Ryan Collins » Tutorial

Find out the last modified date of the web page you are viewing

mr.rcollins — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:51:36 +0000

Javascript Bonus: Curious about when the page you’re on was last updated? Just type javascript:alert(document.lastModified) in the address bar and press Enter to see the date and time in a pop-up window.

And here’s a link (Last Modified) can drag to your toolbar. Once there, you can click on it on any page.

Youtube blocked at school? Got a blog? Show those Youtube videos!

mr.rcollins — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:08:41 +0000

We are getting ready to roll out Google Apps for Education, and there was a video on Youtube from Google on sharing documents that I wanted to show to the staff. Unfortunately, YouTube is blocked at school, so embedding the video was out. To show the video, I did the following (requirements are WordPress and the Podpress plugin):

Using the Techcrunch YouTube Downloader to download the Flash Video file (.flv). Since the video is still downloading from YouTube, it will still be blocked, so you’ll have to do it from home or another location.
Upload the video to your blog. Depends on how your blog is setup, for most people I’m assuming you would need to ftp the file.
My blog runs under WordPress, and I use the Podpress plugin for other things. I add the video to a blog post with the Podpress plugin.

The video is now embedded on my blog, and loading from my blog, so it will no longer be blocked.

Microsoft Word annoyances and fixes

mr.rcollins — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:50:14 +0000

I’ve noticed people have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft Word, more hate than love I’m afraid. In fact, when I mentioned to some teachers that we have to start moving off of AppleWorks, I got some from angry reactions. Mostly it’s because Word tries to help the writer a little too much, moving things around or auto-correcting stuff. There is help out there:

You use your browser a lot. You use your e-mail program a lot. But the chances are better than even that you spend a big chunk of your workday in Microsoft Word. There’s no way any application used by so many people for so many different tasks is going to be set up just right for you. Here are the five settings I changed to make Word work my way, more or less.

I’m going to add a few more, getting rid of automatic bulleted lists, automatic numbered lists, and automatic borders. Go to Tools → Autocorrect → Autoformat As You Type and uncheck the relevant boxes. You will probably want to do it to the Autoformat tab too.

Make your old extensions (add-ons) compatible with Firefox 2.0

mr.rcollins — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 16:39:47 +0000

So you’ve upgraded to the newest version of Firefox, but there is that one add-on that you can’t live without. This article shows you three ways to help make your old extensions compatible with Firefox 2.0.

Customizing Firefox for your school/classroom with the CCK

mr.rcollins — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 21:36:33 +0000

You’ve already made the change to Firefox, and have been jonesing on the extensions, but now you would like to use it in your classroom. Unfortunately, out of the box, Firefox doesn’t really let you set a lot of defaults for your students. Without help it’s also impossible to set the student’s installation at their home. To the rescue is another extension, the Firefox 1.5 CCK (Client Customization Kit).

The Firefox CCK extension is a wizard that walks you through the creation of your very own Firefox extension. This extension, when installed, sets up sensible defaults for how you work. Some of the features that you can set are (from the FAQ):
    â€¢    Set the homepage (even locking it from being changed)
    â€¢    Change the title bar text
    â€¢    Change the animated logo
    â€¢    Change the web page and tooltip used for the animated logo
    â€¢    Add a help menu item that links to a web page
    â€¢    Provide sites for which popups and XPInstalls are allowed by default
    â€¢    Preinstall browser plug-ins
    â€¢    Preinstall search engines
    â€¢    Add folders, bookmarks and live bookmarks to the personal toolbar
    â€¢    Add folders, bookmarks and live bookmarks to the bookmarks folder
    â€¢    Set default preferences
    â€¢    Lock preferences
    â€¢    Add registry keys (Windows only)
    â€¢    Add certificates (See NOTE below)
    â€¢    Set default proxy configurations
    â€¢    Package other XPIs with your distribution
    â€¢    Disable about:config

The biggies are the ability to set the homepage, adding folders, bookmarks, and live bookmarks. You can also automatically install extensions, such as my favorites, CopyURL+ and del.icio.us Complete. (Under Windows, you will need to make sure zip.exe is somewhere in your path.

After you walk through the wizard, it creates an extension. This extension can then be distributed to setup Firefox. If you are using it in your classroom you can use the following command line to install the extension as a global extension so it is in Firefox for anyone who uses Firefox on the machine:

firefox -install-global-extension MyExtension.xpi

You’ll need to use the full path to Firefox, for example, under Windows it is probably:
c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe -install-global-extension MyExtension.xpi

Using a RSS reader (Bloglines.com) to keep up to date

mr.rcollins — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 13:42:03 +0000

I’ve been using Bloglines for about 2 weeks now, and it has made me so much more efficient at reading websites. No longer do I visit several bookmarks to see if things have changed, I can do it all at once.

Once you visit Bloglines and register, you can begin to add website RSS feeds. There are several ways to do this:

Use their directory to find blogs and websites to subscribe to
Find the link to a RSS feed on the website and add it manually
Use the Subscribe to Bloglines bookmark
Use a button from a website

Using Their Directory
By going into their directory, you can search for feeds that have been subscribed by others. Once you find one that you like, you can click on it to see if it is something you want to which you want to subscribe. If so, you can click on the subscribe link and it will be added to your list.

Using a Link on a Website
This is probably the hardest method, and unfortunately, the method you’ll need to use the most. When visiting a website, look for an orange graphic with the letters RSS or XML ( or ). Sometimes it is just a link with the letters RSS. You can right click on these links (control-click if you’re on a mac) and select Copy Link Location. Once you have the address, you can go back to your Bloglines account, click Add, and paste in that address to subscribe.

Use the Subscribe to Bloglines bookmark
By adding the Subscribe to Bloglines bookmark to your browser’s toolbar or bookmarks menu, you can subscribe to most sites by clicking on it. Some sites don’t work with this method and you have to go use another method.

Use a button
This is by far the easiest method, for those websites that have this button. All you have to do is click on it and Bloglines takes care of the rest.

Please take a moment to try out Bloglines, or other RSS readers (you can add RSS feeds to your My Yahoo! page for example). Since I may use 2 or 3 different computers in a day, I prefer to use web based RSS readers as opposed to downloadable programs. With a program that you download, what feeds you’ve already read can get out of sync with different machines.