Upload the jpg into the /images subdirectory of the Kubrick template (it will be called default in a WordPress 1.5 installation Edit header.php and remove the asterisks and slashes at /* #headerimg { background: url(‘< ?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/personalheader.jpg’) no-repeat bottom;} */ Voila! This header art gallery is a nice starting point for…

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Site tweaks

Site tweaks

Now that WordPress 1.5 ships with the Kubrick template as default, I felt that it was time I personalised my site a bit. Found this really cool webtool to create Kubrick headers from Flickr galleries by the name of Kubrickr and it’s shockingly easy to use. I can see myself spending a few hours (maybe next weekend..) searching for the "perfect" header. You will need to make some minor tweaks to the jpg file that it outputs though e.g. adjust…

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