Author: John McLear

Moodle, say hello to Etherpad

Posted on by John McLear

Today we’re pleased to announce a Moodle module that makes collaborative writing inside of Moodle a doddle. Real time editing inside of Moodle brings even more functionality to the worlds most popular Educationally focused Learning Platform. If you want to try it out before you install you can use our sandbox Etherpad deployment at beta.etherpad.org

If you require any assistance deploying Etherpad Lite or help installing new plugins or features then please get in touch.

PrimaryPad offers a hosted Etherpad Lite instance too that can be leveraged so you don’t need to host your own, this service comes with an uptime guarantee and SLA that should provide your school with the piece of mind and simplicity of deployment.

Get the module now

Watch a video guide for how to get started.

We want to send a huge thanks out to Chris K from Dearborn Public Schools for leading on this project and also @spnova who lead the development.

Further reading ODT PDF DOC

Cloudflare – My experience.

Posted on by John McLear

Cloudflare is a service that speeds up your website or blog loading speed times by handling your website DNS and acting as a CDN for your sites content. I tried it out on MySchoolHolidays.com

CF = Cloudflare.

Some things that rock:

  • CF sped my page loading up by minifying my JS/CSS etc and reducing the hops to the static content.  Also DNS lookups were marginally faster (<5%).
  • Some of the plugins available may be of use to others but weren’t for me and some of them even introduced JS bugs.
  • CF introduced me to some new techniques for doing stuff such as catching client side JS bugs.
  • CF would help me scale quick
  • CF protects against exploits and scrapers.
  • FREE and if you want pro you can pay a small amount.

Some things that suck:

  • No round robin ergo no high availability for sites that use this which means greater downtime.
  • Poor customer support.
  • Horrible console and back end.
  • Bugs, lots of bugs.  Everywhere…
  • Paid option doesn’t really give you much in the way of improvements if anything.
  • CF “always online” feature doesn’t work.
  • No wildcard domains.

Cloudflare have a great opportunity and a huge audience but they have some massive problems to deal with if they want to make it a worthwhile service for me to adopt across the board.

Note: I’m too lazy to include stats.

Summary: Use the free version, get used to using a CDN for offloading some page content.  Make sure you setup analytics before so you can review your page speed load times.   Amazon and Google have similar offerings that will probably have a higher QOS ergo provide a better ROI.

PrimaryPaint issues from PrimaryPad

Posted on by John McLear

We’re currently experiencing an issue with PrimaryPaint. If you click the paintbrush from a PrimaryPad you may have a problem. If you do find you have this problem please visit PrimaryPaint – create a paint wall then copy the URL to your pad and ask your pupils to click that.

We will get the issue resolved as soon as possible. Thanks for understanding :)

PrimaryPaint issues from PrimaryPad

Posted on by John McLear

We’re currently experiencing an issue with PrimaryPaint. If you click the paintbrush from a PrimaryPad you may have a problem. If you do find you have this problem please visit PrimaryPaint – create a paint wall then copy the URL to your pad and ask your pupils to click that.

We will get the issue resolved as soon as possible. Thanks for understanding :)