The Curious Reef Blog

New to the site today is the ability for class creators to explicitly define a license for their class.  Licenses were sort of ad-hoc previously and it was up to the creator to define that in the class description.  Now, each class has a separate license attribute that the creator can modify.

The default license is Creative Commons “Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike,” and that can be changed to any of the six Creative Commons licenses.  Support for additional licenses will be added soon.

You can see an example on the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs class.

If you have a specific license that you would like to see added, leave a comment or shoot me an email.

Two updates to the site today.

First, now you can embed YouTube videos practically anywhere.  Just paste the YouTube URL (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY) and it will automatically turn into the proper embed code in your post.  This works in homework assignments, homework comments, forum topics and replies.  This applies to class creators also, and videos can be embedded anywhere in the class lesson and assignment content.  For example, I’m working now to embed the video lectures for SICP into the class itself:

http://curiousreef.com/class/structure-and-interpretation-of-comp/lesson/1/

It should make the classes more convenient to use since it will all be on the page for you.

Lastly, all links now have the nofollow attribute attached to them.  This tells search engines not to follow those links, which means they get no SEO value from them.  The reason for this is to try to deter spammers.  There have been repeated attempts by spammers to post links in the forum, and I hope this measure will help get rid of that problem a bit.

A couple site improvements went live today.  The homework assignments now each have their own permalink that uses an href anchor on the assignment page.  Previously there was no way to reference an individual homework submission, and finding a homework required scrolling through the whole assignment page.  Now that isn’t necessary and links on the activity page to homework assignments use the new permalinks.

Speaking of the activity page, it’s been slightly improved.  It’s now a little faster than before and it includes homework comments and topic replies.  Previously those weren’t included on that page.  Now you can better see the action on the site.