awesome tools

Posting to your WordPress blog by Email

Chris 0 Comments

When you have a WordPress.com <http://wordpress.com/> blog (like I did),
you can submit posts by email – a nice simple way to publish content
without all the fuss of any other app or interface to deal with. Just tap
out your content, use the unique address you’ve been given and hit send.

You can do the same with your self hosted WordPress account. I’ve never
bothered to set up the Post By Email feature until now, but realise that
sending small posts to my blog by email could be a very easy and practical
method.

Turned out not to be quite so straight forward for me. Why? Well, I use
Google Apps, and since my all mail is routed via Google’s MX records, it
means that I can’t use my hosting package to handle the email without some
reconfiguration. The other immediately available option to me for WordPress
to collect email from a new Google Apps account, but it turns out these two
don’t play well together either.

I gave up with these methods, turned off the Post by Email feature
(removing the Postie plugin I had also tried in the process) and instead
setup an IFTTT recipe instead. All I need to do is send an email over to
the IFTTT Trigger (like I did to create this post).

cPanel on iPad

Chris 0 Comments

I don’t know why, but it hasn’t crossed my mind before to try managing this site with cPanel on iPad. Works fine, although I wasn’t too impressed with a dated mobile theme. I can see there are a few iOS apps for cPanel. Maybe that’s what I’ll try when the next WordPress update comes around.

First steps in open badges, starting with a challenge

Chris 0 Comments

Badges by Ellen Munro

I’ve been aware of Open Badges for some time, but only this week have I connected my awareness to another activity.

Spending a day with a development consultant advising us on our further development of a couple of in-house products, I suggested that adding badges to our student progress tacking system would be a good motivator. In this case, I used FourSquare as an example, knowing that through a few pointless checkins, I had earned Campus Explorer, Century Club and Local badges Writing up my notes, I reached the moment we discussed badges and decided to do nothing more than Google it. Up pops the Open Badges page and immediately prompts me to ‘get started’ and learn about the idea with a little wizard. Before I knew it, I had earned ‘Badges 101’ and ‘Hackasaurus’ and stuffed them into my new ‘backpack’. Great!

Having made these rather small achievements, I’m now being encouraged to earn more having been directed to P2PU and complete some challenges. Nothing too taxing at first, it seems. One of the first steps in the School of Web Craft is to write a ‘magnificent’ blog post like this one. [Tick!]

Now, part of the challenge is to review the activities of others in this challenge. It’s interesting to see how others are publishing their own efforts – like these other learners!