WordPress has a single ON/OFF switch to enable and disable comments on all posts in a blog. But what if you want to turn off comments on just a few blogs, or all blogs older than 1 year old, for instance? Is there no alternative to editing each blog one at a time and turning off the comments? Yes, there is. Here is how.

In your WordPress administration, click on “All Posts”.  If you have 20 or fewer posts, they will be listed on one page. If you have more than 20 posts, they will be spread over several pages. I have 3o pages, and I wanted to switch off comments on all posts older than 6 months. So I clicked to the last page with the oldest blog posts. Then,

Click on the downward-pointing triangle next to the words “Bulk Action” and choose “Edit”.

Next, underneath the word “Edit” you’ll see the word “Title” with a checkbox next to it. Click the checkbox and all the checkboxes to the left of the title of all the posts listed on that page will also be checked. If you don’t want to edit all the posts, just unclick the ones you don’t want edited.

Now click the word “Apply”, next to the “Edit” window. You will see a new small window appear at the top of all the blog posts which will list them all in miniature, together with a bunch of options (see the next graphic below).

(Click the image to see a larger, clearer version.)

You can make bulk edits to several different elements. I wanted to just edit the comments options, so I clicked on the downward-pointing triangle next to “Comments” and chose “Do not allow”, like this:

Then click the big red button named “Update” and hey presto! All the blog posts listed on that page should now have had their comments disabled. If there were any comments on any of those pages, they won’t be affected. They should still all be there. It’s just that from now on nobody can write a new comment on those posts.

As I had about 25 pages of old posts I wanted to disable the comments on, this took me quite a while, but it was still a damn sight quicker than fixing each post one by one!

Tags: @Productivity, howto

gradebook template

Are you a teacher? Do you use Excel spreadsheets? Do you use an Excel template? Do you use an online or digital gradebook template?

Like most teachers around Japan, I’m marking exam papers and calculating my final grades.

In the past, I used MyGradebook.com, which was quite good, but is now defunct.  I’ve tried other gradebook templates over the years, but I never found one that I could customize the way I wanted to.

Instead, I used plain ol’ Excel spreadsheets. I use a few basic formulas, but nothing too sophisticated. I certainly didn’t try creating my own Excel template or gradebook template. So I was impressed to find this free Excel gradebook template on the web.

This free Excel gradebook template does useful things like

• allow you to assign different weights to different activities and sets of grades;
• allow you to excuse certain students’ assignments;
• set which assignments are part of the final grade;
• has a column for extra credit;
• turns the final grade into a letter grade, using a complicated “IF” and “INDEX” and “MATCH” formula. (I tried adapting it so that it would do the reverse – give me a percentage for a letter grade, but I failed miserably).

Perhaps you’ve already finished your grading, but bookmark the site anyway. It might come in handy next semester. Plus, the site has a ton of other free Excel templates, too.

Here are a few other neat things to make Excel do, using formulas rather than templates:

• how to make it easier to read and tell apart a long-assed row of columns by colouring every other column
• how to count certain words – in my case how to count all the “shusseki 出席” (present) and / or chikoku 遅刻 (tardy) for each student. Atetndance is recorded digitally online, but includes not only “present” but also “tardy” and “absent”. This formula automates the process.
• how to sort rows randomly – great for creating randomly sorted lists of students for test purposes, for instance.
• And here’s a plugin for MSWord that lets you easily created all kinds of text puzzles and activities – Zarb.

Tags: @Productivity, howto