[One of the first posts I wrote for ProfHacker was this little ditty about web hosting. I've brought it out of the archives because recently some ProfHacker readers were asking questions along these lines and had never seen this post. If there is enough interest, I will write more articles about hosting options—especially high-performance hosting and other hosting options for developers. You can read comments on the original post.]

Although you may have access to web space using your college or university account, whether or not that is a productive space depends on issues likely outside of your control. For instance, if you have relatively little disk space allotted to you, but you want to maintain multimedia downloads for your students, you are already limited by what you can store. Or, perhaps you do not have access to server-side scripting languages or any database software�...

Four months ago I wrote “Using Super Smartphones for Productivity”, in which I discussed the process of deciding to purchase a Motorola Droid and how doing so increased my productivity. As with that post, it is not my intention in this post to do any sort of head-to-head comparison of super smartphones, nor do I intend to foist upon you a super smartphone when you do not want or need one.

I’m just here to provide an update on how this little gizmo has changed my life.

In short: a lot. Since I am still asked almost daily about my phone and what I think of it, I figured this update was in order.

I recently told a story in one of my classes, after students read Adriana de Souza e Silva’s essay “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces,” about how I woke up one morning cradling my Droid like a baby. That’s a true story—I had pushed...

In my time in graduate school (which is only weeks away from being over), I’ve had spectacular instructors and incredibly poor instructors. I’ve learned something from every one of them—if not content or pedagogy, then the general sense of who I want (or do not want) to be as an instructor in my own right. As part of my training in pedagogy—and I’ve been lucky to have more than a few classes—I’ve learned numerous ways for training and enabling students to think and write critically, to synthesize and express their mastery of a topic, and to ask questions along the way.

But somewhere along the way I forgot that I was still a student too—not only because yes, technically I am still a graduate student, but because everyone should continue to learn and ask questions as we move forward (if we want to move forward).

I know some people see asking questions as a sign...

Here at ProfHacker we’ve written a lot about backups, but never about version control. In fact, when I recently wrote “A Few Ways to Back Up Your Website”, I specifically said “I’m not going into things like version control software.” You see, for a lot of people there’s something about the phrase “version control” that makes it sound all super high tech, possibly scary, and definitely something only software developers would need to use. Well, it is pretty high tech on the back end, and software developers do use it, but it’s not all that scary—look at the tree-eating mascot for the free and open source, distributed version control system called Git, used in this post. It’s not all that scary, is it?

So maybe it is scary and high-tech to some, but that doesn’t mean non-software developers shouldn’t or can’t use it. In fact, a lot of you...

Although this post does not directly inform ProfHacker readers of a tip or tool for increasing productivity, you never know—it sure could lead to one.

Since 2005, the Google Summer of Code (GSoc) program has matched over 3,000 students and mentors to produce open source software in exchange for a stipend and invaluable experience working with real-world software development teams and organizations. These projects often lead to jobs for the students, but also (and primarily) to bits of code created and released for everyone to use.

In other words, the Google Summer of Code could produce a tool that enables productivity in our ProfHacker-y lives and fields.

I was reminded about the Summer of Code program by a tweet from @WordPress, one of the participating mentor organizations. It’s safe to say that WordPress has a place in the hearts of many ProfHacker authors, so anything ...

Previously on ProfHacker, I’ve discussed different tools for synchronous and asynchronous classroom discussion, and included Twitter as one of those tools. At the upcoming Computers & Writing Conference I’ll be part of two Twitter workshops along with Karl Stolley, Rachael Sullivan, and Bill Wolff, and at the University of Mary Washington Faculty Academy I will run a workshop on practical Twitter use.

However, Twitter is not the be all and end all of real-time status updates, or short bursts of content sent off into the ether, or momentary shouts from the nearest mountaintop, or whatever you want to call it—many people call it microblogging.

Services like Tumblr and posterous offer platforms through which you can post quick comments, longer entries, links to other posts and other media; this is an example of microblogging in that it retains the structure of a blog...

Here at ProfHacker we’ve written previously about backing up your personal computer—using Backblaze, Cloudberry, or external drives, for example—and others have discussed ways storing files for easy retrieval by multiple computers (see “Stop Emailing Files To Yourself”). But this post is about a few simple ways to ensure your website content is retrievable even when your hosting provider’s servers go belly-up (and the server with the backups does too).

These options are not all of the options for maintaining site backups, and are meant primarily for those folks who maintain basic web sites with a hosting provider. (In other words, I’m not going into things like version control software or true mirroring.)

Here, I’m using “static” to mean any files with content in them that you manually manipulate and...

Previously at ProfHacker, I wrote about choosing a web browser that’s right for you. At the time, and since late 2005 when Firefox 1.5 was released, Firefox was the browser I used 95% of the time—the other 5% was reserved for testing sites within other web browsers.

In that post, I also said:

I do know that if Chrome ramps up the add-ons, I can see myself switching to it full-time in the next year or two. But your mileage may (and will) vary.

Turns out “next year or two” meant “January 2010″ because a few weeks ago I switched my primary web browser to Google Chrome. I now use Chrome 80% of the time, Firefox approximately 15% of the time, and all other browsers 5% of the time. I use Chrome on Windows, but Chrome is now also available for Mac OS X 10.5 or later (Intel only) and Linux (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE)—with extension support for the latter platforms although that ...

I don’t mean to disappoint the legions of ProfHacker readers who have come to expect talk about super smartphones, unicorns in your Google Maps, or a host of other technological things from me—this post is not technologically-oriented at all.

Well, with the exception of my trusty pad of sticky notes. The paper kind. That’s some good tech right there.

A few days ago on Twitter I lamented the fact that I couldn’t settle on something to write for ProfHacker. I got several good ideas (very quickly), including this one, from my fellow PhD candidate at WSU, Lisa Anderson:

@mirrorcove32: @jcmeloni what can you spend 15 minutes doing today that will make tomorrow’s work day better?

“Huh,” I thought to myself, “that’s pretty good.” Several other people in my Twitter stream stopped and said “whoa. How about that!” And thus this post was born—simplicity a...