It took me a while to get this online. The audio doesn’t sound great, but I think most of it is understandable. I’ll post something tomorrow to explain how I created this video resource.
I switched blog servers a year or two ago and never updated the latest version to be licensed under a Creative Commons license.
The whole process is fairly simple.
1 – Decide on the license you want to use. I decided that anyone could use my work for anything except commercial use. I don’t plan to make money with anything on my blog, but if someone does figure out a way to monetize this thing, they will have to get special permission from me to use my stuff. That’s one of the nice things about Creative Commons. Anyone can use my work for anything non-commercial, but if someone does want to go through the traditional process of getting my permission, they can (only with my permission) use my work commercially.
The list of Creative Commons licenses is here.
2 – Edit your blog footer. This is little more complicated. Start by copying the HTML from the Creative Commons license page. All the HTML is provided. High light it and copy. Then open your blog’s footer. You can find this in the dashboard under the Presentation menu.
Presentation – Theme Editor
and select Footer from the menu on the right side of the page. See picture below. Click for larger picture.
I have circled the link to the footer in the right menu. When you click this link, the code for the footer will show up in the edit window on the left. This is where the “be careful at this point” comes in.
What I did to protect myself from a full meltdown is high light all the foot code, copy it and paste it into a Notepad file for safe keeping. If things get totally messed up, that original code can be pasted back into the edit window.
To add the Creative Commons license code to your blog, find where the original copyright information is and delete it out. In its place, paste the code from the CC site. I have circled this in red in the picture above. Click the Update File button to save your work.
3 – Take a look at your blog to ensure the footer is correct. Remember, you can always go back to the original code if you need to.
I have been getting a lot of comment spam on my blog. I don’t want to restrict posting only to those that have gone through the (sometimes tedious) process of setting up an account on my server. There is a place for that, but not on my blog.
I found a free plugin for WordPress called reCaptcha. You have probably used a captcha before. It’s one of the fuzzy-looking letter combinations that you have to type to prove you are a human and not an automated spam-bot. Below is an example from my new comment plugin.
After typing your comment, enter the letters you see and your comment will go through.
This should eliminate all the comment spam without creating a headache to the humans that create normal posts.
Here is a fun site.
Upload a picture to the site and the web-based application turns the photo into a cartoon.
becomes 
There are options that control how “cartoony” the picture becomes, how much color saturation is carried over from the photo and even add some funky effects to your cartoon.
The site is free. Your work can be shared with other social networks or marked as private.
I talked about the five minute rule last year, but here is one that deals with the cost of technology.
If there is a technology you need (USB flash drive, head phones, software upgrade) that costs about as much as dinner at a restaurant, buy it. That’s my rule. I can have a nice meal at my favorite sushi bar for $20. I can skip the sushi next time if I really need to purchase some technology now.
At UF, our students can buy Office 2007 or 2008 for $10. For that price, it makes no sense using anything else. Vista Ultimate is also $10, but some may argue it’s not usable even if it’s free. I’ll save that discussion for another day.
A great dinner eventually comes to an end and then it is over. A two gigabyte flash drive can last for years.
