Morpheus - a design studio website launch
Posted by nobodytalking in website on January 8th, 2010
So it has been a while since I have posted and I am hoping to once again renew my blog posting efforts. Part of my absence has been my due to various side projects I’ve been working on. Last week one of those projects went live. Morpheus is a design studio located in State College Pennsylvania. They desired a simple clean site where they could showcase their previous work, and say a little bit about their services and give some general contact information.
Another requirement was for the image and photo section of the site to be easily updated by themselves. Take a look at the site. I really like the simple clean layout and design of the site. Take a look: Morpheus Studio
Moodle “Error enrolling into (course name) as a student”
Posted by nobodytalking in Web Development, eLearning on July 27th, 2009
If you utilize the upload feature in Moodle 1.9.3 to enroll students into a course then you may have come across an error message which states something similar to “Error enrolling into (course name) as a student.” Although not a serious error it will cause a variety of issues for your Moodle system. After troubleshooting the issue I’ve found that it comes from trying to enroll a student/teacher/admin, etc into a course which has an enrollment length of “unlimited”.
There are a two ways I know of to handle this. First you could set all of your courses in Moodle to have an enrollment period of 365 days or less. This could however pose problems for larger systems with many users. You wouldn’t want to have to re-enroll, and track a large set of users.
The better solution is to make a code change to the upload code on your Moodle system. In the uploaduser.php file in the /admin/ directory of your Moodle installation. Somewhere around lines #660 you’ll want to make these code changes:
if ($courseit->enrolperiod) {
$timestart = time();
$timeend = ($oldtimeend-$timestart) + $courseit->enrolperiod + $timestart;
}
if($timestart == “”){
$timestart = time();
}
if($timeend == “”){
$timeend = (time()+630720000);
}
You can’t have no unenroll time for Moodle uploads, so what this code change will do is set the un-enroll period to be 10 years from the date of upload. Please contact me if you have any questions about the code.
Please remember that if you do choose to upgrade your Moodle release that this change may be overwritten. So I generally note files which I’ve changed code on, and be sure to either copy those over after an upgrade, or make similar changes to the new Moodle release files.
Dynamically Adding Controls in C# ASP.NET
Posted by nobodytalking in Web Development on June 20th, 2009
Adding C# controls dynamically is actually pretty simple:
public void showTextBoxes(){
//
TextBox txtBox = new TextBox();
txtBox.ID = “txtBox1″;
txtBox.TabIndex = 1;
txtBox.CssClass = “textBoxClass”;
//
form1.Controls.Add(txtBox);
}
Now this all works fine, but is somewhat limiting. Many times when your going to want to add controls you won’t know exactly how many at runtime. The number of controls needed may hinge on a users input. Possibly the value entered into a TextBox. This would then be handled with a loop:
public void showTextBoxes(){
form1.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(”<table>”));
//
int i = 0;
//
int numberOfDays = Convert.ToInt16(txtDays.Text.ToString());
//
while (i <= numberOfDays){
//
TextBox txtBox = new TextBox();
//
txtBox.ID = “txtBox” + i;
txtBox.TabIndex = i;
txtBox.CssClass = “textBoxClass”;
//
form1.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(”<tr><td>”));
//
form1.Controls.Add(txtBox);
//
form1.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(”</td></tr>”));
//
i++;
}
form1.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(”</table>”));
}
This function will create TextBoxes for however many days that the user has entered into the txtDays TextBox. The loop will also give each new TextBox a unique ID and TabIndex. This method though has some drawbacks, such as any information entered into the TextBoxes will be lost on a refresh of the page. So if your using C# and not Javascript for form validation you would lose all dynamically created Controls on validation.
In future posts I will look into ways to handle this issue and other similar situations.
Sketchup and Kerkythea - First Attempt
Posted by nobodytalking in Sketchup on May 29th, 2009
I had been using Google Sketchup for a few months, and I was ok with the export screen shots that Sketchup created.
Sketchup has a specific, cartoonish, drawn look. I was looking for a bit more realistic output, and I’d seen some renders of Sketchup models, and was impressed with the examples. However, I didn’t want to have to purchase a plugin for a few hundred dollars, as this is just a hobby for now. So I did some research into free plugins and stumbled upon Kerkythea immediately.
The download and installation was easy. Kerkythea has a set of about 20 lights which can be added into Sketchup, everything from desklamps to spotlights. Kerkythea adds export buttons right into Sketchup, so exporting is extremely easy. Below you will see my first attempt at rendering in Kerkythea. I have not even attempted to change any settings, this is straight out of the box with a spot light and the sun for light sources.
Sketchup:
Kerkythea:
With these promising results I plan on continuing to use Sketchup and Kerkythea to create realistic export images.
Moodle error - “Could not find a scorm course here”
Posted by nobodytalking in eLearning on May 28th, 2009
While working on transfering some of our eLearning courses onto our new Moodle deployment, I came across an error which took me a little while to figure out. After posting a new course I received this error message on the course launch page where the course SCORM menu should have been, “Could not find a scorm course here”.
You will receive this error message if you have the course visibility set to Hide in the SCORM/AICC settings of the course.
To fix the issue:
- Log into your Moodle site as the administrator.
- Navigate to the administrator section.
- Select Courses->Add/edit courses, then click on the course you want to edit.
- Once at the course page, click the Turn editing on button.
- Click the small Update icon at the end of the course name.
- When the Editing SCORM/AICC page loads, scroll to the bottom of the page and change the Visible drop-down from Hide to Show, in the Common module settings section.
- Click the Save and return to course button.
You should no longer receive the error.
Cross-Browser Compatible eLearning - What’s the point?
Posted by nobodytalking in Web Development on May 26th, 2009
It seems that in the past eLearning developers as a whole had turned a blind eye to cross-browser compatibility, myself included. For years we (hotelearning) created eLearning which was intended for a particular audience, who would, without doubt be using a particular browser, in our case Internet Explorer 6+.
It made our job easy - if the course functioned correctly in IE, then it was ready for deployment. We really had no reason to cross the compatibility bridge till we came to it.
Recently, some of our projects have become completely web-based, and only delivered on-line to an unknown audience, and we really have no idea which browser or operating system our users are utilizing. Browsers such as Firefox and Safari have seen a signifigant increase in adoption over the past few years, and must be taken seriously. Below are some general browser usage statistics as of March 2009.
IE 6.0+ - 57%
Firefox 1.5+ - 31%
Safari - 6%
Opera - 1%
For us to ignore roughly 38% of our audience would be to ignore 38% of our potential customer base, and that was just not acceptable. Our eLearning needed to be cross-browser compatible and yours should be too. It was time to cross the bridge.
So in an effort to try to make our content available to as large an audience as possible, we created a cross-browser compatible interface. In terms of development, it may have taken a bit more time. We found though that we really didn’t have to make many, if any, sacrifices to our design or user experience. Infact, our interface could be considered simpler and more user friendly.
So what is the point of creating a cross-browser compatible user interface? You’ll be able to reach more customers, and those customers viewing the content on different browsers will have consistent functionality and a consistent look.
Failing to plan is planning to fail.