Technolgy Integration in the Middle

I love the potential of the RollTop concept PC from Orkin Design. Out of the box thinking like this opens the door for some really great new ways to work.

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to Blog:: Craig Pringle using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Categories: Uncategorized

The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog WordPress

October 4, 2009 everno Leave a comment

Sent to you by Eric via Google Reader:

The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog [WordPress]

via Lifehacker by Gina Trapani on 9/23/09

You took the leap and installed WordPress to host your own blog because you want complete control over how it looks and works. Now, it’s time to power it up, lock it down, and make your blog completely yours.

What You’re In For

With all the hype around cloud computing and no-configuration-required hosted services, you don’t hear about the joys of running great software on your own server very much. The fact is, if you’re just a casual user who doesn’t know if you’ll stick to blogging over the long haul, or if you don’t want to spend a little time maintaining WordPress, you should sign up for a hosted blog at WordPress.com or Blogger or TypePad. (Also, this tutorial is not for you.)

But if you’re willing to keep WordPress updated religiously, you get access to a whole world of WP plug-ins that add features to your site, the opportunity to create and tweak custom WordPress themes, and a huge sense of accomplishment. In the most recent version of WordPress, keeping your installation up-to-date is a matter of clicking a link when you get notified to do so.

Everything you need to know about installing WordPress is right here. Got it up and running? Let’s get to customizing.

Initial configuration

The first thing you want to do on your WordPress blog is set up a new author with administrative access. Don’t use the default "admin" user to write your posts; create your custom username and give it admin privileges. Then, log out of WordPress and back in as your new username. For security reasons, some folks like to delete the admin user completely (as some WordPress attacks have used it to do bad things to your blog). Once you’ve got your administrative account working, add other authors to the list of users who might be posting to your blog.

Now it’s time to cruise through WP’s settings area and configure things just how you like ‘em. First, set up your post permalinks to look prettier for both humans and search bots. WordPress’ default post permalink looks like http://example.com/?p=123. Instead, under Settings>Permalinks, select something like http://example.com/2009/09/welcome-to-my-blog.

Next up, configure how you want comments to work on your blog. Under Settings>Discussion, you can enable comments and set other advanced options, like whether or not users have to be logged into your site to comment, or if comments should automatically close on posts after a certain number of days, if user avatars show up, or what words in a comment should automatically mark it as spam.

Speaking of, spam comments is a ridiculously epic problem across the internet for all blogs, so how you set up comments will mean the difference between miserable hours spent gardening V14gRa and "check out my sexy webcam!!" comments or not. Coming from Lifehacker’s "must register to post here" model, I checked off "Users must be registered and logged in to comment." If you don’t want to put up the registration hurdle in front of your commenters, make sure you install the Akisment spam-killing plug-in (more on that below).

Must-have plug-ins

Just like you can extend Firefox with feature-adding extensions, WordPress also has a pluggable architecture and a whole world of plug-ins that can soup up your blog. When you’re logged into WordPress, click on Plugins, and search for the name of the plug-in you want to install (which you can do without involving your FTP client). You can also just search on keyword, too—to find Twitter related plug-ins, just enter Twitter. The plug-ins that you use will depend on how you want your site to work and look, but here are a few that every WP user can benefit from.

WordPress Database Backup (Backup): Running your own server and database means that if things go wrong, it’s up to you to have a backup. This plug-in can email a full backup of your WordPress database on a schedule to an address you specify. I’ve had great success building my WordPress site locally with the backup this plug-in created; however, the other resident WP expert here on staff, The How-To Geek, recommends using the old-school cron job for "mysqldump -uUser -pPassword databasename > filename.bak" approach. No matter how you do it, make sure you’re backing up both your blog’s database and files. It’s worth consulting with your blog hosting provider about the best way for you to do this, too.

FD Feedburner Plug-in (Feeds): Google-owned FeedBurner is a must-use for anyone who publishes RSS feeds, like your blog does. FeedBurner saves you bandwidth costs by hosting your blog’s feed and offers statistics about how many people are reading it; this plug-in will redirect your blog’s feed to FeedBurner for you.

WordPress.com Stats (Stats): See what posts are most popular using this up-to-the-minute statistics plug-in, right inside your WordPress dashboard. WordPress.com stats doesn’t count visits to your own blog, and unlike the richer Google Analytics service, there’s no day-long delay to see what’s happening on your site. To run this plug-in, you have to get a WordPress.com API key (it’s free) and enter it into the plug-in’s settings.

Search Meter (Stats): If you have a search box on your site, you’ll want Search Meter, a plug-in which shows you what readers are looking for and finding (or not) on your site. Search meter also offers widgets you can add to your site which show readers what other readers are searching for.

WP SuperCache (Optimization): The first time a highly-trafficked site like Digg links to your blog, you’ll wish you had installed this plug-in, which maintains high-speed, database-call free "cached" copies of your WordPress pages on your server. Your site will run faster and won’t buckle under the strain of a lot of traffic if you’re caching it with this excellent plug-in.

Akismet (Comments Spam killer): Because comment spam can get so bad, WordPress now ships with the Akismet spam filtering plug-in. Since I’m requiring user registration to leave comments on my WordPress blog, I don’t have any experience with how good Akismet is (and haven’t had any spam at all), but word on the street is it’s absolutely essential for sites with open comments. Like WordPress.com stats, Akismet requires a WordPress.com API key.

Finally, to make your site as accessible to Google and other web search engines as possible, a few Search Engine Optimization SEO plug-ins help. I use All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps.

Make Your WordPress Theme Yours

If you’ve got HTML and CSS chops, you can make your WordPress theme sing your tune. (For advanced stuff, some PHP skills come in handy, too.) First you want to start with a base theme. WordPress’ default theme is ok, but if you google "free WordPress themes" or take note of what themes sites you like already use, you’ll find an insane number of gorgeous and eye-catching site layouts. Picking your theme is one of the most fun (and most time-consuming) parts of setting up WordPress. It will be hard to choose!

Once you’ve installed the theme you want by downloading the .zip file and putting it in your WordPress themes folder, you can dig into the CSS and markup and make it your own. WordPress offers a theme editor in its interface which lets you update files on the fly (under Appearance>Editor). While this is convenient, it’s also dangerous if you hit the wrong key, save the file, and don’t have a backup. My recommendation is to set up WordPress and your theme of choice on your own computer, edit it in your favorite text editor, and upload it to your live server when it’s perfect. I started my WordPress blog with Lucian Marin’s Journalist theme, and made it mine by adding color to the header and tweaking how comments look.

If you’ve got patience and custom HTML you want to turn into a brand new WordPress theme, copy the default theme’s files into a new folder and get to hacking. The WordPress Codex is an invaluable resource for both starter reading and reference as you go. That is, when you get to the part where you’re thinking "WTF is wp_list_comments?", Google it and you’ll find the function reference at the codex. It took me a full weekend of pretty intense theming work to get my first custom theme done and ready to go live, so give yourself some time, and most importantly, have fun with it. Here are some tips and links from my Twitter followers on creating a custom WordPress theme.

Sidebars and Widgets, Oh My!

The easiest way to customize your WordPress blog without digging into code or your FTP client is to do so with widgets. The latest versions of WordPress offer drag-and-drop custom modules you can add to and remove from your blog. When you’re logged into WordPress’ admin interface, under Appearance, click on "Widgets" to see what’s available and add and remove what you want on your site’s sidebar (or top bar or bottom bar, depending on where your theme puts it).

Advanced trickery

Here are a few more tips for advanced WordPress hackers who want to troubleshoot or try even more customization:

Use multiple custom sidebars: WordPress’ sidebar and widgets feature is very powerful and customizable; in fact, you can create and customize multiple sidebars or site zones to show up on different pages. (For example, the sidebar that shows up on a post page can look different than the one on the front page.)
Troubleshoot slowness and other problems with Firebug: Every web developer knows that the Firebug Firefox extension is absolutely essential when developing any site, and it’s true for WordPress, too. When my WP site went down because of multiple background 404’s doing resource-sucking searches, Firebug revealed the problem and so I knew how to fix it.
Use tags to display content differently: You can use conditional tags to display different types of content on your blog in different ways, like a short link or big photograph. I use has_tag to display "quick links" with smaller inline headlines on my front page by assigning the tag "brief."
Set up a "staging" server: Once your blog’s up and running and live, you don’t want to make huge changes to it with the whole world watching. Set up WordPress on your local computer, hack away on your theme and/or plug-ins, then upload your changes when they’re complete and ready.

This post only scratches the surface of WordPress customization possibilities. The good news is WordPress’ open nature and huge community means that you can find the answer to almost any WP question hitting up Google—or in worst case, asking the forums. Special thanks to the author of this CSS Tricks post who also writes the excellent Digging into WordPress blog, which I referenced for this post.

What did I miss? What are your favorite WordPress tricks, hacks, themes, plug-ins, security measures, and widgets? Shout ‘em out in the comments.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, loves herself a little WordPress hacking. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to Lifehacker using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Categories: Uncategorized

Google Wave’s unproductive email metaphors

October 4, 2009 everno Leave a comment

Sent to you by Eric via Google Reader:

Google Wave’s unproductive email metaphors

via Scobleizer by Robert Scoble on 10/3/09

OK, I took a few hours off from playing with Google Wave yesterday. I read all my comments on the post I wrote Thursday about Google Wave, many of which were very ascerbic toward me.

I took the day off and said “what if they are right?” and “is Google Wave a really great way to collaborate with other people?”

On coming back to Google Wave with fresh eyes tonight and even after collaborating with people on a few things my answer is “no, they are not right” and “no, Google Wave is even less productive than email.”

But, first, over on TechCrunch and Mashable I discovered this cute little video that showed off what Google Wave is and how it could be used. In that video you’ll learn that Google Wave is like email but “modernized.” Well, OK, let’s see how the email metaphor holds up and see if Google Wave has actually made us more productive, shall we?

I’ve been studying how teams collaborate for quite some time. I’ve worked at small companies, big ones like NEC and Microsoft, and medium ones like Rackspace.

I’ve interviewed lots of productivity experts over the years, including the guy who wrote “Getting Things Done.”

Plus I’ve been doing public collaboration for more than 20 years too.

Here’s what I’ve learned: email sucks.

Email is probably the most unproductive tool you use. Even though it is the most familiar. Here’s some reasons why:

1. Anyone can send you email. That leads to spam. But worse, that spam, or that funny email from Aunt Sue, gets placed on top of the email from your wife or your boss. Or, the request from a customer that could lead to a huge contract. (A coworker of mine once screwed up an account because such an email was missed).

2. Email in your account is only available to you. So, let’s say you are pitching Toyota tomorrow for a new kind of headlight assembly. You might be talking with your boss about that and maybe an engineer or two who made the product you’re going to pitch. But, is there a chance that another coworker could get involved because he might know something about Toyota without being directly asked to get involved? No. Yet if you were talking in a more open toolset like Salesforce, Yammer, SocialText, or Sharepoint that other guy might actually see you’re talking about something he has knowledge about. I’ve seen this happen over and over because I talk about my projects in public. Heck, that’s exactly how this interview with LaVar Burton got done (it really is a good one too, thanks to Michael Sean Wright who I met online and who took over interviewing duties while I missed the Twitter Conference).

3. Email is hard to search, because of limited metadata and because you can’t search across company, just your own inbox.

4. Email gets turned off when you leave a company. At NEC I had more than a gig of email. It was deleted the day I left there. As it should be. But, the guy who replaced me sure could have used a lot of the knowledge I built up in that email store. Once I left, though, it was gone forever from both people inside the company and outside.

5. Email doesn’t tell you much about the person. Xobni and Gist and other companies are trying to change that, so you can see stuff about who they are, what they’ve done online, etc. This helps you to prioritize your email.

6. Prioritizing your email is difficult at best. Tools like ClearContext try to help by studying your answering patterns.

But, to repeat myself from the other day, Google Wave adds many of these unproductive problems and then lays another few unproductive things on top. What are those?

1. Chat. Live chat. You know, the kind where you can see me typing my characters. Why is this unproductive? Because your eye gets drawn to anything that moves on screen. This is a HUGE attention distractor. That means less productivity for you. And it’s not easy to turn off (I’ve tried to find it). Cure? Only open Wave once in a while, never leave it open. That is a demonstration that it’s even worse than email.

2. Social networking. The social networking features here are far worse than Twitter’s or Facebook’s. Why? No bio. No real names. No real way to manage them and put them into groups. I’d really like to ONLY see Rackspace employees when I sign into Google Wave. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet and that should be the FIRST thing that a collaboration tool like this lets you do. It’s inconsistent too. In Contacts at bottom left, full names aren’t used, but if you click “+” and add someone to a wave there y ou’ll see full names. Consistency people!

3. Imperfect affordances. There’s a trash can on my screen in Google Wave. Yet I haven’t figured out how to delete anything or why it’s there. Drag and drop? Doesn’t work. Right click? No “trash” or “delete.” Up on the toolbar? Nope, no trash. Now I’m sure someone will call me an idiot for not figuring it out, but I’m making a point here. Stuff here doesn’t work the same way it does on your desktop, or even in your email.

4. They take an email metaphor but they threw out the good parts. I can’t figure out how to BCC someone, for instance. That’s something that lots of us use to make sure that our bosses are kept up to date on projects without including them in the conversation. Oh, yes, I’m sure there’s a way to do it, but in Gmail it’s in your face. In Google Wave? Can’t find it.

5. No clear integration into Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which is where a lot of us are already doing collaboration. Now I know why we need SocialWok. To join all these things together. But why wasn’t that done in Wave?

6. It’s sssssssssllllllllloooooooooowwwwwwww. Sorry, when I’m collaborating with other people I want everything to be snappy fast. Even if you think I’m an idiot on every other point this one will really piss you off. Yes, I know, it’s not beta, but on the other hand first impressions matter and if this thing is so slow now imagine when it gets millions of people onto it.

7. The most powerful part of Google Wave is the bots and extensions that are possible to it, but if you are looking for a well thought out “store” where you can acquire those, like Apple’s iPhone has, give it up. You’ll have to find these on your own (I’m getting a ton BECAUSE I opened up my wave to everyone and now people are asking me “did you get this bot yet?” Of course opening up my wave to everyone has made the tool very unproductive in other ways).

8. Where did all these people come from? Just like with email, anyone can get access to your “inbox.” Including spammers and bad actors. All sorts of people have put stuff in my inbox already. This is NOT like other collaboration tools where I have to agree to see your stuff first (like Skype or other IM). The spam opportunities here are immense until we get a great social networking set of management tools. Worse, even Twitter lets you “block” people, which makes them invisible to your inbox. Not sure how to do that with Google Wave.

9. Waves are seemingly only open to other wave users. Not sure about that, but I can’t see a permalink on anything. Right now there’s an interesting wave going about technology. I don’t know how to link you to it or let you know where to find it. So, now I’ve got to figure out a new metaphor for telling you about things. I’m sure everything is URI/URL based but I can’t find them so I can’t share them with you. And people wonder why I blog. Hint: you can link to this blog easily by copying the URL. Everyone knows how to do that. Now try to do the same thing with a Wave. Wave seems like it wants lockin. IE, to really get a lot out of Wave you have to also use Wave all day long. Email isn’t like that. You can use any email client and you have lots of choices. Don’t like Gmail? Use Hotmail. Don’t like Hotmail? Use Yahoo mail. Don’t like those? Get your own pop server and do it yourself. Etc etc. Now try to do that with Wave. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

So, what will I use for collaboration instead?

1. With Rocky and Rob and Fran and Robert at Rackspace I will continue to use email to notify them of new projects and Google Docs and Spreadsheets to be the objects of those collaborations. Will Wave change this? No.

2. With them I will use Skype or Twitter DM’s for chit chatty stuff that doesn’t need to be kept around in case I get hit by a bus. Stuff like “where we going drinking when we get into San Antonio next?” Actually, this is already how I’m seeing people using Wave, but that means Wave is already a noise generator that is similar to Twitter. Not good. And since I can’t lock out everyone else (at least yet, or at least that I’ve figured out because the UI is so complicated).

3. For deep, project-starting stuff, we will use voice on Skype or just phones, which are really great because I can call from anywhere, not just where I have a fast Internet connection.
4. For group stuff that needs to be kept around and be searchable we’ll continue to use FriendFeed’s groups, which can be made private.
5. For document repository, we have a lot of choices, lots of which are better than Google Wave. Things like Dropbox or Drop.io or JungleDisk. Or even old-school Sharepoint, which nearly every large company already has implemented.

6. Because of their openness and URL-centricity, real wikis are still more productive (and don’t have the bad email metaphor or the attention stealing character-by-character display). Can you imagine Wikipedia being done as a Wave? What an abortion that would be. There’s a ton of great wikis out there that are far more interesting for group collaboration than Wave is. Oh, and I bet that if you want that info to get into Microsoft’s Bing search engine that Wikis will beat Google Waves everytime!

7. Specific domain collaboration. Here I’m thinking of working with designers. Compare ConceptShare to Google Wave. ConceptShare will beat it every time.

Anyway, I could keep going.

Where will Wave prove interesting? I think some developer will find a new, simple, metaphor and will use Google Wave’s APIs to develop something interesting. SocialWok demonstrates just that is possible. But we haven’t seen that breakthrough idea yet and, so, for most of you Google Wave will just turn your collaborative life unproductive.

That’s OK, we do things that are unproductive all the time like play Farmville.

For geeks like me, wasting time on cool new technologies is lots of fun. But for most of the world?

It’s just wasting time. Good luck out there! Me? I think I’ll go do something really fun with my unproductive time left this weekend, like take my kids to watch real surfers in Santa Cruz, which is where I shot the photo above.

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to Scobleizer using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Categories: Uncategorized

Choosing the Correct Edition of Microsoft Office for Your Needs

October 4, 2009 everno Leave a comment

Sent to you by Eric via Google Reader:

Choosing the Correct Edition of Microsoft Office for Your Needs

via Microsoft Office News on 10/2/09

There are at least eight different versions of the Microsoft Office suite, making it difficult to choose the correct one for your needs.

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to Microsoft Office News using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Categories: Uncategorized

Make the world a better place!

October 4, 2009 everno Leave a comment

Sent to you by Eric via Google Reader:

Make the world a better place!

via Literacy is Priceless by readinggal on 10/2/09

What idea do you believe will help the most people?

I recently learned about Google’s 10 to the 100th initiative:

Last fall we launched Project 10^100, a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. Your response was overwhelming. Thousands of people from more than 170 countries submitted more than 150,000 (or around 10^5.2) ideas, from general investment suggestions to specific implementation proposals. As we reviewed these submissions, we started noticing lots of similar ideas related to certain broad topics, and decided that combining the best aspects of these individual proposals would produce the most innovative approaches to solving some very pressing problems.

The result is the list you see below of 16 “big ideas,” each inspired by numerous individual submissions. Which ones should we make happen? You tell us. Your vote for one of these ideas will help our advisory board choose up to 5 projects to fund, at which point we’ll launch an RFP process to identify the organization(s) that are best suited to implementing them.

As a huge supporter of open education resources, I voted for idea #7 “Make educational content available online for free”. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every child or adult that wished to learn something could find high quality educational materials online or on their mobile to pursue their passions for free?! Furthermore, wouldn’t it be wonderful if those resources were organized in a way such that they were easy to find and immediately useful…

To cast your vote, click here. (Note: Voting ends October 8, 2009.)

To free knowledge!

Anna

P.S. I just posted a poll on the top right side of this blog. I would greatly appreciate your feedback. Thanks for reading Literacy is Priceless.

Tagged: 10 the the 100th, Anna Batchelder, blog for teachers, Bon Education, education blog, Google, literacy, literacy blog, open education resources

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to Literacy is Priceless using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Categories: Uncategorized

Microsoft Launches Tools For Teachers

September 13, 2009 everno Leave a comment

Sent to you by Eric via Google Reader:

Microsoft Launches Tools For Teachers

via ReadWriteWeb by Dana Oshiro on 9/3/09

Microsoft’s Education Labs launched a new project this afternoon and it’s better on trees and the environment. The group just announced a new Math Worksheet Generator where teachers can generate math problems and email them in paperless Word format to their students. In addition to Math Worksheet Generator, the group also announced plans for two additional projects to be released in the Fall.

Sponsor

Math Worksheet Generator: Built on top of Microsoft’s math engine, this product is for teachers who want their students to get more problem solving practice. Instead of having to search for new worksheets or photocopy old ones, teachers can enter a sample problem and the generator determines the structure of the expression. From here the tool produces similar problems and generates a matching answer sheet. Teachers can use this tool for their entire class or tailor worksheets to individual work plans.

Microsoft Folder-based Sites:: Education Labs also announced plans to roll out a website creator in mid-October. With this tool, teachers will be able to convert Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents into html files. From here the files can be shared with students as web pages and all the files are hosted at no cost through Microsoft. The group is currently testing different admin rights in order to allow for student uploads.

Flash Cards: This product allows you to create and browse flash card decks and create favorites with your Windows Live ID. Teachers create decks by adding images, text and sound to their cards. From here students flip through the decks in Silverlight 3. One interesting part of this project is that as students answer questions, the software remembers incorrect answers and prompts those problem cards more frequently. This project is due before 2010.

For more information on these projects, visit Educationlabs.com or check out the 30 minute demo video at the bottom of the Math Generator page.

Discuss

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to ReadWriteWeb using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Categories: Uncategorized

10 Mobile Plugins for WordPress

September 9, 2009 everno 2 comments

10 Mobile Plugins for WordPress
via Daily Blog Tips by Daniel Scocco on 8/25/09

This is a guest post by Srikanth. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Due to the advances in mobile technology, now a days almost all the mobile phones are equipped with Internet surfing capabilities. As a consequence, more and more people are accessing websites via their mobile phones every day, creating the need for webmasters to adapt their websites to these visitors.

Below we cover 10 mobile plugins for WordPress that can be used to make your website mobile friendly.

1. WordPress Mobile Edition

Developed by Crowd Favorite, this plugin has got a clean user interface that is designed for mobile devices. When a person visits your site from a mobile browser, it automatically detects the browser and loads the mobile version of your site. You can edit the list of mobile browsers in the settings page. This plugin enables particular theme to load on a specific mobile browser or device for example iPhone, Windows Mobile, Opera Mini web browser and other mobile web browsers.

2. WordPressMobile.mobi

One of the most popular mobile WordPress plugins, with thousands of downloads. This WordPress plugin makes your blog more mobile friendly, reducing the load time on mobile browsers and configuring your pages properly.

3. WordPress Mobile Pack

Another WordPress plugin for mobile browsers. It has got mobile recognition, device adaptation and it is widget ready. With the mobile recognition and device adaptation feature, it automatically re-sizes the images, split the articles or post into multiple pages such that your web page looks just fine on any of the mobile phones. It has a mobile admin panel so the admin of the site can easily manage it. Mobile ad widget allows mobile ads or mobile Adsense to be displayed on the mobile version of the web pages.

4. MobilePress

You can set this plugin to display a specific theme for a specific device model or mobile browsers like the iPhone, Opera Mini, etc., such that your blog displays according to the device capability. This plugin also allows the WordPress theme developers to develop their own mobile themes for WordPress blogs.

5. Mobile Admin

This WordPress plugin enables you to access admin user interface on mobile devices in a users friendly manner. This plugin is especially developed for the browsers on the iPhone and iPod Touch devices and it supports most of the other mobile browsers at basic level. Mobile Admin supports most of the basic WordPress admin features like editing posts with auto-save feature, tagging support, comment moderation, and more.

6. Mobilize

This WordPress plugin, once installed, will detect any mobiles phone having access to your site and it will redirect it to the Mippin server. Mippin will then rearrange your web page and its contents to suit the cell phone type. For example, if your website has images, then Mippin will re-size the images to fit the mobile screen and videos are converted to 3gp format such that users can have a comfortable and quick access to your site.

7. WPhone Admin Plug-in

This plugin will allow you to manage your WordPress install using a mobile browser. It has two mobile admin interfaces, one is for use on the iPhone/iPod Touch and other devices which supports full JavaScript and features CSS AJAX and sliding menus. And another is Lite version to use on phones that do not support JavaScript. It will automatically switch between the rich and lite versions based on the browser you use.

8. Mowser

Mowser is a service that lets your WordPress blog to be viewed more comfortably and quickly on a mobile browser or on any other mobile device. This plugin will automatically detect when a user is trying to access your WordPress based blog using a mobile phone and it will redirect to the optimized mobile version of your blog.

9. Wetomo WordPress to Mobile

Wetomo plugin will automatically detect when a user is trying to access your URL from a mobile phone. Wetomo will act as a proxy between you and the user, modifying your blog to suit the handset of the user such that your blog looks great on any of the mobile browsers.

10. WP viewMobile

This plugin is designed to make your WordPress blog mobile internet ready. It will detect when a user is accessing your blog via a mobile phone. It automatically sends a template which is optimized for mobile devices. It tries to re-size the images in your blog to suite the mobile phone or else it removes them completely if the mobile browser does not support images, such that your users can access your blog without any problem.

Srikanth is the author of the Tech Inspiration blog, where he writes about gadgets and technology tips.

Categories: Uncategorized

How To Control MacBook Fan Speeds

September 9, 2009 everno Leave a comment

How To Control MacBook Fan Speeds

via Notebooks.com by on 8/24/09

Does your MacBook burn your legs? Does the every running fan give you a headache? Take control of the fans using smcFanControl, an amazing free little utility.
Download and unzip smcFanControl from www.conscius.de. Drop it in the Applications folder. The first time you start it up it will ask you for your user name and password. smcFanControl resides on the right hand side of the menu bar. I recommend checking Autostart smcFanControl after login in the Preferences window.

Cooling Down your Computer:
Open the Preferences window for smcFanControl. Click the + button beside the Favorites pop-down menu to define a new fan speed. Enter a name, Cool, for example and move the slider to somewhere above 3500 rpm. Setting it at the highest speed, 5500 rpm, is not a good idea as it uses more juice and shortens your fan life. It’s a good idea to check Autoapply favorite when power source changes, which allows you to use a lower fan speed when the computer is unplugged to save battery.

Slowing Down the Fan:
Is your fan running non-stop at high speeds even when the computer is cool? smcFanControl does not allow you to set a maximum speed for the fans through the user interface, so let’s head over to Terminal. Paste this line in the command prompt and hit enter;

/Applications/smcFanControl.app/Contents/Resources/smc -k F0Mx -w 60e0

The number 60e0 at the end is 6200 rpm. Change this to the speed of your choice (3e80 is 4000 rpm.), but use common sense: if the max fan speed is too low (under 3000 rpm) you risk over heating your computer. Unfortunately this command has to be run every time you log in. To get around this easily open up Automator. Add Utilities > Run Shell Script to the workflow and paste in the same line above. Save your work flow as an application. Open System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items and add your newly created application to the list. And your good to go!

Nathan Cahill

This post was submitted by Nathan Cahill.

Subscribe to Notebooks.com using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Categories: Uncategorized

Augmented Reality – Holy cow!

September 8, 2009 everno Leave a comment

TipLine – Gates’ Computer Tips

I think that every teacher and every policy maker and every parent should watch this video. Also watch some of the related videos about augmented reality.

Why? Because, while the world keeps making portable applications that do these amazing things, the folks who make the decisions about education are either blocking us from using them, or pretending that they don’t exist, or even denying that they make a difference, and instead, continuing to pour money into a system centered around memorization and high stakes tests.

At what point do we take a look at the world around us and say, “OK. It’s now time to admit that these things exist AND that they are game-changers.”

Categories: educational, interesting, technology

Older Entries

	joe on 10 Mobile Plugins for Wor…
	Sharepoint \| Bart Ti… on Google Wave’s unproductive ema…
	iPod 4th on 10 Mobile Plugins for Wor…
	mohamed on Great New Website From The BBC…
	michael rogers on Great New Website From The BBC…

Things you can do from here:

Things you can do from here:

Sent to you by Eric via Google Reader:

What You’re In For

Initial configuration

Must-have plug-ins

Make Your WordPress Theme Yours

Sidebars and Widgets, Oh My!

Advanced trickery

Things you can do from here:

Sent to you by Eric via Google Reader:

Things you can do from here:

Sent to you by Eric via Google Reader:

Things you can do from here:

Sent to you by Eric via Google Reader:

Things you can do from here:

Sent to you by Eric via Google Reader:

Things you can do from here:

Things you can do from here:

Tech in the Middle

Category Cloud

Blog Stats

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Top Posts

Archives