Yes seriously, there is going to be a WordCamp in Transylvania this year. In case, you didn’t know Translyvania is in Romania and contrary to many folk tales (well romantic novels) is not the home of many vampires and a WordPress community looking to host a WordCamp. So, if you like WordPress and love Vampires, this is the WordCamp to attend! Just kidding.
It’s no secret that I am a fan of Codeacademy.com As someone who is still learning to code and at a very basic level their “gamification” of the process of learn to code is great approach that uses proven psychology to motivate even the busiest people to learn. Although Codeacademy has had courses for HTML, CSS, JQuery, Javascript, Python and Ruby for a while, it has just opened up courses in PHP, the heart of WordPress.
Education has been brought to the forefront recently with WordPress.com’s move towards the Education market. Although there are some groups like Edublogs using WordPress to provide educational functions and services there are groups outside the WordPress ecosystem that have created some more unique and useful features that we are yet to see in WordPress (via themes or plugins). Moodle is one of these groups who have some features that really set it apart as an Educational platform. I’m going to list some features that I believe would be very useful as a set plugin or theme to marketed in an […]
Like or loath Jetpack it’s here to stay…and what’s more Automattic have just added a new feature to Jetpack: Likes. Yes, your favorite passive activity when you scan through the internet is now available on self-hosted blogs. Like the idea?
One of the first rules in the rulebook of Web design is think about “the fold“. For any design newbies out there “the fold” is the visible part of the webpage that someone sees when they first load a webpage. It’s kind of like the webpage equivalent of an iceberg. “The fold” is everything above the water, even if there is lots of content hidden bellow. In the past this was a vital element of your webpage design that you had to think long and hard about. If you put the wrong thing here then the chances are no one would look […]
More and more details are coming out about Google project glass (now know as just glass) and I’m excited (though less excited about the price) about the potential for Glass. But what impact might this technology have on the blogging community. Let’s look at some features and then I’ll open the floor to you.
If you haven’t discovered the benefits of minimalist writing tools then I’d encourage you to give it a go as soon as possible. Although many people think they need hundreds of features when they write their first draft (the full Microsoft Word if you will) in actual fact reducing the number of functions (and thus tasks) you have to do increases your productivity and speed. Until recently this would mean writing a post using an offline editing program or in another program for WordPress, good advice anyway considering the risks of losing your work due to a lose of internet […]
You might have seen John’s recent blog post about the new WordPress.com Education and classroom initiative and got really excited about the idea of blogs revolutionising education. As a teacher of English as a foreign language and a keen blogger I have looked at ways to make use of blogging for both my students and my own personal development as a teacher for a while now. In the former case I ran several blog projects with students to publicly show off their best works and chronicle their learning. In the latter case I started my own blog to reflect and improve myself. As I learned more about […]
As someone who has many friends on Posterous I can understand the pain of Posterous closing down. Many people I know have been facing the decision over what platform to switch their blogs over to. Of course, as a self proclaimed WordPress evangelist I have been doing my part in convincing people to switch to WordPress from their original blogs but there is one issue that remains…how can I easily transfer all my blog posts from my Posterous blog to WordPress? If the thought of copying and pasting hundreds of blog posts makes your stomach turn then worry no more because a few years […]
When most people start off blogging they don’t know a thing about coding. After all content is king, right (or design if you ask some people but that’s a debate for someone else)? Whatever the most important element is, for most people it isn’t coding. After all, a good blogging platform should have low entry requirements and highly usable interface where any noob can just turn up and start using it. WordPress, of course, fills this description with it’s visual text editor, themes, plugins and widgets that can help people get a good standard site with no knowledge of coding…but […]
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