Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

For reasons that don't concern you I was a bit depressed in February. So I spent some money to make me feel better :-). It worked. I bought myself a new mobile phone. Actually, I bought myself the brand new E-Ten Glofiish M700. This baby is a Windows Mobile phone and has everything: PDA, Camera (2 megapixel), cell phone, GPRS, wireless (802.11), sliding keyboard, built-in GPS,... It replaces my old PDA and mobile phone. I bought it via the internet on GSMTrack.nl and their service is correct and fast.

I'm quite happy with it, everything I tried out works. The only annoying thing is when I go abroad I keep receiving weird messages from the network. Like last tuesday I was in Germany and every 15min or so I kept getting some number code from the network. Weird.

The number of mobile applications and services are ever growing and also mobile learning is no exception to the hype. So I had to try out my first mobile application. As always, it is a quick and simple experiment with my 6C Quotes site. It turns out it is quite easy to add mobile support to your web application via ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2005.


1. Open Visual Studio and open an existing or new project.
2. Add a new item 'Mobile Web Form' to your project.
3. Put controls from the 'Mobile Controls Toolkit' on the page (These are visible on the toolbar in design mode.)
4. Do your page layout, logic and event handling as you would with any other ASP.NET page.
5. Debug and compile your page as normal
6. Deploy to a web server and test out.

There are also smartphone and pocket pc emulators available for free on the Microsoft site, but I haven't figured out how to use them yet. I used my real device to test and you can see the results on the screen shots.

The screenshots are taken with CapturePro from TekSoft. In the trial mode it displays a black cross but you can use it in trial mode as long as you like. Just install it on your PC, connect your device via ActiveSync, start up CapturePro and follow the instructions.

Try my first mobile page out for yourself : http://www.about2findout.com/6CQuotes/DefaultMobile.aspx .

Of course this is a basic test. I would for example like to find out how to automatically redirect to the mobile page and some other more advanced things, but you have to start somewhere!

Labels: 6C Quotes, CapturePro, E-ten

Over 90% of e-mail these days is spam. More than half of blog entries are also spam. Many forums or sites that allow commenting become victim of spam or inappropriate comments. Very often the spam is inserted automatically by bots. One way to fight bots is to check via CAPTCHA.

You have seen it before: the picture with a few characters that you need to type, for example when you sign up for an account or if you want to comment to this post on blogger. (Try it!) The idea is that software agents cannot recognise the characters within the picture.

I just added a CAPTCHA component to my experimental site about2findout.com/6CQuotes. From now on you can no longer suggest a new quote (which sends me a mail) without typing in the CAPTCHA 5-character code.
I've found this excellent CaptchaControl component on The Code Project. It's free to use.

What I learned in my little experiment:
- You can add a control to the Visual Studio toolbox by right-clicking the toolbox, selecting 'choose items...' from the drop down menu, clicking the Browse button and pointing to the DLL file of the provided component.
- You need to add the httphandler section in the web.config file of your application for the CaptchaControl to work. (as described in the CodeProject article or in provided example)

DECISION: I'm going to use CAPCHA on the about2findout.com site for login, setting up an account and posting comments.

Labels: 6C Quotes, asp.net, CAPTCHA

I've updated the 6C Quotes and Statements application. Now there is a page that displays a random quote in a big font and that auto-refreshes every 20 seconds. The purpose it to display it in the background at an event or before a presentation to keep the audience entertained while waiting. I intend to use it for the first time next week thursday before a session on learning in the workplace that I'm chairing at Online Educa Berlin.

You can find it on : http://www.about2findout.com/6cquotes/eventbackground.aspx . It's free and open for all. Enjoy.

Labels: 6C Quotes