Complaints | education | technology | ai & NOT A.I. | design

Weebly vs Joomla vs WordPress

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.

2 Comments

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on February 15, 2011 in Design, Technology

Tags: Complaints, Joomla, Online, Online Resources, Orgfree, Web Design, Wordpress

Trials and tribulations of job searching

25 Jan

A while ago, I started a job search using Search Associates. I was trawling through online advertisements for employment. In doing so I came to realize that what may be considered great for the receivers of data entry in the form of forms is awful for people having to fill in these forms. Quite often the receiver is asking you to fill everything in that you already have in another format. Only now you are creating duplicate entries and probably doing this through a time-consuming manner. (That of separate fields)

I understand why it is done, which is because different schools want specific information. This ensures the case. However, I am using this blog as a vent for relief and vow not to make too many of these forms if I think there can be a better data collection method.

Awesome Wikipedia assignment for students

02 Sep

Are you a teacher?

Do you want to teach your students “first hand” about plagiarism?

If so, try this:

Have your students try to create a Wikipedia entry. Tell them they need to create a page from the ground up. It sounds easy enough to them at first, but then the turmoil[fun] begins. Following your instructions about creating new content, rather than copy and pasting information from an online source, many students will likely do exactly what you asked them not to do.

However, you don’t have to be the monster. The fine folks down at Wikipedia start to rip apart the new entry. They will look for bias, for plagiarism, for new knowledge, along with perusing to edit the spelling and grammar.

As a teacher you will probably hear a lot of groans in the class with comments like,

“Wikipedia deleted my entry!”
“Wikipedia says I have a couple days to fix my entry or it will be deleted!”
“I hate Wikipedia!”

After some time and a lot of persistence, the students will start to follow the rules. At completion a teacher will also probably hear a lot of,

“Yes!”
“It worked!”
“I finally got my entry to stay on Wikipedia!”

…

Then you need to pull out the next stop and ask them to create an image to add to a Wikipedia entry.

GROANS ALL AROUND. hehe

Googles redirect and how to avoid it

04 Jan

Are you a world traveler?

Do you often search Google hoping for responses in English only to find Google.com has redirected to your host countries language?

There is an easy solution to this problem.

Type: www.google.com/ncr

The “ncr” stands for No Country Redirect. Hope that alleviates some stress and helps with the simple question you probably have had many times but couldn’t ask Google because it was coming up in Turkish, or Thai or any other language you may not have understood.