MDS BLOG

5 Apps for online college students

In the age of digital textbooks, smartphones and online degree programs, having a list of must-have phone apps for your college experience can be a big help. Here are five course-related we rate as most useful.

1. Evernote
   First on our list is an app that allows students to copy classroom notes and record course lectures.  Evernote can be a life saver for students who want to replay a class session. The audio and visual files are searchable and easy to organize.
2. Dropbox
   Next is Dropbox, the most popular cloud technology app for computers and smartphones which allows users to synch files from multiple devices while reducing, or even eliminating, the need for flash drives which can be easily lost or compromised. For students using one computer at home, another at the library, and a smartphone while travelling, Dropbox provides a simple means to keep up with classwork and juggle various versions of one document for group projects.
3. My Class Schedule
   Students have a lot to juggle. Keeping track of tests, assignments, projects, and personal events makes a mobile time management app number three on our list. My Class Schedule is an Android-only app that can keep your entire life on track with easy reminder features that prevent last minute due date surprises that can rob you of sleep and GPA. The app has a free version with ads, but an ad-free version can be purchased for a nominal fee.
4. InClass
   iPhone users have their own excellent time management app that is highly comparable to the Android app, My Class Schedule. With a different user interface than the Android app, InClass still offers the same capabilities to organize the various events in your life.
5. Thinking Space for Android devices, SimpleMind+ for the iPhone
   Each term paper, class project, and synopsis a student writes involves organizing concepts and ideas and then breaking those down to subordinate thoughts. These brain mapping apps are both free and extremely helpful in organizing thoughts into visual representations you can use on the go. Long after you graduate, the apps will remain relevant well into your career.

About the author: Derrick Cruise is a professional writer living in the Indianapolis area. He specializes in technology and education articles. In his spare time, he contributes to stand-up comedy routines.

Website: http://skyesartwork.com/

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We find that most people usually like to stick to the stable platform of joomla version  they are using as upgrading to a new version  usually pose serious problems or you would like to use your 1.5 version template on the new upgraded version of 1.6 or 1.7,  for the brave ones  here is a little tip. Mostly please pay attention to the difference in  headers in your templateDetails.xml.

Firstly you may wish to visit these links to learn how to adapt your 1.5 version template to 1.6,1.7 versions. Visit Joomla Documentation and then here also. These would help you with ideas on what to do , there are not much documentations available for 1.6, 1.7 templates as at the time of this writing and the 1.5 versions of joomla would not be supported anymore in some months time.

One of the major problems is not  being able to find the 1.5 converted template when it has been installed on a 1.7 Joomla version.  It appears automatically on 1.5 version but not the same in 1.7 version. if you experience these problems please visit your admin and then follow Extensions manager > click on Discover > then  Discover on top close to purge cache.  If you have done everything right, your template should appear .

Have fun.

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One of the problems faced by webmasters with a static html websites is how to make it dynamic and also how to increase it’s popularity with the search engines. Every good webmaster understands that search engines likes dynamic pages and this is one thing giving rise to use of content management systems. I would argue that despite all the features offered by most CMS, some webmasters only need a basic use of it.

As usual most webmasters would like to feed constant dynamic contents to their static html pages which gives it that changing look and may attract some search engines to it.

After some good reserach you would find there are many ways to link up your blog contents or contents from other places of interest to be updated regularly on your static page.

If you are interested in this, you may like to try  Google Feedburner, i find it to be one of the best and most stable. When you have created your account, follow the instructions and set up your feed.  To publish on your web page, just choose Publicize and the BuzzBoost.

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Recently i had a problem with a very stubborn virus and was almost messed up if not for Malwarebyte antivirus software, this is highly recommended as it offers free and commercial version. The protection offered in it’s free version is highly commendable when compared with some antivirus programs .

Scanning with Malwarebytes is extremely fast and well detailed, please read the extract from it’s website below.

“Malwarebytes Anti-Malware helps you defeat Malware once and for all.”

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Let us call you back to the issue of website security, you may not be aware that your website is constantly being hacked or hacking attempts made regularly. Sometimes i wonder why some people would own websites and abandon their sites. Some of these sites were designed with high budget and it’s painful when you see such sites being neglected by their owners.

Start by checking your site today for malicious codes and blacklisting,  if you are an active webmaster  it is very difficult to get your site hacked with malicious codes   because you would be doing the following;

• Visit your website regularly or several times a day
• Back up your home directory and databases daily or  weekly

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Recently i had problem with an oscommerce shop that belongs to one of my clients, It is so disturbing these days how oscommerce based shops are being hacked. One major advice i would give any shop owner running on oscommerce platform is to make sure you have a clean copy of your files backed up and be very careful not to mix that copy  up with subsequent backups.

Actually this is the second time i have had this problem with an oscommerce script, but just incase you want to use oscommerce, do not forget to use any good available security that has been provided as an approved contribution.

One good security for people is to try and use the oscommerce security pro,  but if you find your oscommerce website hacked, just don’t bother looking for the malicious codes as most times the hacker must have corrupted a lot of  files with malicious codes like mixing javascript in php codes etc. Just go ahead and re-upload the whole site again(home directory) you must be careful about re-uploading the database file, if it’s not harmed , just leave it.

Afterwards try to test every aspect of your site , and lastly do not forget to change your passwords again both at the site admin and server.

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After searching for while i finally found comm100 free live chat software. One of the biggest problems with live chat software that runs on your own server is the amount of resources it can take out of your server. If you are a small business trying to offer live chat session on your website, then you had better consider comm100.

There are many others offering this services but they limit non paying users in so many ways but comm100 is completely free and unlimited access to all services they offer. It loads fast and runs on their server so you do not need to worry about live chat taking up your server resources .

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I just stumbled on this  interesting article on SEO and felt i should share it with you.

The issue of search engine and page ranking seems to remain a big secret in the internet world. Achieving a high page rank and high traffic through search engines is a huge task for web masters, getting up there is not easy but it takes a lot more to maintain the status quo once a site hits it big with the search engines. Please see an excerpt from a blog below;

“The original PageRank algorithm was described by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin in several publications. It is given by

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))”

Please continue reading by clicking  :

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