HowTo - Steve Boneham's blog

Posts in the category: HowTo

Sweet child of mine

September 09, 2011 HowTo / wordpress — No comments

There are lots of great WordPress themes out there, but I always find something I’d like to change. Being open source, that’s pretty easy to do with a bit of CSS, HTML and PHP. However, when a theme is updated by the author, you risk loosing your hand-crafted customisation. That’s where child themes come in. They offer a simple, but flexible way to create a customised theme that inherits the style and function of it’s parent, but can be customised independently. And as any parent knows, their kids are always way cooler than their parents

bit.ly – bundles of fun (well, links)

July 04, 2011 HowTo / Training — 1 comment

To support a screencasting workshop I ran for Newcastle University library I wanted participants to explore and evaluate a range of screencasts. As this as a custom course, I had a bit of freedom to consider the alternatives to a page on our site. I looked at using delicious with custom tags and a diigo list, but neither offered quite what I wanted – something quick, simple, that I already used, that didn’t need registration and looked stylish. Enter bit.ly bundles.

Simple Augmented Reality with Aurasma

May 15, 2011 HowTo / mobile — 5 comments

Mobile augmented reality is a rapidly emerging technology that allows a camera view of the real world to be augmented by overlaying it with information from the virtual. There are lots of apps that let you consume AR, but creating AR can still be pretty technical. The new Aurasma app lets you create some simple AR-type stuff by linking media to images using only your phone.

WordPress excerpts, featured images and <more>

November 18, 2010 HowTo / wordpress — No comments

How to customise a WordPress blog to show more of your posts on the front page using the more tag, manual excerpts and featured images. Shows how simple changes to a standard theme can make significant changes to how a blog is presented.

Big Blue Button

September 22, 2010 conferences / HowTo / presentation — 7 comments

BigBlueButton is a free, open source web conferencing system that allows remote presentation with slides, audio, video, chat and desktop-sharing. The developers vision for this is to make starting a web conference as easy as clicking a single metaphorical big blue button. While that was certainly my experience with their public demonstration, I wanted to go a bit further an try self-hosting an install, so this post will touch on the hosting and management aspects, as well as the user-experience.

IPA Online – building a site to teach phonetics

August 23, 2010 HowTo — 2 comments

IPA online helps students learn the International Phonetic Alphabet, a visual representation of the sounds produced by the vocal tract. This required presenting hundreds of video clips of male and a female speakers producing the same individual sounds from the chart a logical and usable way. The site also has self-text exercises where speakers produce a range of nonsense words for students to transcribe

Podcasting (JISC RSC-NW)

January 20, 2010 HowTo / podcasting / Training — 1 comment

This is a slidecast produced for participants in an online training session on podcasting for JISC RSC-NW. The idea is to give participants the opportunity to come up with ideas for what formats and approaches would work for their podcast before the event, so that the time online can focus on the practicalities of producing a podcast. [...]

Explaining emergent technologies (with PowerPoint)

March 30, 2009 HowTo / Training — No comments

I’m working on a JISC project to produce guides to how emergent technologies like social media, RSS and wikis can enhance the practice of staff in research, teaching and administration. One output of this will be a series of icon-based videos explaining the key concepts of these technologies. Unable to find suitable icons in stock image sites, I started to make my own – with PowerPoint. This post is an attempt to justify that and retain some credibility!