You can now get statistics and visualize the average holiday date distribution for your country. Enjoy!
To see your countries stats visit your country page and click Stats.
UK ISPs that don’t block the PirateBay
Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2, Virgin Media and Orange are now blocking The Pirate Bay. You should consider switching your ISP to one that doesn’t block The Pirate Bay. Please leave comments to let me know if your ISP is blocking websites or not.
Kids. The decision to block any website is an example of bad governance.
CampEd12 – Why you should of been there
Just a quick review of CampEd12. It was great, the events were great. It had a great feel. The food and beer was great. The weather was pretty good and the company was fantastic.
My thanks to Helen Daykin, @Dughall, and Bill Lord for organizing such a splendid event and to everyone that attended it.
CampEd all the fun and laughter you need.
Read about CampEd12 and Plan to attend CampEd13
Related articles by other folks..
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/science-at-camped12/
http://alexbellars.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/camped12/
Image courtesy of Dughall
Moodle, say hello to Etherpad
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.
Cloudflare – My experience.
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.