Widgets, themes, languages and more!

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).

Introducing Edublogs Supporter

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 :)

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.

The rise of the avatars!

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.

Comments with avatarsBasically, 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 :)

New Edublogs publications

So, we thought that it was about time that we had some decent publications dedicated to all you wonderful edubloggers out there, and with that in mind we’re completely proud to introduce two very special Edublogs publications edited by two very special bloggers.

First up we have The Edublogger, edited by the multi-Edublog Award nominee Sue Waters.

The Edublogger

To put it simply, The Edublogger is a damn good resource for anyone with an edublog, thinking of getting and edublog or just wanting to know how cool having an edublog can be.

So far Sue’s got a heap of articles up ranging from getting more out of widgets, to getting yourself a blog makeover and adding photos to your sidebar. We strongly recommend you subscribe asap!

And as if that wasn’t enough, today we’re also launching our first foray into some seriousl publishing, The Edublogs Magazine, edited by none other than uber-blogger Lorelle VanFossen.

the edublogs magazine

The Magazine aims to provide for all your news, views, ideas, information and general edublogging and educational technology needs, and in our first issue you’ll find articles on what’s up around edublogs, how edubloggers have fared in recent major blog awards and, of course, our welcome post where you can let us know what you think of the venture.

We’re also aiming to make it a genuine collaborative publication by edubloggers everywhere (not only on Edublogs) and we want you to contribute, so please let us know if you’d like to take part.

So, what a great way to get the year started :) I can’t tell you how excited we are to have Sue and Lorelle in these roles at Edublogs and can’t wait to see how these develop and progress over 2008!

Blog Avatars and User Avatars

As an edublogs user you now have two avatars, one for your blog and one for your username.

Your ‘blog avatar’ will appear where your blog is listed, for example in the most popular blogs lists on the front page. You can set this in Options > Blog Avatar.

blog avatar

Your ‘user avatar’ will appear where your username is listed, for example in the forums or when you leave a comment on another Edublog. You can set this in Users > Your Avatar.

your avatar

Of course, you can use the same avatar for both, but you have to upload it to both areas.

We’re implementing this as we’re going to be adding avatars to comments soon and have already integrated them with the forums (you no longer need to sign up for a separate account their either!) The ‘user avatar’ will link to your ‘primary blog’ as set in ‘My Profile’.

at the forums

Happy cropping :)

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