User:JimTittsler/Blog/2013

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Local Times

One frustration with international collaborations is specifying meeting times with easy-to-understand time zone conversions. The {{MTime|}} encourages a consistent date/time authoring format, with output that is formatted by the standard #time parser function. By default, the output is the time in hours/minutes followed by AM or PM. The MTime template takes an optional format parameter that allows specifying other output formats.

By adding {{#widget:LocalTime}} to the page, Javascript causes all of the times specified with MTime to show the local time (based on the browser time) when the user hovers over the time, and a small popover window is displayed if the user clicks on the time. Examples:

{{MTime|2013-12-01T13:30:00+0000}}
1:30PM
{{MTime|2013-12-01T13:30:00+0000|format=Hi}}
1330

--JimTittsler 02:00, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

WEnotes Atom Feed

The WEnotes micro-blog and blog aggregator can provide a one-stop-shop to monitor the activity surrounding one of the courses offered by the OER Foundation or our partners. The standard client displays in a WikiEducator web page (example). The same content is also available in Atom format for use in your favorite news feed reader. You can customize what is included in your feed by subscribing to different URLs.

http://WEnotes.WikiEducator.org/atom/{tag}
http://WEnotes.WikiEducator.org/atom/{tag}/{comma separated source list}

The first feed would include the postings for the tag from all of the various sources, mimicking the WEnotes web display. But you could narrow it down to just the blog postings by using the second form and specifying blog as the source. Or get all the blog and g+ postings (typically the longer form postings) in a single feed by specifying blog,gplus as the source. Examples:

http://WEnotes.WikiEducator.org/atom/ocl4ed
http://WEnotes.WikiEducator.org/atom/ocl4ed/blog,gplus

The first would have an item for every item in the ocl4ed aggregated feed. If you subscribed to the second URL, you would only get news items for the longer-format posts from blogs and g+.

--JimTittsler 04:33, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

WE Activity Chart

I have built a widget that uses the d3 data visualization library to build a simple punch card type chart showing user edits in the wiki. Putting the widget invocation: {{#widget:WikiEducatorActivity|user=Username}} will insert the graph for Username. (Here is an example.)

--JimTittsler 00:00, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Reader Mode is now a Gadget

You can now enable Reader Mode by enabling the preference on the Gadgets tab of your Preferences. Reader mode works only with the Vector skin. By default, Reader mode is enabled for devices with screens with widths of 1024 pixels or less. You can change that default by adding:

 window.weReaderWidth = 1280;

to the vector.js subpage of your user page (where the number is the width that should trigger Reader mode).

--JimTittsler 03:29, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Google+ WikiEducator Community

There is a small Google+ WikiEducator Community. I've started posting a few Tips & Tricks there on effective WikiEducator use.

--JimTittsler 02:38, 7 January 2013 (UTC)