Software, technology, and education. https://iywahl.com/blog 2024-01-30T00:48:19Z Danny Wahl https://iywahl.com/Blogging from the CLI 2024-01-30T00:48:19Z 2024-01-30T00:48:19Z

This might be the worst possible way to blog.

https://iywahl.com/The Plugin Statistic that Matters 2016-04-23T16:38:32Z 2016-04-23T16:38:32Z

Wordpress marketplace provides lots of tracking metrics, but what's important?

https://iywahl.com/Learning is the Goal 2016-04-04T02:57:51Z 2016-04-04T02:57:51Z

Our hypothesis was right.

https://iywahl.com/Laser Cutter Projects 2016-04-03T21:23:24Z 2016-04-03T21:23:24Z

I never knew I was an artist until they let me play with lasers.

https://iywahl.com/Add Auxiliary Power to a KLR650 2016-03-25T04:38:57Z 2016-03-25T04:38:57Z

It's just a little electricity, what could go wrong?

https://iywahl.com/What's Your Originality Score? 2016-03-04T03:54:34Z 2016-03-04T03:54:34Z

We all know anti-plagiarism software. They take a piece of work and then tell the teacher and the student how original it is. It's a crazy business model. What's even crazier is...

https://iywahl.com/Should Students be Content Creators? 2016-03-03T02:40:39Z 2016-03-03T02:40:39Z

In my experience, the rhetoric of "we want our students to be content creators not content consumers" is used ad nauseum by faculty and admins for all kinds of purposes. Maybe...

https://iywahl.com/Gridster for Instagram 2015-10-17T22:09:53Z 2015-10-17T22:09:53Z

Gridster for instagram is the easiest way to get a customized, full-screen, display of any instagram feed.

https://iywahl.com/"My Posts" Wordpress Plugin 2015-05-29T04:01:51Z 2015-05-29T04:01:51Z

If you run a multi-author blog you've probably noticed that it's not so easy to find only your posts. "My Posts" fixes that by adding a link under the "Posts" menu that goes...

https://iywahl.com/Scrollster for Instagram 2015-04-21T00:30:02Z 2015-04-21T00:30:02Z

Scrollster for instagram is the best way to showcase instagram photos in a beautiful, full-screen, responsive scrolling gallery. Scrollster for instagram is a standalone webapp...

https://iywahl.com/Add Share Links to WordPress 2015-03-25T00:19:11Z 2015-03-25T00:19:11Z

Here are a few code snippets to add share links to WordPress content.

https://iywahl.com/Ghost Theme 'Lenore' 2015-03-19T04:50:20Z 2015-03-19T04:50:20Z

Ghost is a blogging platform. Lenore is a theme designed to showcase writing and as such most of its features are about what it doesn't do.

https://iywahl.com/Ghost Share Links Cheat Sheet 2015-03-16T12:20:12Z 2015-03-16T12:20:12Z

In my previous post Add Share Links to Ghost Themes I outlined how to create no-cost share links using the Ghost handlebars API. In this post I'll provide code snippets to some of...

https://iywahl.com/Add Share Links to Ghost Themes 2015-03-16T05:51:24Z 2015-03-16T05:51:24Z

The fastest, "lightest" way to make your Ghost blog shareable.

https://iywahl.com/Proxy Ghost with homebrew Apache 2015-02-13T04:55:19Z 2015-02-13T04:55:19Z

I don't know if you're like me, but I'm lazy. As such I find adding ports to URLs to be quite tedius, so the fact that Ghost runs on a non-standard web port (:2368 as opposed to...

https://iywahl.com/Secure Ghost with Cloudflare SSE 2015-02-12T11:55:47Z 2015-02-12T11:55:47Z

Cloudflare is a great company for so many reasons. They provide DNS, CDN, and security all in one ‐ even on their free tier. If you're not using Cloudflare yet, you should...

https://iywahl.com/Host Your Ghost Blog on Github Pages 2015-02-04T05:41:23Z 2015-02-04T05:41:23Z

I've written a little bit about this before but this site is currently created using a local copy of Ghost and then converted to a static HTML site and deployed to GitHub pages....

https://iywahl.com/Start Your Ghost Server on Login 2015-02-03T00:39:00Z 2015-02-03T00:39:00Z

If you follow the Ghost documentation to install and start Ghost then you probably just open terminal, cd to your install directory and type npm start, this leaves you with a...

https://iywahl.com/Add Search to Your Ghost Blog with Swiftype 2015-02-02T05:39:55Z 2015-02-02T05:39:55Z

If you're moving from WordPress to Ghost (or really any other blog platform) one of the things you've probably noticed is sorely missing is search. The Ghost devs know it too....

https://iywahl.com/Don't use .dev for Development 2015-01-27T02:39:52Z 2015-01-27T02:39:52Z

A while back I wrote about setting up DNSMasq for your local development using the .localhost TLD. Unfortunately during my research I came across a lot of people advocating setup...

https://iywahl.com/Migrate from Wordpress to Ghost 2015-01-19T07:49:03Z 2015-01-19T07:49:03Z

I've been using WordPress as the backend of my website for about 4 years now. I've been a fan of its simplicity, its usability, and its extensability. I didn't want to spend a lot...

https://iywahl.com/Moving 2015-01-09T13:46:30Z 2015-01-29T05:43:33Z

Goodbye Wordpress, hello Ghost.

https://iywahl.com/Yosemite MAMP homebrew dev setup part 2 2014-10-28T19:39:48Z 2014-10-28T19:39:48Z

In my previous post OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Apache, MySQL, PHP 5.6, (MAMP) Homebrew Dev Setup I covered a lot. Like a lot a lot, but by the end of the post all we had really...

https://iywahl.com/OS X Yosemite MAMP homebrew Development Setup 2014-08-13T11:17:52Z 2014-08-13T11:17:52Z

Update:

https://iywahl.com/Elegance: What's Coming 2014-07-22T07:56:12Z 2014-07-22T07:56:12Z

This is just a quick note to say that the next minor version of Elegance is in development. The next release (version 2.7.1) will feature a lot of bug fixes and a couple of new...

https://iywahl.com/Moodle Output: An Introduction 2014-07-18T16:44:33Z 2014-07-18T16:44:33Z

Here at iyWahl we’re not really developers. Sure we write some code, and we have even released a few plugins for Moodle, WordPress, and Mahara but really we’re in the educational...

https://iywahl.com/Elegance 2.7 Release 2014-07-04T23:11:28Z 2014-07-04T23:11:28Z

It’s taken a little bit longer than we had hoped but we’re happy to announce that the official 2.7 version of Elegance has been released! It’s currently available in the Moodle...

https://iywahl.com/A New Home for Elegance 2014-06-18T14:48:40Z 2014-06-18T14:48:40Z

It’s been a whirlwind few months in the Moodle theme community. Julian Ridden released a new theme, Elegance which garnered a massive amount of downloads as well as a TON of forum...

https://iywahl.com/CodePen.io Moodle Plugin 2014-02-13T20:44:33Z 2015-01-18T05:36:52Z

Syntax highlighting is hard. So is porting a syntax highlighter from platform to platform. So I thought, “Why not be lazy?” Bam. Introducing the CodePen.io Moodle Text Filter –...

https://iywahl.com/Code Kids Love 2013-10-28T09:43:22Z 2013-10-28T09:43:22Z

I’ve been involved in technology so long that some times I forget how easy it is to introduce that “wow” factor to someone that’s never been introduced to it, and never had the...

https://iywahl.com/We're Going "Free Culture" 2013-10-09T14:58:13Z 2013-10-09T14:58:13Z

That’s right, I’ve really done it now. I’ve officially changed the license for all content on this site to a Free Culture compatible one. In the past all content was available...

https://iywahl.com/WHOIS Spam 2013-10-04T21:25:10Z 2013-10-04T21:25:10Z

That’s not a question. It’s a statement, or rather a discovery I made the other day when troubleshooting VPN connectivity issues.

https://iywahl.com/URL Shorteners and Page Load Speed 2013-09-24T10:23:37Z 2013-09-24T10:23:37Z

URL shorteners are all the rage right now. They make it easy to share links in sites like twitter without blowing your character limit. They make sharing gross long urls easy in...

https://iywahl.com/Foundation for Moodle 2013-05-22T11:36:34Z 2015-01-18T06:29:55Z

You love Zurb’s Foundation. You love Moodle. How could you choose? Now you don’t have to. Introducing Moodle Foundation. Bottom-to-top Zurb goodness. Top-to-bottom Moodle...

https://iywahl.com/I'm now a Moodle Contributor! 2013-01-19T09:54:06Z 2013-01-19T09:54:06Z

I’ve reported a lot of bugs (some bogus, some good) for Moodle and participated in several more over the last few years, but up until now that’s been the limit of my efforts.

https://iywahl.com/Moodle Plugins Directory Statistics 2012-12-17T12:47:47Z 2012-12-17T12:47:47Z

I recently noticed that moodle.org added some statistics to plugin pages, which had been a requested feature for a while. Maybe I’m just prideful but I like seeing how many people...

https://iywahl.com/Customize Moodle Theme Based on Language 2012-12-07T11:43:00Z 2012-12-07T11:43:00Z

The other day I got an interesting request from a site administrator using my Zebra theme:

https://iywahl.com/Memrise Beta Tweaks 2012-09-01T14:47:21Z 2012-09-01T14:47:21Z

I love memrise. Not just as a concept or a webapp, but as a learning tool. I use it daily. But there are a few issues that I wish they would address that just haven’t been done...

https://iywahl.com/CSS3: Multiple Backgrounds vs. Transforms 2012-07-13T14:48:23Z 2012-07-13T14:48:23Z

CSS3 introduces transforms. Save on code and bandwidth.

https://iywahl.com/Reconsidering Custom Renderers 2012-04-11T09:45:59Z 2012-04-11T09:45:59Z

One of the coolest new features in Moodle 2 is the fact that the core uses a series of renderes to output the final HTML, and that these renderers can extended or even overwritten...

https://iywahl.com/Browser Detection in Moodle 2012-03-19T16:28:10Z 2012-03-19T16:28:10Z

In order to polyfill, you have to know what's missing.

https://iywahl.com/Making Wordpress Protected Posts More Private 2011-11-28T12:37:43Z 2011-11-28T12:37:43Z

Boy that’s a lot of ‘P’s! Let’s just jump right in, shall we. Here’s the scenario, a user creates a post that they only want to share with select people because of the private...

https://iywahl.com/Simple, Dynamic Sidebars 2011-11-24T09:08:19Z 2011-11-24T09:08:19Z

One of the things I loved right off the bat about WordPress is that it’s extremely flexible in terms of output and rendering, and that its built in functions are simple but also...

https://iywahl.com/Adding Custom Images in Moodle 2.0 Themes 2011-11-17T10:59:46Z 2011-11-17T10:59:46Z

Moodle 2.0 has much more flexibility when it comes to themes. But the documentation is a little sparse.

https://iywahl.com/Re-writing Good Code 2011-11-05T14:39:53Z 2011-11-05T14:39:53Z

A few weeks back I published my qTranslate Missing Link code, what I didn’t say in that post was that that was the 3rd revision of the code. And I mean a real v3.0, not a “let’s...

https://iywahl.com/Playing with userContent.css 2011-11-04T21:11:56Z 2011-11-04T21:11:56Z

Here in China the fact that some websites just are never available (e.g. facebook, youtube, twitter, google+, hulu, etc…) and some sites get blocked intermittently depending on...

https://iywahl.com/No Listening Sockets Available 2011-11-03T15:37:37Z 2011-11-03T15:37:37Z

I’ve been trying to hunt down some sigterm and oom errors thrown by Apache 2 lately and in the process I decided to have it log in its default location /var/log/ and on my...

https://iywahl.com/rmdot and lsdot 2011-10-28T08:26:32Z 2011-10-28T08:26:32Z

Remotely accessing a non-Macintosh machine from a Macintosh can really be a pain because OS X creates a hidden meta file for every file and sometimes these files are actually...

https://iywahl.com/New Look, New Learning 2011-10-23T10:15:16Z 2011-10-23T10:15:16Z

I decided to update (and upgrade) this site and I wanted a few things specifically: a minimalist look, HTML 5, and CSS 3. Turns out there’s only a few HTML 5 themes that are what...

https://iywahl.com/QTranslate: Using jQuery to Fix Missing Links 2011-10-22T19:51:28Z 2011-10-22T19:51:28Z

If you look at the qtranslate forums and various theme forums there’s a variety of people saying this link or that link doesn’t translate. The answer is usually to go edit the...

https://iywahl.com/Rolling Database Backups 2011-04-29T13:14:35Z 2011-04-29T13:14:35Z

A few weeks back I decided to try to frustrate myself beyond belief by trying to write a bash script that would (among other things) dump a database every hour. That idea quickly...

https://iywahl.com/rsync over SSH with expect 2011-03-21T12:32:54Z 2011-03-21T12:32:54Z

lately I decided that a good plan of action would be to take the web server files in my virtual machine: Apache config, Postgres config and databases, Moodle root and moodle data...

https://iywahl.com/Zebra for Mahara 2011-03-08T12:05:37Z 2011-03-08T12:05:37Z

I’ve quickly gone back and ported my Zebra Moodle 1.9 theme to Mahara 1.3, if you want it – go ahead and grab it here. It doesn’t support custom colors as easily as Moodle, but...

https://iywahl.com/Zenphoto Album Name Hack 2011-02-16T10:11:11Z 2011-02-16T10:11:11Z

ZenPhoto is a pretty robust, but light weight photo gallery software. The front-end is pretty sparse, but the framework is excellent – meaning you can customize the layout in...

https://iywahl.com/sudo and OS X aliases 2011-01-25T22:14:44Z 2011-01-25T22:14:44Z

I spend a lot of time in the shell on Ubuntu – and in Gnome one of the basic features that I rely on is the right click “Open as Administrator” which will prompt for administrator...

https://iywahl.com/smbpasswd-gui 2010-12-27T14:17:08Z 2010-12-27T14:17:08Z

I recently came across an application I wrote a while back in AppleScript to slap a basic GUI on OS X terminal program smbpasswd. This utility is basically the BSD version of dscl...

https://iywahl.com/Google Books Fuller-Full Screen 2010-12-26T00:29:30Z 2010-12-26T00:29:30Z

Ever since I started using FireFox 4 Beta I’ve been wanting back my favorite plug-ins. Fortunately Firebug has their 1.7a that’s compatible, so that’s good, but GreaseMonkey seems...