No time to play with this, but looking forward to it very much. Version 3.8 of WordPress, named “Parker” in honor of Charlie Parker, bebop innovator, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. We hope you’ll think this is the most beautiful update yet. —WordPress › WordPress 3.8 “Parker”. Similar:A.I. Is Getting…
Facebook wants you to see more serious news, and fewer meme photos. Of all the posts your friends create and share, soon your news feed will be less likely to show you “a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook,” and more likely to show you a news story your friends have commented on. Facebook…
Arent you glad you didnt cite to this webpage in the Supreme Court Reporter at Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 131 S.Ct. 2729, 2749 n.14 2011. If you had, like Justice Alito did, the original content would have long since disappeared and someone else might have come along and purchased the domain in order to…
I was horrified to see that, in order to opt out of pre-approved credit mailings, the bottom-feeders known as Equifax, Experian, Innovis, and TransUnion expect us suckers to type our SSN and birthdate into an online form, which we then are expected to print out and mail. I tried typing “000-00-MYOB” and “000-00-0000” into the…
Words many of us never want to hear: “It’s the transmission.” “We can’t get a technician out there until next Tuesday.” “Your ex will be there.” And, of course: “Welcome to our redesigned site!” —Why I Resist Web Redesigns (And Maybe You Do, Too) : Monkey See : NPR. Similar:Washington Post Cartoonist Who Quit Over…
I spent more time than I’d like to admit this summer redesigning my WordPress website. The new theme emphasizes thumbnails, which are very easy to create on an iPad or handheld and upload via the WordPress iOS app. Most important for me, though, is the fact that this new theme is responsive — that is,…
I have in the past griped on Twitter and on my blog about the clunky Turnitin.com web-based interface. You have to do so much clicking and dragging and typing and waiting for the screen to refresh, and there are places where the “delete” button appears right where an “OK” button was a second ago, so…
Moodle is a free course-management tool that many schools (including mine) use to manage the online components of courses (including computer-graded quizzes, discussion forums, and the submission of online papers). The tool is powerful, but the interface offers a bewildering array of options, so that casual users are often dismayed by how many checkboxes it…
I really like MailChimp’s “Social” plugin, which not only publishes a WordPress blog entry to Twitter and Facebook, but also collects responses from Twitter and Facebook users and collects them as WordPress comments. Today I installed a different plugin, Twitter Tools, which is really just a single tool — it lets you create a WordPress…
Wikipedia is testing a visual editor, in the hopes of lowering the barrier for first-time authors. Wikipedia:VisualEditor Similar:A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting WorsePater Noster Passenger ElevatorsThis morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m…My crowd simulation handles 2000 capsule NPCs at 130fps.…
Teens often work on laptops with track pads, making interactions that require precision — such as drop-down menus, drag-n-drop, and small buttons — difficult. Design elements such as rollover effects and small click zones are also problematic, if they’re usable at all. Small text sizes and dense text make reading difficult. Combine these elements with…
I have a Yahoo account that I use when a website or a local business insists I must provide an email address. Over the years, it has gotten clogged with spam. The filter is actually pretty good, so I can always find what I need, but it’s not usually a service I check more than…
The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity. Web designers love to show off that they can design the hell out of a website. They fall in love with their code and all the cool things that it can do. “I think the challenge for me is to use…
As long as Congress focuses on just unlocking cellphones, they’re missing the larger point. Senators could pass a hundred unlocking bills; five years from now large companies will find some other copyright claim to limit consumer choice. To really solve the problem, Congress must enact meaningful copyright reform. The potential economic benefits are significant, as…
I spent 30 minutes trying to upload about 10 photos, but I only succeeded in uploading two. I’ve tried Safari and Chrome… I’ve tried uploading photos individually and in groups. The rest uploaded part of the way, and then froze, seemingly forever, with this bar. Oh, well… I guess that’s why I don’t upload many…
Apple’s marketing strategy in the 1980s presented its products as democratic and liberating, but the freedoms the Apple users enjoy include the inability to customize or otherwise access the working interior. Apple users trade freedom for security. In short, expansion slots made standardization impossible (partly because software writers needed consistent underlying hardware to produce widely…
I noticed with interest that Kindle now lets you highlight text in different colors. It’s also very easy now to tweet a brief quote. Is it time to revise the blog-based pedagogy I’ve developed over the past 10 or so years, and ask students to tweet a few passages while they read them for the…
The honeymoon with MOOCs is over. The reality check has finally arrived which was inevitable. MOOCs will not solve all the woes of higher education. It is unfortunate it had to be a class on how to design an online course; it was the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application [FOE] offered through Coursera…
The web also creates the illusion that all information is available and accessible to anyone at any time. This common view represses the real disparities of access in our world and also undermines the need for educational experts. After all, if you can get all knowledge from Wikipedia or a Google search, why do you…
Frequent smartphone use imposes significant psychological costs on the user, and negatively impacts our personal and professional lives. —Daniel Gulati – Harvard Business Review. Similar:Washington Post Cartoonist Who Quit Over Bezos Cartoon Wins Pulitzer PrizeA.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting WorseDoctor Bashir, I Presume #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 16)…