Site5 founder dead at young age of 28

Very sad to hear the news about the passing of Matt Lightner, the quite brilliant founder of Site5, my favorite hosting company. I joined Site5 when Matt still owned the company and I’ve always been impressed with the service of Site5, from the technical aspects to the customer service. I felt like he built it for me. At only 10 years older than my eldest son, he clearly left the world too soon.

Dominus vobiscom, Matt. Requiescat in pace.

Living Design is worth a mention

livingdesign This site features an imaginative and unusual blog design that is lovingly crafted down to the last element. In addition, though, the art and design the author highlights is truly unusual and extraordinary; unusual as in beautiful. So much in the way of art today just seems ugly and anti-human to me. This collection, however, raises my hopes in that regard. It’s well worth keeping an eye on for inspiration from around the world (it has a very international flavor).

H/T: Nancy K.

How to replace standard Moodle icons with Tango icons

One of the things that I liked about different Moodle themes are their icon sets, because IMO the standard Moodle icons are ugly and uninspiring. However, what if I wanted to use a better icon set with all of my themes? Was there a way to replace the standard icons? And what would you replace them with?

I found a nice icon set based on Tango icons on the Moodle site, and apparently someone went to the trouble of organizing and naming them so they will work with Moodle.

Here is the link to the .zip of Tango-based icons.

In order to replace the standard icons, you copy everything out of the pix folder in the zip archive and paste it into the pix folder in the root directory of your Moodle installation. They copy (or cut) the icons in the “mod” folder now in your pix folder and paste them in the “mod” folder in the root directory as well. Make sure you choose to have everything overwritten when you copy/paste.

That’s it! Your icons are now cool new Tango icons and you no longer have to be tortured with bad design when you use Moodle – at least from your icons in any case. I don’t know of a down side to doing this, but if you find one let me know.

Edit: There may be icons included in the mod folder for modules you do not yet have installed. This will cause an error. The fix is to delete those folders in “mod” that do not have a module installed (you can tell which ones from the error message: “The “Books” module is not accessible. Check permissions.” etc.)

Success and first module: breadcrumbs

On xhtmlteacher.org I now have a basic taxonomy with terms set up for my xhtml class material and I’ve added the first pages. I managed to set up a menu and create urls that are very similar to the way things were organized on the hand-coded site; minor victories that have given me confidence. One thing that bothered me was that breadcrumbs didn’t work for the menu that I had created. I didn’t know that Drupal core does not feature breadcrumb support for any menu other than “Navigation”, but I found out when I came across the breadcrumb module.

The module was perfectly easy to install and it works the way it was advertised. In the meantime, I’m back on Drupal IRC (Nick xhtmlteacher if you are looking for me) and I’m back on Drupal.org and Drupal Groups. I’ve had one question that is such a n00b thing that I’m unsure where to post it. I can’t figure out how to get rid of the search box in the left hand column. I have set the search block to be on the right hand side, and it is…but it’s repeated on the left as well, at least when I’m logged in as administrator. Under any other role it doesn’t show at all, regardless of permissions. I’m missing something simple.

Another Moodle Competitor?

Google CloudcourseGoogle has just launched an open-source course/learning software solution called Cloudcourse that may rival Moodle. The more I use Moodle, the more I don’t want to use it, so I guess any alternative is welcome, but…

Oh man, at first glance this looks really sweet. I live my life on Google already and the idea of having a tool that fully integrates with Calendar is very appealing. The only problem is that I don’t have a clue how to use Google’s app engine much less Python, so it’s out of reach for me for the time being. I sure would like to try it, though.

Here is the Google blog article on the subject: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/05/cloudcourse-enterprise-application-in.html

Update: It seems that all it really consists of is a calendar/scheduler. While useful, especially if you are already using Google Apps for your enterprise, it’s not anything that you can’t do with Drupal with a little configuration…except the automatic integration with Google Calendar of course. You can try it here.