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.
Weeknote 04
Weeknote 04 – things I’ve read, watched, done and thought about over the last week. Includes building mobile websites, the Internet of Things, Lanyrd, the CETIS conference and planning a Netskills seminar series.
Get with the programme
I was recently tasked with setting up a community site for the JISC Greening ICT programme. Setting aside for now the rather tricky issue of ‘if you build it, they will come’, this post looks at the requirements for this site and the practicalities of using BuddyPress to provide it
Big Blue Button
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
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
weeknote 03
Weeknote 03 – things I’ve read, watched, done and thought about over the last week. Includes a new web2practice guide to QR codes, supporting the JISC Greening ICT programme, community sites, realtime collaboration in Google Docs, events and the JISC Innovation Forum 2010
weeknote 02
Weeknote 02 – things I’ve read, watched, done and thought about over the last week. Includes screencasting, self-hosting a WordPress blog (this one), JISC projects and social media/networks and cognitive surplus
weeknote 01
This is the first post in what I intend to be a weekly series on things I’ve seen, liked and learned something from in the last week or so. While this is mainly an exercise in personal reflection, I’m hoping that a bit of a narrative and a few links might make them useful to others too.
It’s All Geek to Me
My lightning talk at JISC dev8D on how developers in the JISC community can communicate with a broad, non-technical audience. Whilst most of the points I make are common sense, being asked to talk about this at dev8D implies that there is still something of a communication problem between the developers of a system and it’s end-users, so it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves of the obvious occasionally.
Podcasting (JISC RSC-NW)
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. [...]
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