Category: Web Building

Slow Publishing in Movable Type caused by ImageValidate plugin

Posted on March 5, 2011 by ellen

This blog runs on the Movable Type engine, selected mainly because I like the fact that it publishes a static HTML file for each article.

For a long time, Movable Type appeared to be slowing down at publishing posts, particularly ones containing many images. It could take anywhere from a few seconds to five minutes or more just to publish an article! Yet when the images were not uploaded as Movable Type “assets” but simply added using HTML image tags, the publishing went much faster.

Using the Qualtrics API with PHP and javascript to create custom reports

Posted on March 1, 2011 by ellen

Qualtrics.com is an extraordinarily full-featured online survey application that offers nearly every type of built-in report on your survey data you could ever want. But eventually, there comes a time when nothing but a custom report will do. Or you may want to integrate Qualtrics data into another application. For those times, Qualtrics has an extensive API which allows access to both data and functionality.

Qualtrics University doesn’t have many details of how to use the API, so to help you get started, I’m providing an example of how I used the Qualtrics API with a PHP proxy and Adobe’s Spry Framework to build a simple custom report.

Date-controlled random rotating banner script

Posted on March 1, 2011 by ellen

This script text and HTML from an XML listing, based on the end date. It scans through the list, finds the first section with an end-date greater than today’s date, then pulls random banner text/HTML from that section. The example shown here uses a flat color banner with white text, but you could also use this same script to generate image or flash-based banners. I’ve also added a nice jQuery fade-in effect but that is optional.

View Demo

Download source files

A SCORM-Ready Template: Part 1C. Navigation – PageArray generator

Posted on February 27, 2011February 23, 2014 by ellen

Probably the hardest part of using the SCORM-Ready template is setting up the pageArray listing that generates all the navigation. And now that there are so many new types of quizzes and interactions possible, it can be hard to remember the correct settings.

A handy tool for testing X-path expressions

Posted on February 4, 2011 by ellen

When working on an application that consumes data from a webservices XML response, you may find it useful to test your X-path expressions.

A SCORM-Ready Template: Part 5A. Captivate Quizzes – Introduction

Posted on January 25, 2011November 30, 2013 by ellen

Although Captivate has its own SCORM interface, its reliability in our LMS over the last few years has become increasingly problematic. Data gets lost, quizzes score incorrectly, or do not complete at all, and there is a lot of frustration.

At the same time, there has been increasing demand from subject matter experts and educators for inexpensive, easy to learn tools like Captivate that leverage their Powerpoint skills but have plenty of flexibility and options for interactivity. So something had to be done to make Captivate useful again.

What I decided to do was to turn over all the SCORM communication for Captivate activities to our HTML template, which doesn’t have the communication issues of the Adobe products. Using the SCORM template as a wrapper does not add a lot of work to a project, in fact, it requires only one line of code to add a scored Captivate or Presenter quiz to a template-based learning module.

Any type of scored Captivate file will work – both question slides and interactive slides. The module can handle one or more Captivate quizzes, either by themselves, or in combination with other types of content and quizzes, such as Questionmark Perception or the template-based interaction quizlets.

.htaccess tricks Allow public access to a subdirectory

Posted on January 7, 2011 by ellen

I run a little site that is mostly access-protected. If it is viewed from a location within the company IP, no password is needed. If viewed from outside the company firewall, it will ask for a user-id and password. However we wanted to make one subdirectory public.

Drupal: imagepicker / openWYSIWYG module incompatibility fix

Posted on January 3, 2011 by ellen

A site I administer uses the openWYSIWYG rich text editor module as the default input format for most users. Like other rich text editors, openWYSIWYG makes it possible for anyone to add styles and colors to their posts, including tables, images, links and more.

The openWYSIWYG interface

Settings to get Drupal 7 working on Hostgator

Posted on December 24, 2010 by ellen

At the moment, Hostgator’s default PHP version is v.5.2.4, although version 5.3 is available. Drupal 7 requires 5.3, so until they make it the default, it is necessary to manually tell Drupal where to find PHP v. 5.3. Do this by adding

Action application/x-hg-php53 /cgi-sys/php53
AddType application/x-hg-php53 .php

to an .htaccess file located in the public_html directory of your site. If Drupal is not at the root of your site, and you don’t want to change the entire site over, it works just as well to modify the .htaccess file in the Drupal directory.

An .htaccess file is just a text file named “.htacess” which can contain many different types of directives understood by the apache server.

Make the console.log() command IE-8 compatible

Posted on December 14, 2010 by ellen

I often use the command console.log() to trace the execution of my javascript functions in Firebug’s or Safari’s consoles. The only problem is, Internet Explorer doesn’t understand console.log() and moreover, it doesn’t error out gracefully.