Ken Newquist's Blog at Lafayette College
Posts about web applications such as Moodle, Drupal and WordPress.
I’ve recently been running some tests on WordPress to determine where potential download bottle necks may lie. I’ve found two add-ons for Firebug, the excellent troubleshooting/development plugin for Firefox: YSlow: A tool for Yahoo that analyzes a page’s download time, breaking it down by file type (e.g. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Images) and points out potential … Read more
According to CNN, the U.S. government is setting up a web app store designed to allow government employees easy access to tools such as GMail, YouTube, and WordPress. The article discusses a new government data cloud to be hosted by Google. Assuming that their are safeguards in place to protect privacy where needed, I think … Read more
“The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project: A Case Study” that I co-wrote is available on AcademicCommons.org. The case study looks at the efforts of a loose coalition of liberal arts colleges to transform our informal Moodle Hack/Doc Fests into a more formal organization. The case study is part of the September 2009 issue, which features a … Read more
The Easton Area School District is on Twitter: @easdnewsflash. It has updates about district news and events, as well as breaking stuff like the district’s reaction to President Obama’s recent speech to grade school kids and announcements about UStreams of board meetings. Unfortunately they’re not being very interactive. They’re not following anyone (which half defeats … Read more
It’s funny how college life ebbs and flows. Each of us ends up having our own rhythms based on the academic calendar, and some of them can be a little obscure. Like the clash between Firefox and Acrobat Reader that happens almost every fall. As we did last year (and the year before that), we’re … Read more
I’ve posted this to Lafayette’s Moodle Support forum, but figured I’d note it here as well: there’s a bug with Moodle that keeps it from staying in edit mode whenever you update or edit the page (e.g. adding a resource, updating an existing resource, etc.). I’m not sure what’s causing it, but I’ll be delving … Read more
When we first launched Moodle at Lafayette, we ran a short series of podcasts called “The Moodle Minute” aimed at introducing folks to basic concepts associated with the new learning management system. Each episode ran about a minute, and while we had a lot of fun brain storming them, we just didn’t have enough time … Read more
A number of people at Lafayette have been reporting a problem with Dreamweaver 8 no longer retaining their username and password information for their web sites. It turns out that the problem is Internet Explorer 7 (and 8); if you have either of these installed on your computer, it breaks Dreamweaver’s ability to save username … Read more
WordPress MU 2.7.1 removed the Admin Toolbar as a standard plugin. It threw Courtney, Jason and I for a bit of a loop, as we’d come to rely on the toolbar to quickly navigate our WordPress MU install. It’s not a critical thing, but it sure is convenient. A quick twitter ping about the fate … Read more