bodmas blog

Online dictionary has no adverts and is fast

Use the GIMP to copy an image into the blue gradient area of the Kubrick theme, now the WordPress default

The students have realised why I’m YouTubing certain parts of the Maths course… I’ll do some more over the weekend.

MSIE v6 ignores the two forward slash style comments in CSS, and Firefox and Safari don’t. You can have different styles on different browsers…

Make tag clouds from text

Wiki definitions. Slippery.

Oddmuse is a wiki script written in perl. It is based on the Usemod wiki script, but can produce valid xhtml. Oddmuse does not need a database, page data is stored in text files.

To get a wiki running on a Web server that runs Apache (1.2 upwards) and that can run perl cgi scripts, you [...]

Liquid layout with four columns on the home page

This small app allows you to enter a Web address and then save a PNG graphics file of the whole page – screen grabs that are a couple of thousand pixels high.

Change two image files in the default WordPress theme to produce a white page area with sparse header image. I wanted a high key look with plenty of space and no ‘boxes’.

Auctioning the fold for charity. These people will write your name on toast, then photograph it and then put the toast and a link to a site you nominate on their page. The rounds of toast are listed in descending order of contribution. All proceeds go to charity. They are auctioning the space above the fold – well neat.

Many people now use 1024 by 768 or slightly narrower as a screen resolution. 960px has been suggested as a width to design to as it has a lot of factors and allows a range of grid sizes.

Minimalist pages show just the news stories as they update

Now I have the topics mapped, it is time to start adding bits of content

Tabbed browsing and RSS feeds in a side bar…

Winner of recent BBC redesign contest does a Being John Malkovich

This timeline is all my own work and I didn’t look at the textbook… Lesson 2 and 3 applied to an animation showing how the area of a parallelogram is calculated…

If you have any version of the Flash Player from 5 upwards installed on your browser, then the yellow and blue grid above should show a blue square and a red triangle moving around and changing their opacity.

The animation loops once and then stops, and the frame rate is 15 frames per second. According to [...]

Simple template from Open Source Web Design can be adapted as a WordPress theme

A list apart article provides a metric for Web sites and a classification: handy for Web page course.

Being able to express thoughts in writing is key to any career

Flash Journalism by Mindy McAdams, lesson 1. Why is a maths teacher using a book aimed at journalists?

Show the HTML mark up of a web page as a graph

Does the blog act as a gateway to the VLE or does the VLE contain the blog?

We were looking at finding a value for the intercept of a straight line graph when the scale of the graph made it difficult to have an X axis that started at zero – we were setting up and solving a simple equation within a context.

This second whiteboard processed using ScanR was taken in [...]

There is an interesting discussion about one page Web sites on the Signals vs Noise blog published by the Web programming company 37 Signals. I especially chimed with the comment by Geoff Harris

“I agree with Wilson’s comments about distilling information down to the most basic requirements and leaving as is.

Doing so is a fantastic exercise [...]

Moodle 1.53 and 1.6 can be ‘installed’ on a USB stick. Just make sure the drive letter assigned to the stick stays the same on each machine

Yotophoto is a search engine for copyright free or free use images

Anyone going?

BBC radio program about history looks at prime numbers

Zeldman’s article from 5 years ago asking for usability in web design is updated and given a new home – some change for better

MeatBall wiki page about educational uses of wikis and other links

Podcast interviews – DIY Studs Terkel?

Wordpress theme uses tables layout with light styling and one main file

Some projects in Southern Africa aim to reduce the impact of the digital divide

Tinderbox – soon for Windows – is worth the money, deep software

Use a spreadsheet to write each idea in a cell with a heading….

Lawyer in Huddesfield uses Blogger to record case law

Who are you writing your Web page for? Specify and pin down different audiences.

The big three e-commerce sites have moved to home pages with a lot of information and a high link density

Java applets and some DHTML Javascript can be used for educational purposes- and you don’t have to code a line

Maths on the Web is a problem – html entities can provide a limited range of symbols – and I like the immediacy of a blogging approach to Maths. Else it is down to PDFs or scans or Whiteboard captures.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the new Bodmas design is borrowed from Jakob Nielsen’s personal site at http://useit.com/

“Many sites submitted had no concern for the user on the most basic levels. Rarely could you identify an idea or purpose behind the site, or name a possible user goal the site was intended to facilitate. There was no flow, no legibility, no usability. It wasn‚Äôt so much that the designers had contempt for [...]

A Quick (and Hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes) actually starts at Chapter 3. It has cartoons and an unusual style (for a programming book).

A sample: “Most variables are rather temporary in nature. Some parts of your program are like little houses. You walk in and they have their own variables. In one [...]

LaTiS Centre Image Archive from Essex University

Thanks for this resource – about 400 free pictures. Mostly .jpegs and around 400 to 600 pixels wide with white backgrounds.

It all started in May of 2001. I began getting calls from companies I had tried selling security services to in the past but were never interested. Now they needed my help because something happened. It seemed like dozens of people had their websites defaced with the words: “fu*k USA Government, fu*k PoizonBOx.” It was [...]

“It seems like I wrote “Alertbox Five Years Retrospective” just yesterday, but another five years have passed. Since writing my first column in June 1995, I’ve published 247 columns comprising almost 300,000 words. That’s a lot of writing and a lot of content to give away on the Internet. Has it been worth the effort? [...]

David Kolb has produced a hypertext essay on the nature of modern spaces in cities called Sprawling Places
This hypertext has 100,000 words, 600 pages and 1,000 images
The work is multiply linked and threaded by a number of outlines or themes
It is possible for two (or more) people to ‘read’ the work in quite unconnected ways [...]

The OPTE project provides views of the distribution of Internet connections and routes

Performance arts event sets up a public blog to get audience feedback.

A couple of sites with information on the Mother of all Search Engines

Forensic ICT lesson
Students searched for information about Adrian Lamo, the ‘homeless hacker’
Then we read page 3 and 4 of Marc Roger’s essay A New Hacker Taxonomy
Students were invited to analyse aspects of Lamo’s ‘career’ using Rogers’ roles
Disagreements! Arguments focussing on what the roles meant! Useful!
Lamo’s minimalist home page provides an example of embedded hypertext – [...]

Zeldman has this link to a Web designer called Joe Clark. Ten Questions for Joe Clark is a thought provoking piece in the style of a pop mag interview. Should get Web design students at least thinking about the issues. Mr Clark links to Techniques for Accessible HTML Tables

And I definitely need a haircut – [...]

An olive oil can leads to choice of colours

“When researching new processes we often find ourselves working with different industries. It was interesting working with a confectionery manufacturer. Their experience in the science of translucent colour control helped us understand processes to ensure consistency in high volume.”

From Jonathan Ive’s account of the 1998 iMac design (this would be the slot loader judging by [...]

Processing is a programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional [...]

Tinderbox is a note taking application for Mac OS X. A Windows version is in the works – in fact the author Mark Bernstein’s blog includes a link to his development peekhole for Tinderbox.

Tinderbox has a range of powerful features for organising and visualising relationships between notes – such that I am going to try [...]

The NFER has a long term project (started in 2002) tracking students’ experience of citizenship education. The most recent report is referenced as follows….CLEAVER, E., IRELAND, E., KERR, D. and LOPES, J. (2005). Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study: Second Cross-Sectional Survey 2004 Listening to Young People: Citizenship Education in England (DfES Research Report 626). London: DfES

The [...]

Ellen Lupton’s book Thinking With Type is supported by a useful and thought provoking Web site. A table links to short pages of information on various concepts to do with typography and page layout, mainly for printed pages. The table columns move along a logical sequence of scales (Letter – Text – Grid). There is [...]

Don Norman is the other half of Nielsen and Norman the usability consultants. He has provided Chapter 7 of his book The Invisible Computer as a Web reading. The title of the chapter is Being Analog – which we as humans are… You can also read other chapters on the MIT Press site and [...]

Andrew Hunter provided a simple and ingenious perl script that will ftp a directory’s worth of files to a remote Web server
Well done that man
This script worked fine on Windows under Active State perl and works (without modification) under Mac OS X using the perl that comes with Panther

Sebastian Krauss provides MyMind 1.2 a small free outliner and mind mapping tool for the Mac OS X platform. Very simple and basic which actually makes it more useful than the all singing mind mappers around.

MyMind can export its map views as Web pages with a client side image map coded in. Site maps like [...]

Gerry McGovern suggests (see Secrets of great Web headings )

Headings and titles less than 8 words, nearer 4
Summaries less than 30 words
Online research indicates most summaries coming in at 17 words with a low of 10 and a high of 25

Idea for lesson activity: take typical Intranet news item text and write a page title [...]

“The Netscape palette for foreground colors usually (but NOT always) consists of all the combinations of 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, FF for each of the red, green, and blue elements of the color descriptor. This results in 216 (6×6×6) distinct colors.” – Victor Engel

The Browser Safe Palette
Colour palette map
Color Primer

A colour taken [...]

Jutta Degener’s What is good hypertext writing essay is still relevant 7 years later, even though Web pages tend to look more like interfaces and less like documents.

The rest of her homepage looks sort of antique but still interesting. I like the paintings.

” It never occurred to me that the techies writing the software would try to use the computer to simulate paper Ôø? actually not even paper, but paper under glass. ” quoted in Grand Text Auto blog