M.T Blog for Course Web Site

I am seriously thinking of attempting to implement Elizabeth Lawley’s Moveable Type courseware inabox. She gives step by step instructions but they still look pretty hairy.

However, the results illustrated by her Introduction to Multimedia site are very good. I think I might play with it for a max of 2 days and if it doesn’t work after that, then it’s ‘tant pis’ as they say in France.

Another possibly helpful site is the blog <styles> site

Moveable Type v2.6

The M.T system is now at 2.66 and in the move to 3.0 the lads are threatening to follow W3C web standards (at W3C and also see web standards project). I’m rapidly getting hooked on MT again (maybe it’s Spring …) and here’s a list of plugins I’d like to see:

1. Quickcode / Smartypants : helps with students pasting in html/style codes into a blog entry.
2. RSS Feed : should make feeding the RSS gorilla easier ….
3. Wordcount : dead brill this one. “Your homework assignment is to create a 500 word entry on ….. “
4. SimpleComments looks useful
5. printer friendly. Elise, who has a great M.T tutoral site has a “printer-friendly version” for each entry. I don’t know how she does this (I could always ask, but males never ask for directions …) and it’s actually dead cool and useful.

Also getting hooked on Trackback because I can see how this could be incredibly useful for teaching. Imagine this scenario:

• Prof posts homework to blog entry. Peecacake with Zempt / Ecto and Textile formatting. Sets due date and time.
• Student reads homework assignment. Opens up own blog and creates homework entry.
• When finished sets trackback to original question.
• On due date/time the prof looks at the assignment entry and browses through the trackbacks which give him instant feedback on who has or has not done the assignment.
• Sussed!

Desktop Blog editors

I’d love to have a desktop blog editor available for students.
It would make using the blog system an order of magnitude easier.
However, so far I haven’t found one that does all the things I’d like….

Use by students in the Lab

In a ideal world I’d have ‘Ecto’ on every desktop Lab machine and roaming profiles implemented so that student’s personal settings were saved to the network and ‘followed’ them around. As it is, any application that saves settings locally is of no real use - Mozilla bookmarks & IE Favourites are useless too. So, until ECS implements roaming profiles for the Labs none of this will be much use.

Desktop Blog Editors for Windows that are free (or low price):

Zempt 0.3

http://www.zempt.com/ - downloading is from Sourceforge which as of today cannot find the exe file to download. I eventually donwloaded it from a site in Austria (looked for _Zempt_0_3_0702_1.exe_ on Google)

Pros:

• designed for Moveable Type - can use main entry, extended entry, excerpt, keywords, and turn display off for any of these.
• clean interface
• post options support changing status, comments, choosing additional categories, formatting (*textile*) and trackbacks. Problematic option is easy ability to change time/date of posts.
• other useful features : insert hyperlink, spell check

Cons

• Textile support is great but online guide only accessible from web based MT blog entry site.
• the preview does not render the Textile formatting (not surprising really)
• does not do uploading graphics or uploading other files. This is a ball buster.

w.bloggar

http://wbloggar.com/ - Currently at version 3.03, a new version 4.0 is in the works with unnamed new features. This one works with all the major blogging engines including M.T.

Features

• Lots of HTML formatting options including <font> tag with colour and tables as well. Not conducive to html authoring to WC3 standards.
• Textile formatting makes most of this stuff redundant anyway & it’s much cleaner.
• Upload file useful, upload image also useful. The Link tool allows you to add text to the link as well - more intuitive to the naive user.

Ecto

Currently for mac OS 10.2 / 10.3 has all the features I need.