During my upcoming summer vacation (mid June to end of August) I’m going to completely redesign this site. I’m fairly certain that the forums and wiki will be gone as there is no traffic there. Since there isn’t any action I don’t see the need to spend time designing and coding for an unused portion of the site. If the forums or the wiki suddenly picks up in traffic I will of course keep it.

Sometime this summer Expression Engine will be releasing version 2.0 which is a major upgrade and will no doubt add new features (as of yet unknown) that I may or may not added. In any case, I’m planning on transitioning out of EFL in the next 3-4 years and moving into web design.

The upcoming redesign of my blog will be the first site that I code from the ground up. Previous sites I have used templates as a framework to build from there. At the same time I’ll be creating my portfolio site for web design in order to attract paying clients (I’ve already had one and have another potential in the pipeline). And a third site will be my teaching portfolio site to supplement my hard copy portfolio.

Do I really need to make a teaching portfolio site if I’m moving out of teaching? No, but it’s another site design that I can feature on my web design site and who knows, in the next 3-4 years I may need to change jobs. It never hurts to be prepared.

Coming soon a new look for EFL Geek - more streamlined and without the forums/wiki. I’ll probably also rethink a couple of other features of the blog including the links to various social networks on each entry, trackbacks (which have been turned off for ages), and membership in general.

I’m looking forward to exercising my CSS & XHTML kung fu skills.

Comments, thoughts?

The rating module is now working! Feel free to rate entries on this blog using the link at the bottom of each entry. Will do a little formatting work on it after I finish the semester in two weeks.

below originally posted October 7
I’m just added a rating module to this site. You can now vote on how much you like the entry. Member and visitor votes are calculated seperately as well as an overall total provided.
update
rating module is a little wonked. A bunch of errors come up on voting. Hopefully this gets fixed soon.

I’ve finished teaching for summer semester. All lessons went better than expected and overall I’m very satisfied with this course. Tomorrow is a holiday and then Wednesday is the final exam so a little bit of grading and then I will be finished until the last week of August. There will probably be very few entries between now and then, but don’t give up on me, I’ll be back.

Just so everyone knows, I’m still looking for guest authors either as a one off entry or a semi-regular contributor. You can write on anything you want as long as it is somewhat related to linguistics, teaching, language, or language learning.

Finally I’ve just finished the upgrade to EE 1.6 and all went smoothly. I also added the new social bookmarking module. The bookmarks will only be available on the permalink/comments page. The control panel for the module is a little buggy right now so I can only have the default two social sites, but once it’s fixed will add a few more. Will complete the forum upgrade probably tomorrow, right now I’m off to relax with some coffee and DVDs.

Expression Engine has released the latest version 1.6 (change log) with a major upgrade to the forum module 2.0 (change log).

Of particular interest to me is the ability to have seperate forums for each blog. Previously it was only possible to have one forum per installation.

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Expression Engine is about to release EE 1.6 and a new module. Their having a contest to give away 3 copies of the new module and I’ve decided to enter. The rules state that I must post my entry on my blog so here it is. You can see the contest and new release details here. Hope you enjoy the picture below and if you haven’t already switched to Expression Engine, ask yourself why? click the image to see full size.

update
I’ve added another picture to the extended entry.

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A great new module: Title Images just became available for EE. I’ve installed it and changed the look of the Entry titles on this blog. I’ll probably do the same to Let’s Learn Korean as well. Let me know what you think? I may change the font used in a couple of days, but then again I may not.

I just installed the video forum extension.

This extension allows you to add youtube and googlevideo to Expression Engine forum posts. To use it in the forum a user just needs to add:

[youtube]docid[/youtube] or
[googlevideo]docid[/googlevideo]

Any members who wish to share their favorite google or youtube videos feel free to do so using the above code.  follow the link to the forum thread and have fun.
update 2
It’s working now - I had to upgrade to the latest forum version. Still have a little tweaking to get new features added to the forums, but the videos embed easily.

update
it’s not working for me, but will soon once I get in contact with the extension author.

I just upgraded to EE 1.5.2 There’s also a new forum version available, but I am not sure if I will upgrade or not since my forums don’t get much action. If anyone is interested the changelog for 1.5.2 is here and for the new forum 1.3.2 here.

EE 1.5 is out and it’s a big change. THere’s a simple commerce module (included for free), which would theoretically allow me to sell anything in a storefront or if I wanted on a per blog entry basis. Interesting, but I don’t have a use for it yet since my KOrean Podcast project seems to have petered out. Anyhow I’m very excited about this new version and will update, though that’s not a priority right now as I’m still not actively blogging. The change log and official announcement are copied in the extended entry.

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I installed the new wiki module earlier today and it’s running fine. I don’t have time to change the theme to match this blog (but will later). At this time it’s open for editing and adding pages. The only restriction is that you must be logged in in order to do anything. Shortly I’ll be adding more details, focus for this project but for now enjoy.

I’ve added some content to the wiki and started a thread in the forums. Hope to get a large contribution from my readership and increase the size and feel of the comminty here.

Expression Engine just released a new version unfortunately I’m backed up on grading and won’t be looking at it until probably Wednesday next week err, it’s installed but I won’t be customizing the theme until I have more time - gotta go to the gym now and then finish grading.

ExpressionEngine 1.4.2 is primarily a maintenance release, resolving any bugs reported recently.  It also includes over 20 new features and enhancements.

The Wiki Module is a powerful wiki that integrates seamlessly with ExpressionEngine, providing a great solution for websites centered on community contributed content.  It is included free with the ExpressionEngine Personal and Commercial licenses.

The new Discussion Forum Module adds significant new features such as the ability to “split” or “merge” threads, “Show/Hide” capability, enhanced RSS support, and more.

I have already discussed with Graham about using the WIKI and will be starting something soon with that. 

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This blog and all of my sites on were down for a couple of hours due to resource abuse. I determined that the abuse was due to the new EFL aggregator I had set up. It has since been shut down. I hope to bring it back, but there is clearly a problem with the plugin that I was using to run it. Anyhow shutdown temporarily, maybe permently. And now I am back online.

Expression Engine, the software running my blogs, has incredible comment & trackback spam control. First there are captchas, the images non-members have to read and type what they see into the comment form, there’s the referrer blacklist, and a couple of other things that I forgot. However there is now one newer feature and that is the spam prevention extension (YES! EE Core {free version} supports this extension).

1. Reject comments with more than X URLs
2. Reject comments submitted less than X seconds after comment form loaded.
3. Comment specific blacklist

If anyone wants to discuss spam for any type of blog software, let’s move it to the forum.

Expression Engine has released version 1.4 details in the extended entry - there is some really exciting stuff in here!  including a free version… Everything looks really good and I’ll be upgrading soon.

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Have you ever wanted to have your blog professionally designed? Do you want a free personal licensed copy of Expression Engine (What I use to run both my blogs and forums)? If so, there is a contest just for you: go check out Bonafida Style

Tell us in 150 words or less what YOU would have us do for your blog design if you won a custom design.

Hat tip to Yoshi

update
I’ve finished customizing the forums. I’m pretty happy with the look and feel. There is only one thing remaining and that is to fix the pm box/login box at the top of the screen. In firefox it looks great, however stinky IE makes it all broken and ugly. I’ve also added an RSS feed for the forums so you don’t have to keep coming back to see if there is any action: subscribe to the feed. I spent good money on the forums and hope that others will get some use out of them. If you haven’t commented on entries previously, this would be a great time to introduce yourself and join in the conversation.

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originally published July 4, 2005
I’ve added a message board to my site. The new module is great, but with one limitation: The forums must be shared across all domains. So the Let’s Learn Korean and EFL Geek forums will be combined. They look a little ugly right now as I’m trying to customize them, but haven’t exactly figured everything out. If you feel so inclined, please post away.

Visit the forums.

I’ve upgraded to Expression Engine 1.3 - there are a couple of new features, such as built in avatars (previously I was using a hack) - the built in avatars still need ironing out as I have to remove the hack first. If you login and check your account/profile you’ll see a number of new features available as well. Once I get a handle on some new options there’ll probably be a few changes as well.

update
I’ve upgraded the avatars to the built in system. This means that everyone who had an avatar previously no longer does. To re-enable your avatar login to your account and click personal settings. YOu will also be able to add a signature which will appear at the bottom of every comment.

I just installed the new polling module for Expression Engine and it works really well. At this point I haven’t figure out how to include a poll in a blog entry but it works fine on the sidebar.

I will start the weekly polls again from Monday. for now, have fun and vote on the currently meaningless poll.
update
I got it figured out. Special thanks to Lisa Jill. Now I need to work on the CSS for the in entry poll.

I started writing the research proposal this morning and so far everything is going smoothly. I’ve only been working on the introduction but already I have six sources (less than one page) with a required minimum of eight. I’m pretty sure I will end up with around twelve to fifteen. I’m sure that some readers will be wondering if my research will be related to moodle or other areas of CALL since I spend a good amount of time talking about that. It won’t.

There are a couple of reasons for this, but primarily Macquarie does not offer a CALL unit. Without a CALL unit that means there is unlikely to be a supervisor available. And most of what I know comes from informal sources. I have picked up my ideas and practice without a guided approach and while I am confident that what I am doing and know is correct I do realize that there are large gaps in my knowledge that formal training would be necessary to fill. Without that formal training I do not feel ready to write about or research anything in that area.

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A new upgrade on Expression Engine was released today with over 50 new features.

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