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.

There’s now improved activity and profile pages.

The activity page now shows a snippet of the latest assignment or forum post:

And the user profile page shows a list of all the work you’ve completed along with a snippet of the assignment.  Here are some examples:

- kday (me)
- shaggorama
- pbr
- dtmetz

I find that these updated profiles are a great way to quickly see the work that a user has done, and to keep track of the work I’ve completed so far.

I also was a little surprised that it’s been 3 weeks since I last did a homework assignment, so it’s encouraging me to get back at my Bash Scripting class.

Feel free to share any feedback you have on the new changes.

Each class now has a status property, which can be either “Under Construction” or “Established.”  This indicates whether or not all of the lessons and assignments have been added to the entire class.

The class status can only be set by the creator, or another class administrator.  It’s a way to indicate that the class has finally been fully built-out, and if a user is to complete all of the assignments, they should get credit for completing the entire class.

An established class can still be edited in any way, even to add more content.  However, students need to have some kind of target to shoot for, and it wouldn’t make sense to take away credit for a completed class just because an instructor comes along later and adds something new.