Month: February 2008

Here’s some pretty big news… Edublogs.org is now open only for teachers but also for students of all descriptions.

Previously we’ve hosted three other sites – uniblogs.org, learnerblogs.org and eslblogs.org for students but we decided a few weeks ago that this is both overly complex and limits what teachers can do with their students through their blog on Edublogs.org.

Uniblogs.org, Learnerblogs.org and Eslblogs.org will remain in operation indefinitely but we won’t be allowing new signups to them, from now on *everyone* can sign up here and simply select if they are a ‘Teacher’, ‘Student’ or ‘Other’ (librarian, researcher, administrator etc.)

You can change this ‘blog type’ at any time through your options and we’ll be adding more ‘types’ as we go along (best to start simple).

And here’s one of the immediate benefits of the new system… our brand spanking new, completely groovy, forum system!

All you have to do is visit Options > Forums and you can create a forum and add it anywhere on your blog by simply pasting in the ‘Page Code’ that you are provided with – for example (forum:4) – but with square brackets.

Then you can use it for class discussions, Q&A on anything you want and as a central hub for hosting conversations on whatever you like. You know, all the things that forums are good for :)

And of course, now all you students need to have is a username and/or blog on edublogs.org and their avatars will appear next to their contributions and link back to their blogs if the have them. Neat huh!

Here’s a handy 3 minute video that goes through the whole process of setting up a forum:

So we hope the new system makes life easier for everyone and we hope you enjoy the new forums functionality (please feel free to suggest any improvements too!)

NB: You can export blogs from uniblogs.org, learnerblogs.org and eslblogs.org to Edublogs.org if you want by creating new blogs at Edublogs.org and using the Manage > Import / Export features.

With not-so-heavy-heart Edublogs finally bids farewell to the ubiquitous Kubrick as our default theme today and welcomes in a mod of the brilliant 3 column Cutline based on the original by the brilliant Chris Pearson.

We originally figured we’d wait to see what new default WP came up with but sometimes, heck, you’ve just got to take these things into your own hands!

The new default theme has a nice customizable header, first level pages listings (if you make pages ‘sub-pages’ by giving them page parents they won’t appear), two widgetized sidebars (with one dedicated to telling you want to do with it) and a first post full of useful information and a quick video introducing you to the site.

An unfortunate by-product is that everyone with a default theme now has the new theme… however, never fear as you can just reselect Kubrick if you like as it’s now available as a regular old theme.

You can see an example of how a brand new blog will now look here.

Onwards and upwards as they say!

Phew, it’s been a busy few weeks here at casa Edublogs.

But all that toil has not gone in vain as we have a few new goodies for you that we think you’ll like.

First up there’s the Clustrmaps Widget… basically this little beauty makes it utterly simple to insert a Clustrmap into your sidebar, go give it a go, it’s a synch!

Then we’ve got a delightful new theme that goes by the name of Vertigo and is adapted from the excellent original WordPress theme designer supremo Brian Gardener. Just scroll down to the bottom of you theme area and you’ll find it there. Here’s an example of it being used rather beautifully indeed at Frank’s blog (who helped us with some tweaks, thanks Frank :).

And as if that wasn’t enough we’ve gone and make the backend of Edublogs seriously multilingual. You can now operate your Edublog in 34 different languages including, along with the regular ones, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Uzbek and Esperanto :) Just go to your options menu and select your language of choice.

Finally as we’ve had quite a few incidences of users RSS feeds being stolen and republished elsewhere without your permission, we’ve added a small copyright notice to the end of every feed… so if it is published, you should be able to track it down a whole heap easier and get the recognition you deserve (feed thieves usually remove the link from the header only).

This is a big development for us here at Edublogs, so if you’ll excuse a small fanfare (trumpets etc.) we give you Edublogs Supporter :)

As you know, Edublogs is free of charge and free of advertising, and we’ve been giving a great deal of thought to how we can continue to grow the site, buy more hardware and develop functionality and resources while keeping it exactly that way… and this is one of the ways we are going to do that.

As an Edublogs Supporter you get extra features (like brilliant Twitter and FeedBurner integration), extra storage, listing on the front page of Edublogs (we select 10 random Supporters every hour) and a warm feeling inside that you’re supporting the provision of free, advertising free, tools and resources for teachers, librarians, researchers and, of course, students the world over. All of the current features are listed here.

And we’re going to be adding many many more features too… in fact, if you can think of some which would persuade you to sign up as a supporter let us know about them in the comments below!

So we hope you’ll give it a go, if you sign up for a yearly Supporter account it’s only just over 6 cents a day (25 credits) and you can also sign up for one (5 credits) and three (10 credits) months if you’d just like to give it a try.

Oh, and we’ve also bumped up our standard space upgrade to 3 Gigs.

There’s more information here and we’d love to get your feedback and suggestions below or in the forums.

When we said user avatars were going to be important, we surely meant it and if you check out any one of you comment threads (which has had a few comments recently), we hope you can now see why.

Basically, now whenever you leave a comment on another Edublogs blog your user avatar will show up, and likewise, when another Edublogs user comments on your blog, their avatar will show up, linking back to their blog. Neato huh!

Now, a byproduct is that if the people leaving comments who aren’t signed in edublogs users get an anonymous avatar… but that’s easily remedied by them grabbing a free account (they can get ‘Just a username’ or a blog if they want) and uploading an avatar. It’ll take them less than a minute and it’ll also mean they won’t have to fill in all the forms next time they leave a comment.

So, head to your ‘My Profile’ or ‘Users’ tab, click on ‘Your Profile’ and get uploading straight away… you could even leave a comment below to show it off :)