COV project website updates and a group for Oklahoma TitleIID winning districts

22nd September 2008

COV project website updates and a group for Oklahoma TitleIID winning districts

posted in digitalstorytelling |

I used SeaMonkey’s free webpage composer application and the Cool Text website (Thanks the “No Time To Sleep” blog author) to update the homepage of our main “Celebrate Oklahoma Voices” project website today with simplified links:

Our installation of Joomla is still running VERRYYY slowly on POWWEB servers, and we’ve needed to migrate our site to a different and more responsive interface for many months. This isn’t a negative reflection on Joomla, rather I think it is continuing MySQL simultaneous connection and response problems at POWWEB which compelled me in the past year to switch my personal websites over to Siteground. (An ISP with which I have been VERY pleased and satisfied, incidentally.)

Last Thursday on September 18th, the Oklahoma State School Board announced winners of the 2009 Oklahoma Title IID instructional technology grants. Educators in winning school districts should join our COV learning community group “Title IID Awardees” for updates and information relating to TitleIID workshops. We’re planning to share a webinar in late October which will provide details and answer questions about these workshops. Before and after the webinars, however, we’ll use the discussion forum in this group to solicit and field questions. For more info, please see this initial post in the TitleIID group.

I’m considering using Adobe Acrobat Connect for these webinar meetings. I’ve become familiar with Elluminate as a result of my involvement with the K-12 Online Conference, but haven’t used Adobe’s web meeting environment for several years, since it was still Macromedia’s Breeze. I’m eager to gain some protracted, personal experiences using Adobe Connect as well so I can form an informed personal opinion about the relative merits and drawbacks of each platform for synchronous web meetings. To date I have been VERY impressed with Elluminate. It can be, however, quite expensive (I’m told) for organizations to license on a large scale.

Hopefully this is clear on our main COV website, learning community, and online application, but just in case it isn’t I’ll repeat it here. CURRENT PK-20 OKLAHOMA EDUCATORS CAN AND ARE INVITED TO APPLY for our November 5-7 COV workshops in Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Educators in districts receiving Oklahoma TitleIID grants should NOT apply using that online form, however, but instead await instructions which will be forthcoming in late October about planning and scheduling a COV workshop for teachers. These updates will be posted in our Title IID Awardee learning community group. Districts have two years to utilize awarded TitleIID funds for professional development.

More background about Celebrate Oklahoma Voices is available.

Technorati Tags:
oklahoma, cov, celebrate, voices, digitalstorytelling, audacity, photostory, imovie

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 4:40 pm and is filed under digitalstorytelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

1 On September 22nd, 2008, Wesley Fryer said:

Shortly after posting this entry I received the following email from POWWEB:

Dear Wesley,

We are constantly working to improve MySQL performance on our
shared hosting platform, and we wanted to let you know about
some of our latest initiatives, as well as steps you can take
to make sure your database applications are secure.

*****************************************************************
CUSTOMIZED HOST NAMES
*****************************************************************
When modifying your code in the future, please be sure to use
yourusername.powwebmysql.com as your hostname.

We are in the process of updating the code of all customers to
use this customized configuration. (Rest assured, this hostname
cannot be accessed from an outside source; it’s only routable
from inside our network — even a DNS lookup won’t find it.)

You may recall that we began customizing MySQL hostnames last
year to include your username instead of the server name:
yourusername.powwebmysql.com

Configuring hostnames in this way provides a degree of
flexibility if the resources of certain MySQL servers exceed
capacity, translating into better performance for your databases.

*****************************************************************
MySQL QUERIES: 50,000 PER HOUR
*****************************************************************
To ensure optimum MySQL performance for all our customers, we are
limiting the number of queries per login to 50,000 per hour and
the duration of individual queries to 60 seconds.

This should not be an issue for the vast majority of customers –
in fact, most customers will experience improved performance as a
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http://www.powweb.com/webControl/mysql/manage.bml

We apologize for any inconvenience; however, on a shared hosting
platform, there are practical limits to the amount of resources
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for you, you may be able to reduce the number of queries you are
running by using application-level caching, combining queries or
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*****************************************************************
CHECK YOUR APPLICATIONS: DON’T GET SPAMMED OR ABUSED
*****************************************************************
Be sure to closely monitor your applications — don’t let them
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* Check your bulletin boards, forums, blogs, etc.,
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For more information about how to keep from getting spammed — or
if you’re not sure what we mean by, say, “Guest or Anonymous
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http://www.powweb.com/info/systemnotice.bml?id=6880

If you have additional questions or concerns, please submit a
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Sincerely,

The PowWeb Team