rpgsearcherz

Well, to begin with, I chose "TALKSENSE" for the simple reason that I rarely talk sense myself. :ph34r:Another thing I could suggest might even be "EARNYOURHOST", as that is what many members are doing here too.

Now, about the revamping, I think the forum could definitely do with some re-organisation of some of the forums and subforums, as it is sometimes difficult to see the wood through the trees.
I have not given any possible constructive solution for that, but I soon will, as I was only mentioning right now what I see at first glance, but I shall be having a scan through the division of the general forum and talk about some of my findings, and probably suggest some possible solutions.

One very positive thing, in my very humble opinion, is that the chosen domain will directly load the forum.
I think it is a time saver, as most members who visit here (or at least, so I assume) probably come here to read through and post in the forums.

But, anyhow, I will be back soon with (hopefully) some constructive talk.

I kind of think "earnyourhost" seems a bit too commercialized and is more based on earning things from the forums, rather than learning. The system seems to be designed more around creating a community, and I really don't think that domain would facilitate the image needed to do so.

I think our brains do that naturally but very slowly and gradually over the years. Forgetting names, faces and events is similar to partial and gradual formatting.

This is one way to view it, but there are theories that we never actually forget anything, and it's all still in our brain, it just can't be accessed for one reason or another. I guess a better way to explain it would be like... things get put in the recycle bin (where they can be retrieved, but otherwise are "trashed" to an extent).

Thank you all for your input. I agree with all what you brought up. It seems to me a kind of furum cultural difference. I'm coming from more interactive background, that's not to say you're not.

 

Anyway, that's the good thing about making mistakes; you learn from them. Now I I knwo about necroposting which I didn't hear of before. Now let's agree on these little things:

Necroposting is inot allowed and it should be highlighted somewhere in the rules for the new comers

Old topics should be locked at some point of time, if not removed

The voting replaces the casual short thank you post

Any post that asks for help or with an explicit question should be answered by an expert in the field (sounds like more work for the moderators )

I completely agree with most of those. I'm actually not sure why the older topics aren't automatically closed (even if it's only done in certain categories). Locking them would be greatly beneficial though.

 

One concern I have, though, is regarding "experts" having to respond. A lot of us have knowledge spanning across different skillsets, but aren't experts in any (or are but only in a couple).

Hey, I'm glad everything worked out for you! The entire situation regarding showing substantial medical evidence can be a real hassle, as well as confusing, but it's because they have to ensure they have as much information as possible (as too many people try to "game" the systems). In a case like yours, where there is a legitimate claim, it's great to see that you kept pushing forth, and eventually won!

Moodle is my favorite for hosting my online courses. Some people consider it a content management system but that would be over-generalization as it is more sophisticated than just managing content. Some describe it as LMS, learning management system which is true as it has the right tools for managing the whole process of the learning cycle.

 

I'd describe it as a structured learning community system for several reasons:

 

Structured:

The content is organized in courses, courses are organized in topics/weeks format and topics or weeks hold both resources and activities.

Also each course has its own teachers and other user roles that are similar to the roles in a proper school.

Learning:

 

As opposed to teaching. You as a teacher facilitate learning more than actually teaching. The activities are more student-centered and learners have the choice on how to pace their learning in terms of what, how much and when to do their study

Community:

 

That's the philosophy behind the Moodle setup, an active learning community where learning is augmented through collaboration and sharing knowledge and ideas

As an open source it has a large community and excellent support with a very large pool of plugins and themes.

 

If you're considering hosting your own Moodle then I'll advise you to go for the latest version. The only problem is the PHP requirement for an installation of Moodle to work. It requires PHP version 5.3.2 at least which is not available on many free hosting plans.

 

I came here hoping that I can get a hosting plan with PHP 5.3.2 for that reason.

 

I'm a bit worried about how efficient it is though. The default setup, on the default page, has like 20-30 queries (if I remember right), and have read a lot about people saying you really have to dig into the core to make it more efficient, or else even a moderate amount of traffic will kill the site.

 

Is this really a concern?

Hey, thanks for this! I haven't dug into Moodle yet so I can't test this yet but I can see it being very useful both as it is and for learning how to make other customizations, .

Talksense is the one that seems the most "natural." The rest are a bit awkward and when trying to remember will be a lot like Xisto (a word that isn't so natural and that you have to think about it and possibly misspell often).

Figure 3, for sure. It's the best one because it allows everyone to have partners (4 per group) for helping one another. The downside to this is that because of how those desks are situated, it's harder for some students to see the teacher, but the general principle is the same: grouping together allows students to learn from each other and in process strengthen their knowledge of the subjects.

I want to toss out the view that while books are helpful to a point, they usually teach you the basics but not the real-world usage. It's after you learn how things really work that you start to learn, and in that case I find breaking down projects much more efficient. For example, take a light website and figure out how things were done, then move to something a bit more complex and test your knowledge along the way.

Both are fine with attachment size. That used to be a problem in the past but not any more. Anyway you wouldn't like to use large files for attachment.

GMail now uses their "Google Drive" for hosting attachments, so even very large files can be shared/attached easily.

A lot of things you're responding to are also very, very old. A majority of them have updated (answered) threads or are so old that the information found within is obsolete anyways.I can see this being a good thing to start for more recent topics, but resurrecting topics from 2005 and prior just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Welcome back to KS darling! I hope you have been well. How about this?
Why don't you tell me what url you are using OR try to login with the username & password you have at the following url options :-

http://www.madwire.com/

OR

yoursite.net:2082

If you are told even once that the login username & password is wrong, stop right there and let me know. I will have a tech send you a new password

OR

You can login to your client area at Xisto - Support and change the password yourself. You need to find your service and view it to see the option to edit your password.

Let me know.

And great to see you here

I've actually had some issues that may be related. When I visit the cPanel sometimes it will give a "warning: Malware" when using Chrome. This is using the link that's in our CH account. I can bypass it by choosing to go there anyways, but wanted to give a heads-up. This started yesterday as far as I know.

I agree with Lozbo about WordPress.
If you google "themes for wordpress" or "pkugins for word press" you would get loads of search results compared to any other CMS.

With the vast number of themes and plugins you can tweak and customize WordPress to suite many personalized requirements that you wish to have in your CMS.

Also the learning curve is faster in the case of using WordPress compared to other CMS.

The most interesting thing I found about Wordpress is the integration with the facebook. By integration I mean going beyond the normal like buttons.

I actually found the learning curve of Joomla to be easier to conquer, especially if you want different looks for different pages (in regards to modules and such on the sidebars, or removing them on some pages, etc.).

Hey, sorry I haven't been back around this thread in a while! I haven't forgotten about it or anything, I've just been altering the project a lot. I'm working out details on scalability and such, as I want to ensure everything is done "right" the first time around instead of having to be re-done yet again in the future. It's a fairly large project I'm taking on, but I'm confident it'll all work out (and I'm learning along the way!).

Moodle should support a majority of this stuff. You could also integrate your own live conferencing application into it to make it work the way you want. I'm not really sure how all of that would work, but mostly what you're asking for is just a classroom-based setting (which Moodle is set up for, and it's open source so you can download it for free and adapt it however you wish).

It all looks interesting, Moodle was somewhat new to me, but I did definitely think about Google for online teaching purposes.
Unfortunately, due to my health situation, I have had to put my plans on ice for now, but I still intend to go ahead with testing an online teaching system.
I would not be using that system in any school (I do not think I would find many schools (if any) who would allow you to teach from home or even sit at the staffroom PC to teach your class.), but I would use it for my private tuition which is mostly on a one to one basis

I will have to test that Moodle system thoroughly (once I am back on my feet, of course) and see how either me or my pupils could benefit from it.
Mind you, I have already done sort of "half online" teaching, meaning I used resources (which I always made myself) and the pupils/students either had to use them from a website I had uploaded the resources to, or just run them from a PC or laptop, with the resources on a CD/DVD.

One example of this I remember is an online karaoke system I had put on the web, I used it for a course for disabled students, and they loved it.
I have always been in favour of modern teaching methods, provided they have been thoroughly tried and tested.

Anyway, I'll have a closer look at Moodle, and hope that one day soon I will still be able to teach people.

Thanks for the tip anyway.

On the note of teaching from a staffroom or such, there are distance learning courses in most colleges. This is where students are in a classroom and the professor is elsewhere (usually in a different school, state or even country) teaching the course via TV. So it's definitely usable in the real-world scenarios as well!

Hey, as a heads-up, it usually helps if you link the game as well so others can see what you're looking at.

So often I need to query several table that are linked through some key.
I never understood the difference between different types of JOIN although I used it in one of my application, but it just worked without knowing how.

The main problem with using the wrong JOIN is that you get lots of duplicated records no matter you try to filter the results using WHERE

My question is general and not specific to a certain case. I only need to understand the difference between the different types of Join.

Can any expert help me?

Thanks

I'm still a bit new to this but I'll take a try at this.

There are a few different types of join:

LEFT JOIN -> always shows the left column *even if there is no matching right column*
RIGHT JOIN -> always shows the right column *even if there is no matching left column*
FULL JOIN -> only shows when both columns are hit
JOIN -> shows regardless, as long as one is hit

But does that mean flash is loosing the battle against HTML 5?
I agree with you about the capabilities of scripted animation but since it's a designer's arena, desigmers in my opinion are less patient when it comes to coding evrything they do.

A programmar would tolerate using notepad for writing his code, a designer needs to see something

I wouldn't say that either of them is "losing." Based on what k_nitin_r said, it appears they pretty much cater to different people. Which one is more "powerful" and such is irrelevant when you're dealing with designers vs. coders. Those who design will always take the route that's easiest to them, and those who code will do the same.

Interesting topic though... I didn't know you could set up animations using just HTML5 and JS!

Lucky for me, I'm just recently starting on a new project. I was using mysql for everything when I was learning, but I'm moving over to PDO for the new project because it's seen as being more mainstream as of lately.

Interesting. So it could actually be my computer and not the world in general? Tell me, do any of you others see in my original post any underlined words? Because when I look at it the words "my own page" are highlighted in blue and I get a box that advertises a web site builder and a free domain name ad.

That's definitely odd, and would probably be an addon or something you have in your browser, rather than this site. Addons can change information on-the-fly so they could be implementing their own ad network into every page (or most pages) you visit.

Part of the enviornmental problems that technoligy has cause is the developement of so many throw away products. Camera's, telephones, and numerous other products are being developed for single use and then to be tossed into the trash. Even products that are not originally designed to be throw away are being made very cheaply and do not last very long, requiring quick replacement and then the disposal of the product and replaceing it with new. Things just aren't made to last anymore. I'm on my 4th computer since I started messing with these silly things not that many years ago.

This is true -- everything is made cheaper (both in price and quality). The other big problem though is in regards to how quickly technology moves. If you purchase a new camera/pc/phone today, within a week it will already have dropped in rankings in terms of what's best. If you buy a PC part now, give it a month and it will be a lot cheaper and much better ones will be out. And this is a big part of why so much is thrown out too.

Yes, I'm late to this party too! Like a week, lol.I am sorry to hear you've had such a bad year this past year. Mine was a bit rough too, though probably not as bad as yours. I did certainly have the health problems, and now with the hospital bill the financial problems that go along with that. But I['m ok now I suppose. Wish I could join you in the non smoking catagory. How the heck did you manage that? That is one super hard habit to break.
Wishing everyone here the very best in 2013!

In regards to your question about stopping smoking, I know of many people who used to be heavy smokers and went to e-cigs (the electronic ones) and either cut back significantly or quit altogether. I think it's definitely worth looking into!

I have never heard of PunBB but I think for most users it's better to stick with something widely supported. phpBB would be the go-to forums for those who want the free ones, for example, as they have the biggest community. And with all the extensions and documentation available, extending isn't *too* bad I don't think (although I've only done minor stuff, like interfacing the forums with another website for logins and such).

Moodle can actually give you a whole report on all of the student activities for the course. It even goes as far as telling you what the students were thinking when they answered a question... did they click on one radio button and then change their minds and click on another radio button? Did they finish early? A downside is that if the students do not finish on time, they get a zero on the quiz and there doesn't seem to be any way to get Moodle to grade them on the answers that they did mark.
BTW, the quiz engine in Moodle is the feature that most people use it for - it has an import/export system, it supports options with partial credit, it supports calculated results where you can get Moodle to randomly select values within a range, and it can compute the correct answer so you do not have to manually grade the results. Moodle can also grade answers in which students have to type in their answers by looking for specific keywords. Sure, it may be inaccurate but when you have to grade the work of a hundred students, it beats having to visit each and every one of them - and you can re-visit the answers if you have the time or if the students call for a grade appeal. I'm not sure if Moodle supports grade appeals though. I'm guessing it is a manual adjustment that you have to do on paper... or within Excel after exporting the grades. If Moodle's grading is an all-or-nothing, it would have a lot of instructors overloaded with manual grade corrections at the end of a course.

Being that it's open-source, I think any small things (like changing grades), if it's not already supported, should be pretty easy to implement. Sadly I suck with API's so I'd be doing that with an external script.

I did a lot of research into Moodle and a major concern I have is how inefficient it is. It looks like any major site that uses the system does heavy altering of its core to make it work better. The default Moodle installation, for example, has (I think it was 36) a lot of queries.

Don't get me wrong, I think the concept is awesome. But if I make the move, it will be a long-term choice. Factoring in expansion is a major part of that, and it makes me wonder if I'd be better off writing a custom script rather than trying to learn/alter theirs, especially since I wouldn't be using some of their features anyways, and if there's things I need I'd have to write a lot of new stuff.