Month: April 2007

A couple of exciting new additions to Edublogs this week, the MyBlogLog widget and the ability to embed Slideshare in your posts.

To set up the MyBlogLog widget just cruise to ‘Sidebar Widgets’ under ‘Presentation’ and drag and drop.

To embed a Slideshare slide just copy it’s wordpress.com embed ID… replace with spaces the ‘id=’, ‘&doc=’ and delete the &w=425. More info on that here.

Update: You can now just copy and paste the code they provide for WordPress.com, i.e.

Thanks to Ring Of Blogs for the fix.

Not content with bringing you funky ways to upload and present your files, Edublogs now also allows you to share those files – be they course notes, worksheets, favourite songs or great big image files – using a very funky Box.net widget.

How does it work? Just go to your Presentation tab, click on Sidebar Widgets and drag and drop the Box.net file sharing widget into a sidebar.

Then click on the little configure icon (on the widget) and take it from there.

Couldn’t be easier huh… are we becoming your one stop online teaching and learning shop… or wot :)

Well, only because we have to ;)

Seriously though, the vast majority of Edubloggers are MS users and the vast majority of Word docs, presentations and spreadsheets are produced as .doc, .ppt or .xls files.

So, now when you upload or link to any of these documents to edublogs – your readers will, courtesy of ThinkFree Viewer, be able to simply view (as well as download) the file online in a rather neat fashion.

Update: This is now a plugin, so go turn it on :) 

One of the things we’re focusing on here at Edublogs is bringing you unique features & plugins which provide you and your students with an unrivalled blogging experience :)

So this week I’d like to introduce you to an old favourite of the plugin world and two new bunnies, the new ‘uns first:

Edublogs Only – This is a neat plugin that will immediately make your blog private to all but registered and logged in Edublogs users. That way you’re protected from pretty much any nasty outsiders and don’t have to stress about adding your colleagues as users of your blog – all they need is an Edublogs account!

DivShare Uploader -Fancy unlimited uploads, up to 200MB at a time, straight from your ‘Write’ screen… then turn this on and register with DivShare and you’ll be laughing. We provide 100MB of upload space for you free of charge already… but every little helps huh!

And we’d also like to welcome back Subscribe to Comments, an old favourite that was built in but will work better as an optional plugin. Basically it allows commentators on your site to tick a box and get updated of responses to their comments / other comments… amazingly useful!

So there you go, we hope you enjoy them :)

There are more in the pipeline too – but please feel free to make suggestions too!

If you’re new to edublogging, or are looking for some great resources to share with your colleagues then you’re going to love How to Edublog – Versions 1 / Version 2.

Heck, even old hands might learn something rather useful!