Moodle, IT and me

The European Comics section has been moved to the European Comics site.

Justin Guitar is my favorite guitar web site. The guy has some fantastic free guitar lessons. For example I’m training on this one at the moment:

I love WordPress for the simple reason that I never had to open Netbeans in a year. I just ran PHPmyadmin one time, and my FTP client another time. It was due to two themes that were displaying blank pages once I edited their footers. This issue was everywhere, admin pages included. These themes were telling me that they were under CC licence and I had no right to edit their footers. Without a doubt the images are under the CC licence, but WordPress being under GPL licence, I’m dubitative about the PHP/HTML/CSS  theme files CC licence. Anyway if ever your install a theme, and some of your plugins (Google analytics for example) add some code to the footer, it could entirely break your site. If it happens to you there is some information on this page to reset the default theme.

To come back to the WordPress superbness, I would say it is:

• the easiest upgrade/update process ever (themes and plugins included)
• plugin search functionality and plugin installation from the administration pages
• lots and lots of plugins, most of them working on every updated WordPress
• Possibility of configuration much deeper than my first look suggested
• Thousands of beautiful free themes

There is something I learned about themes. Less they have functionalities, more you will like them. Few month ago I started to buy some very cool themes on Themeforest. They are all Flashy and JQuery with great PSD files. They also come with a considerable amount of coding by the author. The problem is that if ever you want to switch to another theme, you could lose widgets/menus/functionalities/… I found out that all the functionalities these themes offer can be found in some free plugins. Except if you want to do a business site, I suggest you to only install themes that don’t provide any special ‘stuff’. A theme should be only about the look. If you are like me you want to change the theme times to times, don’t be depending from a theme.

I’m now going to list the essential plugins I found and use for my Wordpres blog, maybe some of them will interest you.

Akismet: the pre-installed anti-spam plugin is easy to set up and effective.

Contact Form 7: a simple contact form. Just insert a special [shortcode] in a page.

Incarnate for WordPress: because the WordPress avatar system is quite restrictive to one service (Gravatar), this plugin lets people search and choose their own avatar image from profile images of famous community. And that, without being registered.

Polaroid Gallery: Wordpress comes with a gallery attached to each post. You can install many plugin to display it in a better way. This plugin is the one I use on my blog. All my comic reviews use it.

Quick cache: a cache system that works pretty well, once installed my blog got a massive boost.

Sketch Bookmarks: it’s the massive “SHARE->” at the bottom of my post.

TS Custom Widgets: probably the best plugin. It lets you setup where you want your widgets being displayed (by categories, posts, pages, front page…). With it you can design quite complex site, you are just limited by your imagination.

WP-PostRatings: people can vote for a post.

WP-Stats-Dashboard: display nice statistics on the dashboard. Even though Google Analytic service got the best statistics, I do prefer to check my stats from WordPress with it.

Now you’re ready to blog stuff like that…

Less famous than the beautiful game, but nonetheless as impressive, Red Bull has taken freestyle soccer under its wings.

The first 2008 world cup

The French 2008 champion

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Catan is a vary famous board-game. The goal is to get 10 points. 1 point for a settlement, 2 for a city, 2 for the longest road, 2 for the best army… During the game you collect resources that have been attributed to you following every dice roll. With these resources you build cities and roads that will get you to victory. You can also trade your resources with the others players, trade with the bank, or use some special cards. Even though my boss told me he won most of his games, I found the game particularly difficult, but it is its charm.

Fun :  

I already spent 7 hours on this game, and I only played 6 games. The game can be play in mode turbo, that I recommand after 2 games. All is very well presented, and you’ll be playing 5 seconds after pressing the game icon. One of my best iPhone game with Peggle.

Time :  

There is a dumb rabbit player…

is unacceptable 14.8 Millions results
is acceptable 66.4 Millions results

Overall it is acceptable

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Stratergery is a variant of the Risk board-game with different options to set it up  as you like. Nothing new, but you’ll be playing four seconds after pressing on the “desktop” icon, and it’s probably one of the most important feature of any game. The A.I. starts to be quite good at hard level and you can play on very large maps, even though it’s bit annoying to move around on the small iPhone screen. I prefer to play on medium maps.

Fun :  

I spent about 4 hours on this game, it is not ready to leave my iPhone. I love the simple design, and the fact to be able to have a quick game whenever I can.

Time :  

We’ve just received the iPad at Moodle. I’ve played one minute with it. My first feelings are:
* Browsing the web is awesome specially with a the big virtual keyboard.
* If on iPhone I didn’t care about Flash, I’ve been little frustrated to not be able to play my blog videos.
* Some javascript will need to be modified all over the web to match touch screen UI (like voting stars).
* As empty of software as the iPad was, when I first ran the iPod app, it took 2 seconds to launch. A bit strange…
* Waiting for testing a bit more the device