Ideas….

I’ve been looking at Moodle themes and wanted to save some of my favorites here so that when it comes time to change the themes I have a bunch to look at:

New School Learning Themes — New School charges for some of the themes. But its a minimal cost.

• New School Equinox Blue
• New School Prestige Blue
• New School Solstice Blue/Black

Themza Themes — Themza Themes are free. The downside is that there is a little add in the footer for web hosting. I can see if I can get rid of it if we like one of these themes.

• Binary Waves
• American Education
• Computer Scientist
• Computer World

Miscellaneous Themes — Some random themes I found.

• Moodle Themes Gallery — I really like the orangewhite one. You’ll need to login to the moodle installation using the instructions on the front page.

Make Your Own — there are a number of articles on making your own Moodle themes. Below is a list of Web Pages that could help us with this endeavor.

• Interface Guidelines
• Theme Basics
• Creating a Custom Theme
• Make Your Own Theme
• An interesting look at how the style sheets effect Moodle
• Chameleon Theme — allows you to create themes from the GUI.

Chris indicated quite some time ago that he needed a place to store his images. When he told me how much space his images are currently taking up I almost choked. To get a server (and keep getting servers) would just be absurd.

So when the idea of cloud computing was brought up I thought “Hey maybe Amazon can keep buying servers!” Turns out we don’t need a server…we just need S3. What’s nice about S3 is that it allows you to create a web form (yes a web form) and upload to S3 straight from the web form (yes really a web form).

So Chris could be uploading things through his web form (oh and they already give you the template…it makes you want to cry a little) and we could be paying Amazon based on how much space we’re using, how often Chris uploads files, and how big those files are (more pricing information can be found here).

You also have to pay to remove the files. I’m currently investigating some of the code samples available in forums to see what we can and can not do. Below you’ll find some links to those code samples:

Amazon Code Samples for S3

• Amazon S3 Bucket Listing
• Building a Small Business Backup System Using Amazon’s S3
  • Amazon S3 PHP Class
  • Amazon S3 Backup Solution (PHP/Perl)– The download link doesn’t work but you can browse the code.
• Programming Amazon Web Services by: James Murty
  • Example Code from the Book
• New Amazon S3 Customers: Introduction and FAQs
• Amazon Documentation

Ok that’s all I have for now. Its past five and I need to go home.

I attended a session on Amazon Web Services provided by NITLE.

Essentially Amazon Web Services’ EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) allows you to get a server on demand…and rather cheaply. You can pick from their already set up servers, or you can configure your own AMI (Amazon Machine Image) and put whatever services you would like for yourself or other potential users of the AMI. You then create instances of the machine based on the original AMI. So if I want every server I ever use to be running Red Hat have PHP, MySQL, and Apache on it, I create an AMI with that set up and then launch multiple instances of that AMI. Essentially in about 10 minutes I can have 10 servers up and running.

The drawback to EC2…when the server turns off or “crashes” you loose everything..this is where S3 (Simple Storage Service) comes into play. You can back up your information and data to S3 so that in the event something happens its all just sitting there…waiting to be moved to another instance of the AMI you originally set up.

This actually brings me to the idea of social networking via…servers. So let’s say I decided to create an AMI that is optimized for Moodle and make the AMI publicly available (you have the ability to make AMIs public or private), I can then share with other schools the knowledge that if you use this AMI, then you already have a working Moodle server ready to go. Pretty neat.

Even better, let’s say that I want to see how an institution set up their instance of Moodle, or I want to pilot Moodle, I can actually take a snapshot of Moodle out of the S3 (with their permission of course) and play around with it on my own server. Essentially…instant development server…instant pilot server…instant whatever you want server.

Of course all of this is pay for play…Amazon isn’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. But its relatively cheap and they give you a lovely little calculator (AWS Simple Monthly Calculator) so you can see how much in charges you’ll wrack up.