Monday, July 30, 2007

Nvu and KompoZer

With all the changes in web authoring, one thing I've noticed is the demise of good, affordable, mid-range HTML web editors. The old Claris Home Page used to be my standard web creation tool until I moved on to Dreamweaver.

Nvu (pronounced "N-view") probably isn't a true mid-range editor, as it can do a lot of cool things. But like many mid-range editors of old, the price is right. In fact, Nvu is a free, open source offering based on the Mozilla Composer that used to be a part of the old Netscape Navigator. If you're like me and work on more than one operating system, a big plus is that it's available for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux.

Nvu is supported by Linspire, Inc., and has the drawback of not progressing under the Nvu name past the 1.0 release in 2005. However, it's been picked up under the KompoZer name. From the Nvu forums:

Although NVU 1.0, released in June 2005, is the last official release that you will find on the official NVU download site, it isn't the newest or best version of the software.

An unofficial bugfix/update called KompoZer is available from www.kompozer.net. Current version number is 0.77, released in July 2006. For various legal reasons it cannot carry the NVU name, but for all practical purposes it is the same program.

KompoZer is not a cure-all for all the bugs in NVU 1.0, but it does fix some of the major annoyances. For example, KompoZer does not clutter your html source with extra blank lines as NVU does. And CSS functionality is vastly improved.

If you use NVU 1.0 and it works for you, stick with it. But if you run into problems, give KompoZer a try and see if it helps. It can't hurt.

I first tried to download KompoZer on a Saturday afternoon without success. I couldn't get a connection. I tried again late at night and got a very quick download of the current Macintosh release of KompoZer 0.7.7b (10.9 MB). I didn't see a lot of differences between KompoZer and Nvu, as I think most of the changes are "under the hood" kinds of things. But it was good to see that a good alternative to commercial web editors is alive and well and still under development. 

I wrote this section of today's posting with the Nvu and KompoZer.

$100 ($176) Laptops Go to Production

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project announced recently that they have released to production the order for mass production of laptops in their one laptop per child program.

• One Laptop Per Child Sends PCs to Production
• One Laptop Per Child site
• Wikipedia: XO-1 (laptop)

Council for Exceptional Children Critical Issues

The Council for Exceptional Children's Representative Assembly recently identified their top 10 issues in special education. CEC Identifies Critical Issues Facing Special Education lists their "top 10" that were chosen at the 2007 CEC Convention & Expo. Missing from the list was one that made me quit CEC for a few years: working conditions for special education teachers. In 1997 I was asked to write an editorial on the issue for CEC Today. They later included working conditions for special educators in one of their national proposals. With working conditions only making their "also ran" list, one can only assume that working conditions are much improved. Special educators must no longer have unbearable caseloads, reams of paperwork, dangerous students in class, and on and on. What was the CEC RA thinking?

Early Detection Offers Hope for Autistic Children

Autism study offers hope by Stephanie Desmon tells "a study at Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute that revealed that half of children with autism can be diagnosed not long after the first birthday - nearly two years earlier than it has been reliably diagnosed before...Early diagnosis leads to earlier intervention, which they hope can change the course of an autistic child's life."

 

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Thursday, August 2, 2007

Using Moodle 2nd Edition

While we were getting ready for our PRISM/Moodle Workshop yesterday, one of the guys told me that Jason Cole has completed the second edition of his Using Moodle manual. Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System (Using) is now available for pre-order from Amazon with an expected mid-fall delivery date. The first edition of Using Moodle (Community Press) has pretty well become the Bible for Moodle users, so most of us in that community are looking forward to the new release. Cole has been kind enough to grant the Moodle organization the right to post the entire first edition on their site for download in PDF format by chapter.

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