Warning: Personal post – my new job

Once again I am breaking the editorial guidelines for this blog.  This post isn’t a tip, trick, useful software or hardware.  Last time I did this was in 2012, so I think I’m allowed one every three years. After 12 years of working for Cramlington Learning Village, I’ve moved on. I’m thrilled to announced that I

My Top 4 Chrome extensions

Whatever your opinion on Chrome, it’s extensions are really powerful, so much so that I keep a list of them.

FIXED: Webpages display correctly without using Compatibility Mode

Something strange started happening with Internet Explorer last year.  When IE10 turned up, it seemed like it rewrote the rule book on how the browser displays web pages.   For instance, if you hadn’t coded your font name in your style sheets absolutely correctly, then you had to deal Times New Roman. Now of course, one should code

YouTube Royalty-Free Music bank

When adding music to a video, there is always the point when you want to reach for your audio collection, be it iTunes, Amazon or that pile of dusty CDs and import your favourite song and use that. Yeah, that’s called copyright infringement.  It’s so easy to do, but ethically and legally it’s a big NO. The

Converting videos so they can be edited

At Cramlington, we don’t currently have a third-party video service. Instead, having an entirely Windows server environment, we’ve used Windows Media Encoder and WMV files to stream all our videos. Together with Graeme Porter (since moved to be Walbottle Campus’ VLE Coordinator), I put together our own video database system (CramTube – yeah, our naming’s

Auto Menu (PHP)

More often than not, I get asked to upload and link some files from our teachers to one page or another.  This is part of my job and I’m happy to do it.  But sometimes, I get asked to upload 20 – 30 files in one email.  This gets tedious.  And generally, I’ve no sooner

Need a small server capable of hosting databases?

In my last post, I talked about using PHP and if you didn’t have access to a server that allowed PHP to run, what could you do?  For the more technically minded out there, you may be surprised that this is even an issue.  The sad truth is that lots of free websites don’t offer

FIXED: Playing MP3 files in Windows Media Player from IE (instead of Quicktime)

Preamble OK, before I start. I don’t want to hear about Chrome, Firefox, Winamp, iTunes or frankly anything else. It’s taken me an absolute age to find a solution to this on the internet and almost every forum I went on where someone was having this issue, there was someone else suggesting they just change browser

Sparkbook

Sparkbook is a database driven system I’ve built for school which populates students directly from our MIS (Serco Facility) and allows teachers to quickly mark them against different criteria. The system is designed to be customisable, so teachers can add their criteria. There is a tiered marking system built in – teachers can choose from 5

FIXED: Frog’s Kerboodle widget

Kerboodle is an online subscription resource site.  Frog is our VLE.   And Frog’s official Kerboodle widget allows single-sign-on from Frog to Kerboodle.   So no different usernames or passwords to remember. Unfortunately, when I downloaded the official widget from Frog, we discovered a really odd issue.  For our students and teachers on Windows XP machines running IE8* the