iSean

okay, 2 blog posts in one day . . . i think that means i am procrastinating on my other tasks. ;~)

i just wanted to mention that i am once again going to use phpBB forums in my online teaching; however, i am setting up an all new site for the forum and the customization is taking quite a bit of time. and, there’s the little things that i have to problem solve as i get things up and running. for example, i like to add avatars to every account. during the first day of classes, i’ll take photos of every student and then go in and physically attach the photo to their account — this photo is called the avatar. well, i went to add an avatar to my own account and i was unsuccessful. i tried a few different way and checked settings on the new forum versus the old one. nothing worked.

so, i moved on to smilies. i added a smiley (emoticons) package to the site because my students tend to like being able to express emotions easily because words can often leave the wrong impression. well, all 40 emoticons i added failed to show up. i had to delete each smiley individually. i’d click to delete one and be taken to another webpage. i then had to navigate back to the list of smilies and delete the next one that was messed up. this kind of thing takes considerable time. and, i tried it twice because i wanted to make sure i didn’t make an error the first time — and, i did make some adjustments first. same results. i had to delete each one manually. aauuugh!

so, i head off to the phpBB support forums. the first thing they tell you is not to ask a question until you’ve conducted a search of old messages to see if your question/issue has already been addressed. i knew i my issue was not new. i did a search and read through a few of the results and then i noticed one response ask the poster if they had turned on permissions to the appropriate folder where images are stored. i immediately knew that this must be my problem. i opened transmit (my FTP tool — best available, fwiw — on a Mac) and navigated to my site and chose, “Get information” on the Images folder. sure enough, the permissions were not set correctly. i changed them and went back to test things out.

everything worked just swell. whew!

so, here’s how the new forums will look this semester: