Thursday, January 27, 2011

Add a Contact form page or widget Blogger Wishlist

As I've been moving several sites from self-hosted WordPress to Blogger, I've discovered things I had accepted as normal, but are not yet available so I'd like to add the following.

There should be a way to add a contact page or a widget for a contact form. It doesn't need to be anything fancy just a simple form for name, subject, message, a captcha (not a difficult one) and a back end option to either send it to the email account registered for the blog or a different e-mail address.

In Self-hosted Wordpress this can be done through one of many free plugins. It looks like I'll need to add HTML from an external service to do the same.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Frame Border Business Card from Zazzle.com


How about a classic business card design for your formal conservative business? If you are part of a brick and mortar type of company instead of an internet based one or perhaps you work in a conservative industry like banking or accounting, this business card in gray and black with a classic font and border could be right for you.

Frame Border Business Card

Blogger: Please don't shorten my URLs

It has been several days since I moved a few sites from self-hosted WordPress to Blogger and I need to add one more thing to my wish list.
Please don't shorten my URLs. It seems that although I can have decent titles, they get shorted quite a lot in the URL so key words won't appear in search engines if they use the URL for that decision. I'd shorten the URL to not use unnecessary words, but the interface doesn't have a field for editing the URL so please keep my URL relatively long.

I'm slowly making progress in integrating my 3rd site to blogger, but I'm still having trouble due to the 10 page limitation since my wordpress blog had around 30-40 static pages. I'm still trying to decide what to do with them, but I have time. I am still reviewing my old blog posts that were imported.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

fatfatin Yellow Hibiscus Swirls Swallows Profile Business Card Template from Zazzle.com

Are you looking for a beautiful business card for your small business? There are many amazing business cards available at Zazzle. I was very impressed by this one. It is soothing and beautiful yet professional looking at the same time. The swirls make me think of plant stems and there are flowers the colors are earthy and make me think of the autumn with tan, orange, red, yellow, and green.

fatfatin Yellow Hibiscus Swirls Swallows Profile Business Card Template

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Google Blogger Wishlist

So far in my websites to Blogger blog switch I've completely moved two blogs to Blogger with custom domains. Obviously without the product catalogs I had before, but these two sites converted pretty well since the blogs had few posts. I've created a blogger blog for my main art site and I spent a few hours converting the Wordpress exports and importing to blogger.  I got several errors that didn't mean anything (just error codes), but I got everything in draft form to later publish under their old dates.  However I came across one important limitation.

While I am very happy that Google Blogger now allows Pages, I discovered that you can only have ten and there are no subpages whereas in Wordpress pages can be in levels and you can set up as many as you want to (at least when self-hosted). In my art site's blog I have about 30 or perhaps 40 "pages" with relatively static information so I'm trying to decide what to do. Should I convert them to posts? Perhaps start another blog just one one of the subtopics that I rarely go into?  I'm not quite sure, but I will probably turn some into posts and combine others.

Here's my wishlist for Blogger:

  1. Allow as many Pages as someone wants. It should be as unlimited as posts.
  2. Allow posts to be hierarchal so that they can be in levels and appear that way in the URL too. At least 2 levels.
  3.  Improve post export and import to give descriptive errors instead of numbers or there was a problem.
  4. When importing check for duplicate entries. I noticed many posts were appearing twice. Basically just check for the same title and date before adding.
  5. Something isn't working right for the Amazon ID in Monetize, When I try to add one of my codes for Amazon it doesn't update.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Time for a switch to Google Blogger from Self-Hosted Wordpress

The last three years has been a very interesting journey. I stared out with a website for my English students to take tests online, but a computer wasn't available for use in class so it was just reference and testing.  I learned how to use Google Adsense and experimented with other systems.

I later stared this blog as a self-hosted wordpress blog manually installed. Quite a lot has changed at the time you could post a datafeed catalog and you'd get listed in search engine results and get sales.  Competition has increased and the economy had basically collapsed and it still is far from recovering.

Even though conversions are down costs have increased. Domain registration costs seem to have gone up a couple dollars per domain too.  Coupon codes for hosting discounts don't seem to apply on renewals even if the email with the code says it does. I went from one to two hosting accounts and back to one, but on a different host than the first.

This last year my focus has changed from affiliate marketing to earning royalties on my visual artwork . It is much less than I was making before the economy collapsed, but I know my designs and artwork will be available and searchable whereas affiliate marketing depends on other people's work.  In the last couple years I've seen several affiliate programs steal commissions that I earned or break tracking. Other good programs that I was working with would switch to a different affiliate network and would stop converting although I can't say why. It is a slow race, but the only negative I see is the investment in DVDs to back up my files.  Still selling art and graphic design is full of learning, but I had learned how to program in PHP and mysql and create complicated catalogs and automated feeds among other things. I've learned that we need to keep learning and experimenting and be able to grow and change.

As part of this change I made a tough decision. I had been analyzing costs for having websites self-hosted and comparing that with the income and this last year the income has been about even with costs and as I get close to the time I need to renew my web hosting account (about $120 dollars per year prepaid), I decided to look for alternatives. I decided on using Google Blogger moving my blogs from Wordpress (which I've learned to hack and program plugins for).

Pros of the switch:

  1. cost -  Only pay for domain registration renewals and Internet service to access the sites.
  2. maintenance - less time spent on upgrades. Wordpress updates several times a year and has security updates which is great, but even with online upgrades from each site, it is still several hours a month to update my different sites. With Blogger, Google updates and maintains the server(s).
  3. Design - Google Blogger recently released atractive blog designs as attractive as Wordpress designs. I was really surprised since when I tried Blogger a few years ago all the designs were ugly and making changes like design and sidebar width was complicated.
  4. Blog statistics - Yes, there are statistics tracking including Google Analytics as well as WordPress plugins for blog stats, but these stats are like Google analytics and appear on a tab in the blog admin.  When I had tracking stats as a plugin I got a complaint from the host about resource use. :-(
Cons of the switch
1. No more automation.  I spent a long time learning PHP and mysql to make scripts to make product catalogs and posts to feature products, but you can't do that on Blogger. So no cool scripts unless I learn Javascript and don't need to save data. 
2. No extreme customization - Yes, I know you can add javascript and use a few widgets, but Blogger is very simple compared to WordPress's customization option using plugins and their API. 
3. Loss of control -  At the end of the day, a blog hosted at Blog spot could get removed or have posts removed since I no longer control the hosting of the site. I can only export the content and hope nothing happens.

Since I don't have English students requiring online testing, I can take down that software. If I find the need for it I could always reopen a shared hosting account later. 

The final consideration in the switch is e-mail. I want to maintain at least 2 email addresses and e-mail hosting is typically around a couple dollars per month per domain so right there I thought I was stuck paying for hosting, but I did a search and read about Google Apps.  Google Apps lets you set up your domain's e-mail through Gmail. I'm still experimenting, but yesterday I converted one of my sites to Gmail using Google apps, I set up an email address with the domain and I added the domain as a custom domain to my blog here. 
About an hour ago I was able to send and receive e-mail to the account and the custom domain worked for the blog.  
I will try adding my original domain to this blog and set up Google Apps email for it as a further test. If all goes well, I will continue to move my sites to Google Blogger blogs and set up email for those crucial accounts before my hosting needs to be renewed in the next couple months.

Will I keep my domains?  I guess it depends on whether or not I get enough traffic and earnings to justify the cost, but I think I will keep most of them. The good thing is that if I no longer want a domain with a blog at Blogger, I can just remove it and use the Google blog subdomain and still have a site and traffic.  I can imagine myself creating a few new blogs just for fun without a custom domain since I won't have to worry about the expense.

Why didn't I use Google Blogger before? Well first I don't know when Google Apps was released. I wanted a professional e-mail address for my business cards and contacts for classes and graphic design work.  I am sure it wasn't available before.
The Blogger system didn't include attractive templates, static pages, social bookmarking or statistics tracking as it does now.  It didn't include post dating to make future posts either. All of these changes happened in the last year and a half as far as I can tell by reading the Blogger blog. I am very impressed!
It went from a very limited confusing system to one that lets you make changes fast and get blogging!
Thank you Google Blogger team for making this a system I'm willing to switch my blogs to.

Google's purchase of Feedburner was surprising. I had an account before the purchase, but I am very impressed with how it is automated to include ads and the feed address is automatically added to Feedburner's display. Very cool! I also like how the new templates let you select an Adsense advertisement configuration in just one click. I don't need to copy and paste the code anymore.

What about my LMS and other custom code? Don't worry I'm backing up all my scripts on DVD so when I need it I can set up hosting for it. :-)  I still like Wordpress I just don't want to mess with hosting when I have this great alternative.


Thursday, April 1, 2010

Wordpress LMS Time for a Solution for ESL and Other Courses Online

This blog is about my experiences, thoughts, and ideas with the struggle with making money online. It is not easy at all. For every success story you have hundreds if not thousands who make less than minimum wages.  Our dependence on the search engines for traffic and limitations of current software can make our tasks very difficult or very easy, but in any case it is still quite a lot of work for most of us.

I first started with websites online with portallanguageservices.com which was at first an HTML site I made with Dreamweaver templates. It was great at first and I was adding information for my ESL (English as a Second Language) students to look at and some fun games for practicing vocabulary and tests for reading.  At the time, I only knew HTML so I was just limited to what was not dynamic or software online to use as-is.  After several months of adding content and seeing my visitors rise, I also saw that manually updating/adding HTML pages was getting quite tedious. I was having trouble getting a consistent look and I found myself spending time on getting the same design on each page often more than in writing my content!

I next went on to try Wordpress (which was much more limited then. It was before tags were added around version 2.3), Joomla, Drupal, etc.  I found Joomla to be tedious and Drupal to have a poor interface so I stuck with Wordpress and HTML.

Next I went to see if I could use any software for creating online courses for giving tests to my off-line students to take when they were not in class with me. I tried Atutor but the lack of help was unnerving. It worked and I was able to give tests, but I knew it wasn't anything I could easily modify or improve myself. I finally got rid of  Atutor with much regret after trying to set up a new course finding that half of my page content was cut off.  It seems they decided that we shouldn't have pages with a lot of text!  I couldn't get the Paypal system to work right either since that was just an add-on and the instructions were vague. I could pay, but the system wouldn't update.

I next went on to try Moodle. I admit the community is much larger and people were really friendly. There seems to be several ESL/EFL teachers online willing to help out, but I couldn't figure out how to create a course.  I know Moodle is powerful and can do very much what you want, but the interface was not very intuitive and I didn't want to have to take a course or read a book  to create a course! I was shocked to discover that almost a year and half have gone by since I joined Moodle.  I still have my Moodle install online, but I don't have it linked to my pages so it shouldn't come up for searches. In any case, the courses I was working on are set as unavailable.

Not much after joining Moodle, I started working on integrating affiliate datafeeds to my websites since I really didn't care for paying for Popshops which didn't quite meet my needs and without good sales, who wants to be paying a monthly fee?  With many hours of self-study and asking a couple friends in a forum some questions when I got stuck, I learned how to write PHP pages using mysql for databases.   Every so often I've added more code of my own or hacked other free scripts getting better. I'm far from an expert, but I am not a newbie in the least.

What happened to my first website? As I got more focused on creating my visual art which is my third activity, I admit I left it in a sorry state. I had started to convert it from HTML to Wordpress, but kept running into problems with integrating the quizzes and games many of which are in javascript.   Very frustrated, I left it in a worse state than it was in before with so many broken unredirected links that my traffic went from several hundred visitors per day to around 50 per day to old pages that unlinked still somehow get traffic! Ever since then it has been nagging me so a couple days ago I started my third attempt. I'm still in the process of moving that old content into "ordpress, but I finally have a plan for how to do it so it will be organized and logical even if it takes me until summer to finish!   I first mindmapped my ideas then I made a diagram of what I would do.

What about those pesky tests and quizzes and javascript games? I've put my PHP coding skills to use and I've turned my favorite quiz script into a Wordpress plugin integrating the logged in user info or email address for registering test and quiz  scores each test gets its own table and the scores are also placed in a master gradebook table recording the initial answers and then the most recent score and the number of tries for each test.

Anyone can take a quiz which makes it very internet friendly, but only registered and logged in users can see their answers in the gradebook while admins (think teachers) can see the gradebook scores for any test or student.    I like this system because they just have to log in to Wordpress and then navigate to the gradebook to see their results.

What more needs to be done? I need to do quite a lot of code clean up and I'd need to make an options page before distributing the code. Most of the settings are hard-coded and I've been using a separate database instead of the wordpress one although that would be easy to switch.   Other items on my to do list is to add recording of  passing grades from some of the activities that are not necessarily scored, but I'd like to see that a student did the activity.  I'm afraid I'd have to learn AJAX so that might be in 2011 or 2012 depending on what information I come across.Finally I'd eventually like to set up PayPal for membership to get certain features yet I'm not eager to learn their API or pay hundreds of dollars a year for a membership plugin.

Is anyone out there going through the same issues, just wishing that Wordpress had a LMS  quiz/testing/grading/gradebook system set up?

I would like to have Wordpress (or something as easy to use and expandable) for my LMS base because it is a great tool for communication. Most LMS are very closed system which is fine for an established schools, but not so great for private teachers and online educators. With Wordpress you can add content and the search engines can find it quickly.

I also think Wordpress would make a great LMS base because all of the busy work of registration and notification of new users.  Users can log in and edit their profiles right away.

Wordpress has hundreds of PHP based themes and custom page template options. You can easily use a free theme from wordpress.org to use or customize one to your hearts content by changing the CSS and PHP of the templates.

Wordpress only isn't an LMS because of the lack of plugins for managing course content and record keeping. I have seen some slow progress with a plugin for quizzes (but no grade keeping!) and another for a gradebook which is no longer supported (yet you have to mantain a CSV file with scores to use it).

I've given up on hoping someone else will do it for me so I decided yesterday to hack my favorite and previously abandoned PHP quiz script fixing its per-quiz table records to include a gradebook and a script for viewing scores of tests.  The missing element was user (student) management.  By using current user checks in Wordpress, I was able to show quiz scores based on level. The admin sees scores for tests by all students when logged in.  A normal Wordpress user only will see his or her scores when logged in.  A guest quiz taker or someone not logged in will see a page reminding them to log in or to register if they need to.   If you go to the "reading" option in the menu there and select an article, you will then be able to read then answer comprehension questions.  After adding your name and e-mail address, you get your results and an e-mail message with the test name and score for your personal records.   A logged in user seeing the quiz will have their name and e-mail filled out using information from their Wordpress profile.  Their user ID is also recorded when the grades are saved to the database.

Can you think of a better way of doing this?  I'm trying to keep it simple so that if I later switch to a different CMS as my LMS backend, it wouldn't take more than a few days to reintegrate the script.  I didn't want to create a separate user registration system since that just complicates it and it would break eventually as Wordpress gets updated.

What are you looking for in an LMS for Wordpress? What should it do or not do? I'm very limited in time since I need to work hard to pay the bills, but if I get help or enough donations, I might be able to fix it up enough for testing by other teachers.

Current issues:

  • Need a way to record Pass/fail grades for activities online

  • Need a way for a teacher to manually add grades for activities that are offline or cannot be checked by the server.

  • Need a way to add more question types. Currently only works for T/F and multiple choice. I'd like to add a drag and drop ordering question for process or timeline questions. I'd also like to add matching and sorting questions.

  • Need a way to calculate a running grade for all tests on a site or a grade for a specific group of quizzes as courses by level or topic.

  • There is no way to enter a quiz as having more weight than others for when I later add grade calculation.

  • Need a script for quickly creating quiz forms and saving those forms to the quiz directory.

  • Need a system for giving and receiving written homework although a special contact form would probably cover most circumstances since homework files could be email attachments.

  • Need a way to add a calendar of events and assignments for courses with specific start and finish dates. This doesn't matter for open ended courses, but schools would want one.  I believe there is a plugin for this (yet no gradebook for recording that information).   Wordpress has a calendar widget and posts can be scheduled for different days in the future. You could schedule posts and put them in an assignment category however students can't see new posts until they go live whereas a normal syllabus would let you see every topic that has to be covered.  Pages could be used with topics and links, but a huge list of everything to complete might demotivate a student.


Recent developments online make many past needs unnecessary.  Twitter and Facebook have effectively replaced the need for a chat. It can be very easy to see updates and answer quick questions.