Category: Tips

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Blackboard, A College Student’s Best Friend

Blackboard is a college student’s best friend. If you’re in college and you don’t know what I’m talking about, I feel for you. Blackboard is the best thing to happen in keeping up to date with assignments and grades.

For all of you who don’t know about Blackboard, it is a website which professors can use to post anything they want from class schedule changes, to upcoming assignments you need to prepare for. They also can post your grades online in this secure environment. My teachers only posted grades from my tests and online projects. I loved this feature because I would then communicate with my teacher, if I didn’t do so well. I would ask questions and find out what I needed to work on, and they could help me without ever having to meet up after class.

Another useful feature of Blackboard is that it has integrated email. This is useful if you don’t know your teacher’s school email address.  You can just use Blackboard and they will get the message in their in box. Also you can communicate with all the other students from the class to start study groups or ask questions for peer assistance.

I found Blackboard to be very useful and wished more of my teachers used it because it got a little bit annoying when some teachers would be so kind as to post things online and others did not. So, if you forgot something you could always just check online. But with the old fashioned teachers you don’t have this luxury, you have to go ask them next time you have class, and if it just wasn’t your day perhaps next class is when the assignment was due. Yikes!

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How to Show an Excerpt in WordPress Versus the Full Blog Post

Some blogs like to just show an excerpt of the post and then a link at the bottom of the blog post to view or read more. So how are they doing that? It’s easy!

First write your full blog post in the WordPress control panel or migrate from Word if that is what you do. At the place where you want you post to break, just put your cursor there. Then click the HTML tab at the top right of your blog post panel, just above the font control and hyperlink insertion menu.

Then where your cursor is located just paste in this code:

<!–more–>

When you go back to the Visual tab, to view your post, you will now see a dotted line where your post is to break. When you publish your blog WordPress will automatically add a link to read more and then take the reader to the exact section of the post on the new page.

Cool huh? A neat trick to use the excerpt function.

Okay now why don’t I use this on my own blog? Well I have found that typically the reader will not click in to read more on most blogs, they will simply read the next post and not click in unless they are REALLY interested in what you have written. So I do not use this feature on my own blog as I want to encourage readers to review my full content with minimal action on their part.

Why would a blog want to use this feature? Some blogs have so much content on the home page that to “look” less intimidating they will use the excerpt format. Sometimes to have a less cluttered look, and sometimes so they can get more content on the home page.

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Google Maps Adds Route Images

Image of Google Maps showing an intersection photo.
Image of Google Maps showing an intersection photo.

Well, Google Maps have outdone themselves this time. First, their maps were so accurate and useful and now they even have on-site pictures of any turn’s you think you might miss.

The images are perfect and allow you to get a clear picture of the turns that are key in your route with interactive arrows. Also the map has an interactive 360 degree rotator cam. You just click on the compass and move the arrow around to see all angles of the turn. So if you need to look for the turn that has a BP gas station now you’ll know before you even get in your car!

I am a very visual person, so being able to see the surrounding of an important turn in my route helps me to find the location better. I have no idea how Google is getting these pictures, because when you rotate the picture you realize it’s in the middle of the street. There are no traffic cameras in the street that Google could possible use.

Now you have to wonder, is a Google Maps “spy van” driving around your neighborhood taking pictures of your roads. Hmm I’m not sure, but whatever they are doing I like it. It is very useful and it helped us get from our home to Post Home of Marjorie Merriweather in Washington DC.

If you would like to take a look I’ve added the two locations at the end if you would like to take a look at the directions yourself.
2254 Ravenna Ct Waldorf MD 20603
To
4155 Linnean Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008 (Hillwood Museum & Gardens) (202) 686-5807

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Google Friend Connect New Easy Interaction for Your Website

I am not a programmer and simply do not aspire to be one. I consider my expertise to be in other areas, but that does not mean that I do not want to add cool new interactive features to my website that typically require a strong knowledge of web programming. This is why I am so interested in checking out Google’s new Friend Connect.

Created just for people like me, Friend Connect lets Google do the heavy lifting for you. You can now install into your source code cool little mini applications that allow for users to become members on your website, add comments about a page or your website, and to rate your content. It is the beginning of a very neat interactive component that I am sure many will actively embrace. More applications and sharing tools are sure to be created as Friend Connect allows people to add programming-like elements into their static website without programming or database integration.

Friend Connect allows users with a Google account (which Google early on nearly forced on everyone who advertised in AdWords and when Gmail was initially introduced, so many users already have one), Yahoo accounts, and even AIM accounts. You can visit our website today to check out what we’ve done with Friend Connect integration. Just visit our resources section and click any top tip link to see just a bit of how we are using Friend Connect.

Although every page in our website is not using Friend Connect, we see it as a content interaction tool and so on some of our content pages which are really focused on teaching or sharing we want to help others to share our information and leave comments.

Friend Connect is easy to install for users who understand HTML, but not for the person who does not update their own website. You can find out more about Google’s new Friend Connect by visiting the official Friend Connect website.