Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Category: blogs

  • Widget of Recent Student KidBlog Posts with Yahoo Pipes and RSS Dog

    This evening I used the free web service RSS Dog to add right sidebar widgets to a new page of “KidBlog Links” (classroom interactive writing websites) on our school website for Independence Elementary in Yukon, Oklahoma.    by  Wesley Fryer  Several months ago I used Yahoo Pipes (also free) to create an “aggregated feed river” of posts from…

  • Results of Grade 4-5 Interactive Writing School Survey (Oct 2014)

    Interactive writing should be a cornerstone of literacy development and assessment in elementary and secondary schools, but in 2014 it remains a rare activity in most K-12 schools in the United States. Interactive digital writing involves the production and sharing of electronic texts which (in most cases) can be readily conveyed (transmitted), copied, connected (hyperlinked), commented…

  • Utility to Find and Replace Broken WordPress Links

    In this post I’ll share some lessons learned finding and replacing a large number of broken links (over 13,000) in the mySQL database of a WordPress installation. After trying several different methods I finally found the free PHP utility “Search Replace Database by interconnectit,” which worked beautifully. Hopefully you won’t ever need this information, but if…

  • WP Super Cache To the Rescue

    The past few weeks have been frustrating for me because my primary WordPress website (this one: speedofcreativity.org) has been crashing immediately after I’ve published a new post and shared that link on social media. (Twitter and Google+). Based on the numerous trouble ticket exchanges I’ve had with my web host, it sounds like each time my server crashed…

  • Change the Tagline of Your WordPress.com Website

    This weekend I’ve seen two different WordPress.com sites with the default tagline, “Just another WordPress.com weblog.” This is the default tagline which WordPress.com uses for every new site when it’s created. The tagline of your WordPress.com site is displayed by most WordPress themes in the header section of your blog. It’s like a byline. It’s…

  • Create Embeddable Twitter List with List.ly

    This evening I created a linked list of sponsors for EdCamp Broken Arrow (coming up this Saturday just outside Tulsa, Oklahoma) using List.ly. This was SO much faster and easier than “creating the list by hand” on the event WordPress site. That tedious process involved saving images of each sponsor logo locally, uploading each image…

  • Use Video Camera Like a Pencil – A Blog Like a Textbook

    Today during our lunch break at the “Create, Make and Learn Institute”, I picked up a copy of the July – August September 2014 newsletter of the Peace and Justice Center in Burlington, Vermont. The newsletter includes an article by Dr. Rob Williams, board president of ACME: Action Coalition for Media Education, titled, “Fight for…

  • Fix When Facebook Shows Wrong Site Image and Title

    This is a somewhat geeky fix I’ll pass along in case you run into something similar. I recently updated the “Write Well, Sell Well” Conference website with our October 24-25, 2014 details, but for some reason when anyone shared the website on Facebook the OLD conference details were presented. I figured out how to fix…

  • How to Archive a KidBlog Website

    I used free KidBlog websites this school year with my 22 classes of 4th and 5th grade STEM students, so they could periodically post text reflections, images, audio reflections, and links to videos we used in class for STEM lessons. Since the school year is over, it’s time to “archive” these classes. This evening I…

  • Remove Disqus “Around the Web” Ad Images and Links from Your Blog

    It’s unfortunate it’s taken me so long to figure out I could do this, but this afternoon I FINALLY turned off the “around the web” images and links which have been appearing at the bottom of my blog posts for the past couple years since I started using the free Disqus commenting system for WordPress…