Darren posts a thoughtful piece on social networking over at Social Networking and Safety | Youth Ministry Blog

Various learning management systems (LMS) like Moodle allow you to create online activities like quizzes and polls as part of the course content and engagement. But what do you do if you need something like that but you don’t have access to an LMS that does it or you need to put that content in an environment outside of the LMS.

I’ve been playing around with Hot Potatoes which gives you some of this functionality. It feels a bit clunky in places, but it will certainly get the job done if you want basic multi-choice quizzes, crosswords and matching exercises.

If course if you want to create a quiz that logs the results against the student (say for assessment purposes) then you’ll need to step up to something more like an LMS.

Useful Problogger article on different ways of getting a design for your blog – from the free through to the expensive. See Problogger: How Do I Get a Professionally Designed Blog?

Turning MS Word files into web pages can be a really painful experience – particularly if you have to go through them by hand looking to change or modify them. I’ve had some days when I’ve given up trying to get Word content into a nice web format and just gone and recoded the content from scratch. However, I might give some of these tools a trying in future – Convert Word Docs to Web Pages – Wired How-To Wiki.

Adobe make a version of Photoshop – Photoshop Express – available as a free web-based application adding yet another application type to the burgeoning area of free web apps offered to allow companies like Microsoft, Google and Adobe carve out their own corner of the internet – and hence a source of consumers to manage and advertise to.

After being initially released (see Adobe’s Photoshop Express and the big picture | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com), the terms of use has quickly been updated in the face of criticism from potential users – Report: Complaints trigger rewrite of Photoshop Express terms | Tech news blog – CNET News.com.

Ernesto comments on using it over at Ernesto Burden | Photoshop Express — Sweet, Free Photo Editing Tool With Social Media Extensions.

I’ll be interested in checking it out – I don’t know how many times I’ve been away from home or the office and needed to edit an image and had an internet connection but no image editing application in the computer I’m using.

Problogger, Darren Rowse, publishes his list of useful blogging tools for Mac OS X. I use (or have tried many of them) – Ecto (article editor which I have on both Mac and Windows), CyberDuck (FTP client), ImageWell (for quick manipulation and posting of images) and Firefox. I prefer TextWrangler over TextEdit though (I used BBEdit Lite from way back)

The full list is at 14 Essential Mac OS X Applications for Bloggers

There’s no standalone newsreader application in there though because he uses Google Reader to do that. See Greenflame · NetNewsWire (Free now!) for my preference there. I used the Sage plug-in for Firefox for ages, as well as Bloglines, but I really like having one app that does a single job well, but can talk to other apps if need be.

I use NetNewsWire Lite to keep up with my blog feeds, though I’ve never felt the need to upgrade to the full version. Now, however, the full version of NetNewsWire is being released for free as its developer focuses upon growing their online services. So, if you you’re running Mac OS X 10.4 or later you can grab the latest version and take it for a spin.

More information at: RSS Reader for Mac – NetNewsWire

Hat tip to: TidBITS Networking: NewsGator Turns NetNewsWire Loose for Free

(Of course, I’m still stuck in 10.3.9 for the foreseeable future [anyone want to donate me a MacBook?:-)] and will be plodding along with the old Lite version just fine.)

After some initially using the PHPWebsite content management system way, way back as a proto-blog I shifted to using Blogger, and then over to Movable Type 2 because it afforded me more control over the blog (and added things like categories). And then Movable Type 3 arrived and the licencing became confusing and more restrictive so I just kept on chugging along using the functional, but now relatively obsolete, MT 2. Finally I came to WordPress (via some playing around with Drupal and Mambo/Joomla) and it works pretty well (especially with Ecto).

Now, in part in response to the success of WordPress, there’s an open-source version of Movable Type 4 available, which might just make me go back and have a look at it if I need to set up a new blog on my own server. I quite liked MT – and back when it was more widespread there were all sorts of interesting sites providing helpful tips and themes etc. (Just like for WordPress now).

More details at: Six Apart Reinvigorates Movable Type with New Open-Source Release | Compiler from Wired.com and Movable Type Open Source – MovableType.org – Home for the MT Community.

BTW – I see PHPWebsite continues to evolve. I liked using the early versions, and I might have a look at it again next time I need a CMS.

I was wondering yesterday, with the Wifi and Safari built into the iPod Touch, whether you could blog from it. It appears you can, and there’s a WordPress plugin to format posts for the iPod Touch/iPhone screen size. See WordPress for Ipod Touch (iWPhone)

If you’re publishing stuff on your blog or web site and you’re concerned about other people misusing your content then ProBlogger has a useful little article on how a terms of service page can help with that. See: Nip Problems in the Bud with a TOS Page.