IT Tutor

Eating my own dogfood here by getting this somewhat neglected blog back in order.

Sitemap Plugins installed, together with redirection to monitor 404s

Old urls blocked from robots

Meta tags updated

What else?

Happy New Year for 2010 from the IT Tutor blog.

In 2009 I posted 12 blog posts here on the IT-Tutor blog, which I admit is kind of sporadic.

I guess the early part of 2010 is going to be a time for making the decision as to where the blog goes from here.

Google Analytics is a system for tracking traffic to a website. By including a piece of code that appears within every page on a site, information sent voluntarily by visitors browsers can be accumulated over time and used to provide interesting statistics about the nature of the traffic to any particular site, most importantly where they came from.

I commissioned a Wordpress plugin that does some fancy stuff with category code pages to include a table of contents. So far it seems to help a bit with navigation, which is the main aim. Time will tell if it makes any difference to findabiity

build a LEGO school

371 children use 1 million bricks to build their own school.

After considering changing my web hosting, for various sites one thing has occurred to me which may be worth an airing and that is that the act of migration can be non-trivial with larger sites these days. If you have a domain with a couple of established blogs and maybe a mediawiki installation then it’s not just a question of ftp-ing a few dozen files or so. The software itself takes up a lot of space for each installation, together with all the plugins and customisations, then there’s the content section which may have a large number of images each with thumbnails and size options, and finally the mySQL databases which are not always so easy to transfer. As far as I know there is no way to ftp across from one website to another so the whole process needs to be done twice, once to download an entire site to a local computer, and once again to upload everything to the new host. File permissions are often not re-created exactly the same as the original leading to access errors which all need sorting out.

One utility which helps with the process is a program called mysqldumper. It makes sure your database is fully exported and re-imported, getting over any file size limitations.

I’m thinking of moving this IT Tutor blog to another web host but the question is to which one?

I’ve had a look through most of the web hosts listed on the web hosting page at DAR wiki and that seems to be a good place to start.

Any other suggestions?

Not long ago the problem of how to embed a youTube video into a Wordpress blog involved selecting the right plugin and worrying about theme compatibility not to mentiom backward compatibility on upgrading the core Wordpress installation. Now it has been built in so it;s just a question of getting the right URL for the youTube video and then adding it in between square brackets with “youtube=” at the start like this:

I go to a video I want to embed, in this case it’s Jerry Springer live in London.

Copy the URL supplied on the video page just above the embed code

Then click on the “add video” button in the WordPress Post Editor as below

And paste it in.

Voila

Image editing can be really simple, like just cropping or resizing a photograph or it can get extremely complicated when used by professional graphic designers tp produce high quality retouched illustrations for printed magazines.

In between those extremes there is also a space for the amateur photographer, website builder or blogger who wants to do a bit more with images but doesn’t have the time or money to get to grips with a 10 tion gorilla piece of software thet is Photoshop.

There have always been simple image editing programs for Windows computers, I remember Paint Shop Pro which was pretty good. On a Mac there is a program called iPhoto which comes bundled with the iLife package, pre installed on Mac computers – which is remarkably good for cropping, and making some automated adjustments with edit tools like sharpen, highlight and shadow.

To go beyond iPhoto but short of Photoshop I recommend Seashore the free image editor for Mac. It’s based on Gimp technology, so it’s quite powerful, but uses the Mac Cocoa system which makes it integrate really well with the Mac way of working, and fast.

The possibility of a swine flu pandemic is always a good cue for increased interest in the idea of remote working, distributed teams and working from home.