ryebrye

edit: I didn’t read the whole thread before posting, so a few of the ideas here have already been mentioned…

“However, some students may feel uncomfortable if I put their grade in plain view of everyone else.”

It’s not just a matter of some students feeling uncomfortable – it’s a big legal issue. I’m not sure what the differences between the laws for college and high school are, but the student privacy ones are likely very similar.

At my University a few years ago, a student sueed a professor for using the age-old procedure of returning homework in boxes with their names on it (which had a side-effect of allowing everyone to see who got what grade… etc.) The student won and the professor lost his job. Now every class that returns homework in boxes requires students to get a CID assigned to them for each class. This CID is random, unique, and different for each course a student takes that semester.

You could always require students to use CIDs to post things. Of course, with things like essays and classes in high school (I’m guessing it’s high school) people are likely able to figure out who wrote what… in college it would be difficult to figure that out based on the large pool of loosely connected people taking each course…

If I understand the law correctly… as long as the identity is protected, the grade can be public. This could be a positive thing for you because it would show consistency of grading regardless of who the student was – or it might bite you in the rear if one student notices that student CID #413 had a paper he considered worse than his get a score 10 point higher…

Just some thoughts of alternate ways of doing it… It seems to be a very popular way at college.

Oh – and about Blackboard… My university uses that. I hate it. I could go on and on and on about why I hate it – but I’ll just leave it at: It’s clunky, unreliable, ugly, and inconvenient. Our CS department could have done a much better job at creating an elegant and truly useful solution….

I noticed that my biggest databases in MySQL are the StatTraq ones – but other than that I haven’t seen any problems I would attribute to StatTraq… (but seriously – the data it stores is massive)

Just because somebody asked “what about GoDaddy” – Answer:

GoDaddy sucks for hosting. Good for domain registration, bad for hosting.

I had them before I switched to Websitesource. I have an okay relationship with Website source (I’m hosting 5 sites there now) – but would not recommend them because my site has outages related to their mysql server going bonkers due to high loads sometimes…

Not a bad idea. I really want to add on some more functionality to the inline-upload to add an inline-snag to grab images I have hosted on another server (i.e. flickr, or somewhere else on the web) and then snag them to the blog server the same way it does when you upload images…

I recommend reading the Wikipedia article on favicon if anyone else ever has this same question.

Sorry I didn’t monitor this thread better…

To get rid of the graphic sidebar you need to make this change to the CSS… Unfortunately this means that the “G S B” text that used to be there is no longer – so the columns will have no identification.

(It’s simple enough for the average viewer to be able to decipher though… or at least it’s easier to leave it headerless than it is to write some PHP to inject a header into it)

.medalcount thead {
display: none;
}

Edit: Another thing you will want to do when you implement this is make the CGFeedRead update your feed more often. This is done be editing the file:

plugins/cg-plugins/cg-feedreed.php

Edit line #50: Where it says
$XML_CACHE_TIME = 6 * 60 * 60; // hr * min/h * secs/m -- you can change this for faster updates of the caches.

(I think that was the default…)

I changed mine to update every 10 minutes by using this code:

$XML_CACHE_TIME = 1 * 10 * 60;

If you ever want to manually reload the feed – simply delete the cache files in the cache_feedreed directory.

Oh, you should use CSS to do it. There are a lot of CSS menus out there that do collapsing based on the children. It would be even easier than JavaScript.

Check out the Listamatic tutorial… It has some cool options that don’t even involve clicking “see the Pop-open” ones.

https://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic2/index.htm

If you need help editing your CSS to make it work, let me know.

edit: another good site is:
https://tutorials.alsacreations.com/modelesmenus/

I think the drop down menu might be of interest to you if you want one you can click on to make it work.

Could you just hit the “HTML” button and edit the source – paste it in there – or would the RTE still jack it up when you applied your changes to the source and then played around in the RTE?

I got something working using the CG FeedReader plugin, a little bit of CSS work – and that RSS feed you sent me.

Here’s the way you do it… First download and install the CG-PowerBack:

https://www.chait.net/index.php?p=238/

(The latest version for 1.5.13 works fine for WordPress 2.0) – install those plugins with the instructions given

In your sidebar.php – add the following: (Replace “Title you want” with whatever titling method you use inside your sidebar. I use <h2> tags…)


<div id="medalcount"> Title you want
<?php
$feedUrl = "https://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/torino2006/medals/rss.xml";

$feedOut = getSomeFeed($feedUrl, $maxItemsPerFeed=1, $showDetails=true, $cacheName="feed-medalcount", $filterCat='',$tLimit = -1, $dLimit = -1, $noHTML = false,
$showTime = true, $feedStyle = 0, $noTitle = true, $showTimeGMT = false, $titleImages = false, $multiSiteTitle=false,$makeRSS=false, $rssName="CG-FeedRead Multifeed", $rssLink="https://www.chait.net/");

if ($feedOut)
echo $feedOut;
?>
</div>

In your CSS file, if you want to get rid of the titles so it blends in better, include these lines:

.medalcount .feedDescription {
display: none;
}

.medalcount .feedItemTitle {
margin: 0.5em 0 0 0;
padding:0.5em;
font-size:0.9em;
}

.medalcount .feedItem tr.last {
display: none;
}
.medalcount .meta {
font-size: 0.9em;
padding: 0.5em;
}

That will get rid of the “Powered by Chevy Tahoe” line – along with the other lines, but will still link to Yahoo for the main medal count page.

This solution works for me, so I’m not interested in building a custom plugin just for the next two weeks. When the worldcup comes along, just pray that Yahoo has an RSS feed for that medalcount, and this would be very simple to implement for that too (provided they throw a nice HMTL table in their RSS feed again)

I haven’t yet seen if the CG-FeedReader will automatically update the medalcount because I haven’t seen Yahoo update it yet. I will know tomorrow if it actually updates the feed. ??

You can see it working in my sidebar here:
https://www.ryebrye.com/blog/

You may have to expand the menu for it if it isn’t expanded by default for you.

Ryan

That RSS feed is probably a good source. It still doesn’t have the data in XML – the data is sent out in an HTML table. Not a bad start. I might play with this later today if I get time.

What’s the best way to snag data in PHP? Does it have good support for regular expressions, or am I going to have to write a script to troll through and manually parse it out of the table?

https://cbs.sportsline.com/olympics/box-scoreboards

That’s the cleanest source of data I’ve seen so far – just a plain table.

The NBC olympics one loads the data in arrays so that you can sort it by different categories.

I don’t want to be a complete nuisance, but if anyone could point me in the right direction on where to start looking at how to write a plugin to hook that area, it would be appreciated.

To add those things to the sidebar, you have to get the image from Yahoo and just place it (and the link) in your sidebar.php file (if that’s what your theme uses… if your theme is non-standard you may have to hunt for your sidebar)

Oh – and you’ll likely have to insert some code in your sidebar.php file to make the calendar work. (I’m talking about your theme file for sidebar.php)

Check the readme that came with the file, and it should tell you what to put where.

I updated and didn’t have ANY template issues. WordPress 2.0 didn’t change anything related to the them… If you are really worried, I would suggest making a complete backup of your DB on your local computer, (install Apache, MySQL, and PHP) – and then run the test offsite first – then try it on your live one.

Cool feature with the timestamp adjusting. I’ll have to try that one out.

The theme “Neuron” has such a sidebar – with instructions on how to add this effect to just about ever theme.

I have added such an effect to my blog:

https://ryebrye.com/blog/