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Showing posts from November, 2012

My Favorite Wordpress Quiz Plugin: SlickQuiz

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Quizzes are a great way to engage your audience and educate them on a topic without sharing a long list of pointers.   I recently found myself with the need to create a simple online quiz.   I started with Googling a “free quiz maker” and other similar phrases, only to find myself unhappy with the options.   Most of what I found was geared towards the educational field or appeared to be “free” but not without slapping ugly ads on my quiz.   I just needed a simple interactive quiz that allowed visitors to test their knowledge and immediately see if their responses were correct.   Google Docs provided quiz capabilities, but no way to easily show the answers in real-time as a visitor moved through the quiz. I didn’t need to store results or generate reports based on the responses. I’d forgotten for a moment that I was working within Wordpress! One of my favorite things about Wordpress is the vast pool of plugins offered to enhance your website or blog.   Surely there were more than a few

unaboutique

unaboutique

Test Driving Feedly and Google Reader

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In today's post, I'm sharing the process of creating Google Reader and Feedly accounts. I have to tell you, I think you're really going to like Feedly! If you already have a Google Reader account, simply visit Feedly.com and sync your accounts.  Then, download the Feedly app if you wish.  If you're an iGoogle user like myself, I've outlined the process below and shared my thoughts on the Feedly interface. In the process of finding a replacement reader for iGoogle, I knew I needed to first create a Google Reader account.  I wanted to bring over all my iGoogle feeds via an import instead of manually adding each one (I had more than 70).   Thankfully, the steps outlined here worked like a charm, and in only a matter of minutes.      Next, it was time for me to sync my new Feedly account with my Google Reader account.   I suppose you could stop at Google Reader, but I was not happy with the design/layout.   I wanted something that was beautiful and easy to read

Time to Replace iGoogle with New Reader Service

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If you're a longtime reader, you already know how much I enjoy reading through my favorite blog feeds on iGoogle . At the time of this post, I have close to 75 blog feeds aggregated on my iGoogle page , allowing me to quickly scan the "headlines" (latest posts) and dive further to read a preview or the full post. The recent announcement by Google that they will be retiring iGoogle effective November 1, 2013 has prompted me to find a replacement for the service.  I've looked before, because browsing my favorite blogs via iGoogle on my iPhone is sometimes wonky (turns out they had an iGoogle app that has since been retired). Now I'm in the market for an RSS aggregator that works/displays as beautifully on a mobile device as it does on my computer screen.  In reading this post about the best free RSS readers, it looks like I should test drive Feedly and create a Google Reader (different than iGoogle) account.   Since browsing my feeds on my iPhone is something I&#