Taking easy Screenshots
I was using Mac Grab to take screenshots. It was quite cumbersome to use, plus I had to change from .gif format to .jpg to be able to use it for mahara or to alter the image easily. I found this page - http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/Screenshot-Format.htm which links to a page showing on Mac you can use - command+shift+4 to create a selection box that you can draw over what you want to capture. Then it tells a simple way to setup your Mac so it auto saves it as jpg -
- Launch Terminal, located at /Applications/Utilities.
- Type or copy/paste the following commands into the Terminal window. Press the return or enter key after you enter each line of text:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
killall SystemUIServer
The above commands will set the file format to JPG. You can use any of the following for the value following "Type" in the first command above: jpg, tiff, gif, png, or pdf
- This has been a life saver making screenshots fun and easy
Mahara memory cleaning
7/12 journal
Today I decided I needed to get more space on my Mahara account so I went through and saved images to my desktop - tools adjust size - made them smaller than 50 kb (some images I had at even over 100kb) then re-uploaded them and then re-entered them into the OPs they had originally been in. This was a bit difficult but quick once I got the hang of it...
Then I found a folder in my mahara files called viewfiles (I believe) it was the last folder and it said something in description about files from copied collections. This was over 20MB of info I wasn't even using it was storing all the images that were on the T2 template! Once erased I went from 56% to 45% of my memory capacity! good find
Animation
Check out the animation on the Activity Hub home page! I made this by following the instructions of this yahoo forum - https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120822084741AABXHLt
To create the effects I used Pixelmator which is a highly functioning photo/image editor for $20 - very similar to photoshop. I would change the image a bit with effects export it as a .gif (I used numbers for the title to keep them in order) then change it a bit more and export it again under the next number title. I then imported them to GIMP (which is a free open source image editing software) as layers and followed the instructions in the linked forum. Then uploaded it to Mahara and inserted it as an image. The only thing about animation is it takes a lot of space. I need to find if you could host a gif somewhere else and still use it in mahara.
RSS feed Pattern writing
Originally my blogs RSS feed was showing up fine then it started to not load correctly. Where there was a thumbnail image of my blog logo it was showing a question mark and the posts feeds where not showing anymore.
I found that instead of using the normal URL followed by /feed like this http://episystemic.wordpress.com/feed if I changed it to http://episystemic.wordpress.com/?feed=rss it would work!
Loading speed
Recently I added some animation to my profile page, the page would load very slowly and didn't look nice as a first impression. I googled page speed and found this blog post - http://www.copyblogger.com/make-wordpress-faster/
What is says is that the theme is like the foundation of your page.. I was using "Ultima" which is purple with a bit of image in the background. So I changed it to "no theme selected" which is default. The result my page loads faster!
Using Flicker slide shows
I had quite some trouble to embed Flickr slideshows in my final OP5. I am also somewhat new to Flickr. I saw one embedded on another associates OP and decided I wanted one! I thought of asking them but decided to just search around and figure it out... I could not find any way in Flickr's present interface to get an embed code. I searched and found two different ways of doing it.
1. This is the way I have had the most luck with it coming out right - Go to your Flickr sign in and go to the album you want to embed. First go to "edit in Organizr" top left. Now double click each photo individually checking that the permissions is set to public for each. If it is not they won't show up. Now go to Open Album page bottom left below text block. Once on the album page add the text /show to the end of the album URL. once you do that it will bring you to a different view. Click on Share upper right and copy and paste the embed code into Mahara in and External Media block. If you need to you can change the dimensions of the slide show box by editing the Object width and height numbers in the code.
2. This way ended up showing other peoples photos sometimes for me.. Maybe it will work for you if the other doesn't. Log in to Flickr and go to http://www.flickrslideshow.com here you copy and paste the URL of your album and they give you a embed code. Your photo permissions still need to be set to public.
Updating old Mac Pages Documents
Recently I bought a new MacBook Air upgrading from an older version Mac. I use the free word processor it comes with Mac Pages. When I would try to open up one of my old Pages documents from my old computer it would say that the new pages could not read the document and I had to first save it with Pages 09 (which is older than the version on my Air).
I searched all around the internet and tried downloading iWorks which has Pages 09, failure after failure I was unable to get it to work. I wrote to the store where I bought it with no response, I searched forums on the subject and came up with no solution.
Then I decided to try other ways of opening it (sort of by chance) so I clicked the document while holding the control key and a drop down menu appears I went to “open with” another drop down appears I used Preview. It opened in Preview. I used control A (select all) and control C (copy) and then opened a new Pages document. Control P (paste) and save.
Now I can update my old Pages documents and access all the documents I created last year, thankfully!
HTML for creating links and page transitions
More HTML
See the attached document above for HTML code on how to make links from one page to another spot on the same page or from one page to somewhere in the middle of another page
I recently found a few more helpful codes:
1. You know when you click someone’s address and your mail opens up with their address in the "To" field? Here is the code so you can do the same…
<a href="mailto:example@hotmail.com">TEXT</a>
TEXT is the text link they will see, where you can either put you e-mail or click HERE to mail me etc. Between the "" put your email.
2. The second came to me because of another Gaia U Associate Moni, she asked if it was possible to have an image link to another web page when you click it. I did a quick search on html for images as a hyperlink and came to this page - http://www.hyperlinkcode.com/html-image-hyperlink.php
I tried it out in Mahara and it worked. The code:
Full code - <a href="http://www.tu-sito.com"><img src="http://icaafs.earth/artefact"></a>
http://www.tu-sito.com - is replaced by the web page you want to link to
http://icaafs.earth/artefact - is replaced by the URL of the image that you have uploaded to mahara. Make sure to leave the parenthesis in the code.
Enter this code into a text block using the HTML button and presto!
See the forum post (in Spanish) here
HTML for Line Spacing
Sometimes I will find that mahara crowds my text, meaning the lines are too close together. They don't give you the option of changing that, so I just open the HTML and after "font size;" I enter - line-height: 20px - I find 20px to be a good height but you could use what ever you want.