Brian Corrales

I’ve just found out that for a limited time, Gospelink.com has a coupon page where you can get a 3 month subscription to Gospelink.com for only $9.99.  That’s about half off the regular monthly price!  You can give it as a Christmas gift subscription to a friend or keep it for yourself.  Here’s the link to the promotion:  http://gospelink.com/gift/employee, intended for friends and family of employees of DeseretBook.  If you want to learn more about Gospelink, here’s a screencast.  Gospelink is the world’s largest database for LDS-content, including the entire DeseretBook Online Library, BYU speeches, Ensign articles, old LDS newspapers like the Times and Seasons, Christian Classics, the Standard Works, other editions of scriptures, including Greek and Hebrew definitions for almost every word in the Bible, and much much more.

As many of you know, I am the owner and chief instructor of Wasatch Martial Arts Academy in Salt Lake City, Utah. Tomorrow I am holding a test for about twenty of my students. A major test like this happens quarterly with smaller testing groups in the middle. Traditionally, each testing candidate will complete a testing application, which I will later file.

As you can imagine, this can become an administrative nightmare.  To decrease the paper, I have developed an online management system for all my rank tests. Students and families create user accounts on my site with their basic information, including their Gup membership Id, which they receive from headquarters. This information is saved so all they have to do is login and submit a test request. A test request is merely them selecting their testing date and hitting submit. Later, I can generate a report of the test and give each studebt a pass/fail and an average score.

I believe I have greatly simplified the testing process and I believe many other Soo Bahk Do instructors may benefit from this management system. My next step is to get the system ready for market. If any instructors have a request or are interested in kearning more, I hope you’ll leave a comment here.

YouTube, without warning, has added an ugly search bar above the embedded video. The problem I have with it is it encourages people off your site and to search YouTube rather than your site. Luckily, there is a quick fix. Add this to the src of the embed tag and the param movie tag:

&showsearch=0
This gets rid of the Search Bar in the embed tags. Kind of annoying, but at least we have a choice.