It’s Feb 23rd, 2011. How many of these things I will mention below will become a thing of the past or will become the “cool new thing that we don’t know how we did without it”?
Also, good to note are the terms memes and cloud computing.
In my last post I was talking about things that are great for neat tricks, great time saving devices, excellent linking and syncing software / applications and also good websites. If I was to get a new computer, I would recommend getting the Microsoft Software and the Adobe Creative Suite put in first, but then I would be tweaking the computer out with the remaining products. All of them are free and easily available online found at the links below. Check them out for yourself and install them today:
I hope contributions will allow me to come back here to add more. Thanks, in advance, for your help.
I have been working on a few different versions of the same sites and have been comparing my needs with what is offered with each of these site infrastructures.
I started using Weebly.com.
I enjoyed the back-end interface; a little clunky, but the built in blog was easy to add info to AND it had the Facebook “Like” button and Twitter “Tweet” button built in automatically. The reason I moved away from Weebly was because there was no built in Search. I tried adding Google Search to the site, but to no avail. I am still not sure why. Plus, I didn’t like the idea of showing a “Google” search as advertising that I added this item in.
Next, I moved over to Orgfree.com. This hosting company allows free space and excellent integration of SQL databases to support for Joomla, WordPress, phpBB, simple machines forum, Drupal, and Moodle. Talk about excellent…and EASY.¹
I started with a Joomla.org installation.
The intention was to strip out all the unnecessary pages, categories, menus, sections and then add a plug-in or module for blogging, as this was my primary concern. The easy blog plug-ins were not easy to install. The more simple sounding ones all seemed to cost money. I was not impressed. Joomla has offered an excellent infrastructure for so many other modules. I decided to try to WordPress.org.
WordPress was like an angel sent from heaven. For all my needs it was easy to install, very intuitive to use, had a great blog, minus the “like” and “tweet” buttons, which I will look for later. So far, I am enjoying the interface and may show my students how easy it is to create an online blog for themselves soon enough.
¹Sidenote: I have recently had access problems to the back-end of my WordPress installation with Orgfree. I have emailed them multiple times to try to gain access to my account, but have not heard anything. I have switched to WordPress.com. I still think Orgfree is great to try out different website management interfaces. They just have not given me any support.
In coming up with good information to have on this website I not only have to delve into my own knowledge base, but I also find myself cruising the web to see what others are doing. One such mentor I turn to runs The Thinking Stickover at ISB, here in Thailand.
Jeff Utecht has come across my path a few times. First, at an Earcos conference in Malaysia, then at another ISTEC meeting I hosted at Concordian International School.
Most recently I have heard him talk at the TEDxKrungthep Event that I helped coordinate from a web presence point of view. I ended up making the website and helped to make everything “live” through video streaming and constant Facebook and Twitter [no, I’m not linking these] updates. Lots of fun and work.
But back to my point of research and I am constantly looking for good sites, neat tricks, great time saving devices, and excellent linking and syncing software and applications. If you have any ideas, please add comments.
Mr. Jayzeer
education | technology | design 