Ryan Collins

🕹ī¸ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • I’ve been hacked and you can learn from my mistakes. 🙂

    Hacked!

    Yes, I let my WordPress installation rot. And it’s entirely my fault.
    Wordpress makes it so easy to keep it up to date now that there is no
    excuse, so I do accept full responsibility! I’m lucky in the fact that
    all the hacker
    did was rewrite my .htaccess file to redirect visitors to a malware
    hosted site.

    After examining the WordPress database, it appeared that it hadn’t been
    changed by the attacker, so I went about installing a new copy of
    Wordpress. It went pretty smooth, and for right now I’m going for a
    minimum amount of
    plugins and keeping the design pretty basic. As I was restoring, I
    began to think of what the hacker might of had access to and what I
    needed to do to protect myself.

    1. I don’t know if the attacker had access to the filesystem or could
      only append lines onto the .htaccess file. Why is this important?
      Your MySQL password for your WordPress installation is listed in the
      wp-config.php file. If you allow access to your MySQL server from
      the outside world, an attacker armed with this username and password
      is free to make changes to your database, even making themselves an
      administrator. So before doing the installation, I changed my
      password to MySQL.

    2. One plugin I use with WordPress is Automatic WordPress Backup.
      This makes daily backups of my WordPress installation and stores
      them on Amazon S3. What I realized after this hack was that if the
      attacker had gotten access to administrator privileges, he could
      have wiped out every single backup I have. Worse yet, they could
      gain access to my access keys for Amazon S3. I went in and changed
      my Amazon S3 access keys.

    What I’m doing differently

    1. I will be keeping up on WordPress updates!!!

    2. The wp-config.php file, which contains some very important
      information on your WordPress installation does not need to live in
      a web accessible directory such as your main WordPress installation.
      I moved it up a directory. For example, if you installed WordPress
      in \~/public-html/, you can put wp-config.php in \~/.

    3. Once my installation was completed, I created a user for myself and
      made it an administrator. I then logged in as my new administrator
      account and deleted the default administrator. This protects against
      hacks that target the default admin account.

    4. I switched to Disqus for comments. The blog only had one user, and I
      didn’t want to worry about being hacked giving up reader
      information. By using Disqus, I let them handle it. 🙂

    5. I installed the CHAP Secure Login plugin for WordPress. This
      protects logins by encrypting the password. Since I don’t have an
      SSL certificate, my password would be “in the clear” without this
      plugin.

    6. I will be automating the download of my backups from Amazon S3.

  • Personal computers are extinct, bring on mobile technologies – #OHECC11

    Here’s my presentation from the OHECC 2011 conference and the handout
    is available by clicking here    :

  • Put a countdown timer on a presentation slide

    [][]

    This past week as I was working on a presentation, I had a slide where I
    asked the participants to discuss among themselves. I wanted to set a
    time limit, but I didn’t want to have to switch out of Keynote, I wanted
    it on the slide. It took me a couple of minutes, but I finally came up
    with a quite clever solution, if I do say so myself. 🙂

    The first thing I needed was a little countdown video that would count
    down from 10. I started a new Keynote project, and created a ten second
    countdown. Originally I used ten slides, with the transition taking a
    second, so that when played it would count down in ten seconds. The
    problem came when I wanted to export the movie. The minimum amount of
    time I could show a slide was two seconds, and since I didn’t want to
    count down by two a new solution had to be made. So I deleted all the
    slides in my presentation save one, and put 11 text boxes on it (10-0).
    I then did a pop build in and out, and set the time for the build to be
    one second. The out build would happen concurrently with the in build of
    the next number, so I got a pretty cool effect as a bonus. I exported
    this out as a Quicktime movie    .

    Now in my presentation, I added a question text box with a build in
    transition to occur after a click. Next, I added my movie with a build
    in transition to appear. The secret is to set the movie to appear
    however many seconds you want to wait. I set it at 60 seconds, so
    participants actually had 70 seconds until it finished. It doesn’t
    appear until the 60 second mark has passed, and then counts down to 0.

    Works better than I had hoped! You can download the movie
    here    . (right click and use Save
    as…)

    []: https://ryancollins.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/countdown.png

  • A Kindle, iPad, and iPod Touch walk into a classroom – #neotech2011

    Here are the slides with notes: Handout from my presentation. For
    those following along with Twitter here are the results of the poll:
    [][]

    I really enjoyed the conference, and want to thank everyone that was
    involved at putting it on. It was very well run (although I didn’t win
    the MacBook Air door prize… :-).

    (more…)

  • A Kindle, iPad, and iPod Touch walk into a classroom – #oetc11

    The slides are available on Google Docs.

  • 21st Century Learning – Return of the Jedi #oetc11

    The slides are available on Google Docs, and I’ve started to put my
    links under http://www.delicious.com/mr.rcollins/partvi.

    Have you succumbed to the dark side? Do you use technology for good or
    evil?

  • Interview with Kent State journalism students at #oetc11

    I was interviewed by Amanda Murrow at the Ohio eTech Technology
    Conference:

    Star Wars for Teaching from David Smeltzer on Vimeo.

  • My presentations for the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference 2011 #oetc11

    I’ll be presenting twice at the conference this year. On Monday, I’ll be
    presenting “21st Century Schools: Part VI, Return of the Jedi” from 3:45
    – 4:30 pm in Room: D230 – 232. This session will be on motivating
    students and teachers, while trying not to stray to the “dark side” of
    technology. The twitter hastag will be #rcpartvi.

    My second presentation is Tuesday, “An iPad, Kindle, and iPod Touch
    walked into a classroom…” at 3:45 – 4:30 pm in room: C213 – 215. This
    session will explore the Kindle, the iPad, and the iPod and how they can
    be used in the classroom. Alternative technologies will also be
    presented and discussed. The Twitter hashtag will be #rcmobile.

    For both presentations I’ll be using Google Docs, and will update this
    site with urls to the presentations. I’m going to try to use the “View
    together” feature, where participants can follow along and actually
    converse if they have Google accounts. For audio, I’ve set up a
    Shoutcast server and I’ll be attempting to broadcast the audio live
    while presenting. I don’t know how well it’s going to work, but it
    should be fun!

    Update: The “21st Century Schools: Part VI, Return of the Jedi”
    presentation is online at http://eduk8.me/nrMMMm. I’ve started to
    collect the links for the presentation at
    http://www.delicious.com/mr.rcollins/partvi

  • Distraction free writing with JDarkroom

    [][]

    While there are several full screen text editing apps, I’ve settled on
    JDarkroom. Written in Java, JDarkroom is a distraction free text
    editor, taking over your entire screen so you can concentrate on writing
    and not worry about new email or tweets. It is patterned after Darkroom
    for Windows     and Writeroom for Mac.

    I was using Evernote for writing, but it doesn’t have a full screen
    mode. To emulate the ability to sync my notes written in JDarkroom with
    my other devices I use Dropbox (Affiliate code in link,
    dropbox.com is the website without the affiliate code). Now I just
    save my notes into my Dropbox, and Dropbox takes care of syncing them
    across my devices. The Dropbox app for Android allows me to edit text
    files directly in the application, and there are several apps for iOS
    devices that will let you do the same. For mark up in text files I use
    John Gruber’s Markdown. It’s a very readable way to encode
    formatting in a text file. There are several libraries that let you then
    convert it to html or back to markdown. I installed the WMD plug in for
    Wordpress     which allows me to write in Markdown (or just copy and
    paste from one of my files.

    Yes, it’s a little convoluted, and as soon as Evernote as a full screen
    editor option I’ll probably switch back to it, it does work for me. 🙂

    []: https://ryancollins.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/sc_1.png

  • Checking out Android

    As I prepare for my eTech 2011 presentation, An iPad, Kindle, and iPod
    Touch walked into a classroom…    , I decided that it would be
    beneficial to plan on questions about Android, Android Tablets, and how
    they may work in schools. The Consumer Electronics Show was held this
    past week, and during it a bevy of manufacturers announced tablets, with
    almost all of them running Android.

    Android is an open source operating system created at Google based on
    Linux. Google allows distributes this OS free of charge to be used by
    manufacturers and cellular providers on mobile devices. It competes
    against other mobile operating systems such as Apple’s iOS (used on the
    iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch), Microsoft Windows Phone 7, RIM Blackberry
    OS, and HP’s WebOS.

    I purchased a Motorola Droid off of eBay and received it this past week.
    I’ve been playing around with it for the last couple of days, so this
    isn’t so much as a review as it is my first impressions.

    (more…)