Year: 2009

Christmas has come nice and early for Edublogs supporters, with two fabulous new features in your Supporter Tab.

Premium Support

Do you have a question about Edublogs, need personal help or would rather not use the forums?

Supporters can email us support requests using the form located in their Premium Support Tab, and we’ll get back to you as a matter of priority.

How freakin’ cool is that :)

Now supports just a click away!

Please Note:

1. Our reply is sent to email address shown in Settings > General.
2. We recommend you include an alternative email address in your support request if your email address has changed, or there is a chance your organization’s filters will block our emails!

Premium Themes

Supporters now have an extra menu item under Appearance, namely ‘Premium Themes’ (and you’ll also see it under your ‘Supporter’ menu).

Under this menu you’ll be able to see new gorgeous themes that are only available to Supporters.

Currently you have three new themes (WPMU-Dixi,  WPMU-Triden and WPMU-Nelo) — and more themes to be added in the new year!

These three themes are incredibly popular on Edublogs Campus sites.  They are massively, massively configurable and with each you can choose between using blog homepage or a custom homepage.

The custom homepage is very popular on Edublogs Campus sites for their school websites and main blog of the sites.

Here’s Dixi in action

As a blog homepage on my personal blog:

And Nelo doing it’s thang:

As a custom homepage on John H. Leichty Middle School campus site.

Please Note:

1. WPMU-Dixi,  WPMU-Triden and WPMU-Nelo all include nested comments — to enable go to Settings > Discussion
2. Don’t use the Threaded Comments plugin on these themes because it won’t work and isn’t needed because they include nested comments
3. For tips with using WPMU-Nelo check out Getting More From Your Homepage with WPMU-Nelo

Enjoy!

We’ve got some big plans for Edublogs.org for 2010 to make your experience better and improve our service and functionality.

So we’ve put together this really, really quick survey to help us find out how we can best help you.

And, to sweeten the deal, we’re giving away several Amazon Kindles to survey participants!

So please, take 60 seconds to complete the quick and easy survey, it’s designed to help us identify how we can best help you.

And as the usual response rate to surveys is about 5% there’s a great chance you could be a winner!

Here’s the link to the survey again (it’s also a great example of what you can achieve with Google Docs :)

Many thanks for opening this email and taking part in the survey – we can’t wait to implement your feedback to provide you with a much improved experience.

P.S. A whole heap of schools, districts and Universities are taking advantage of our 30 Day free trial of Edublogs Campus, get in touch with us any time to start yours!

We’re hoping the new school year is going well for all Edublogs users and we’re looking forward to providing you with some great blogging tools for the next year!

And we’d also like to say a huge thank you to all of you who have become Edublogs Supporters or looked at Edublogs Campus for your schools… you are the people that make Edublogs possible so give yourself a huge pat on the back!

But while you’re doing that, have a think about whether you’d like to take this whole Edublogs thing a bit further and come and work with us providing help and support for Edublogs.org and Edublogs Campus users!

That’s right, we’re looking for a help and support ninja.

Someone who can figure out how to make widgets dance, plugins gambol and posts and pages sing!

You’ll be working alongside the existing team, manning the forums, tweets and emails… and putting the EDU into blogging :)

There’s no specific experience required – except that you are an existing Edublogs or WordPress user – and naturally we have a preference for people with educational backgrounds.

What’s more, we’ll be looking at a flexible, hours-based, arrangement at first so that you can easily do this kinda thing alongside your current work… especially if you spend a lot of time in front of a computer already :)

We’re not saying that you moonlight per se…. oh, ok, we are… moonlight away!

So… if you’re interested, please contact us here (or by emailing support (at) edublogs [dot] org) and we can have a chat.

Let us know a little about yourself, point us to your Edublogs / WordPress experience and ask us any questions you might have.

About a year ago, we started selling domain names and the ability to use your own domain names on Edublogs blogs.

Well, after we did that for a while, we changed over to the Supporter model and that became tricky… but no longer, because we’ve decided to bundle free domain mapping in with Supporter, so that every single supporter can now use their own domain… at no extra charge!

How does it work? It’s really easy… let’s take Sue as an example:

So, Sue’s old personal blog had the very catchy URL of “aquaculturepda.edublogs.org” which was a bit off, seeing as it started life as ‘Mobile Technology in TAFE’ and then became ‘Sue Waters Blog’ ;)

So, we did the very simple thing of going out and purchasing suewaters.com (for less than $10), and then configured the A record by following our handy Using Your Own Domain guide.

Then we visited Tools > Domain Mapping, and simply entered the new domain there:

And that’s all there was to it… now you can catch Sue Waters at… suewaters.com!

As mentioned above, this is a new feature for Edublogs Supporters, at no extra cost, which we think is pretty darn cool.

Let us know any bugs / questions / comments / thoughts below :)

Well, odds are you’ve noticed that Edublogs has just undergone a pretty radical upgrade – and that your admin area is looking a heap of a lot different!

In particular you’ll notice that the admin menu now goes down the side – rather than the top, and that everything has gone all drag ‘n drop pretty, but that’s not the all of it.

There’s also vastly improved uploading / media management, far better management tools for posts, pages, links, tags, categories and almost everything that can be managed!

And there are some plain excellent new features, like QuickPress – now featuring in your dashboard:

If you and your students need some assistance we’ve also been working like dogs to get the new Help & Support section up to date… it’s pretty much there but we’ll be adding new stuff to it as we go into the 2009 – 2010 academic year.

In particular you might like to share around our guide for Getting Started with Edublogs – it also comes with handy downloadable pdfs!

If you;re looking for someone to thank for them (or to complain about to if you hate them ;) the you’ll want to catch up with Sue Waters aka The Edublogger.

But that’s not all there is!

This year we’re going to be adding amazing new features, themes and plugins to Edublogs.org blogs and Edublogs Campus so now is the time to let us know of any extra features that you’d like to see.

As well as any bugs you might encounter with the new upgrade… but we’re hoping there are very few of them :)

Here’s to a great Edubloggin’ 2009 – 2010!

We asked you how you thought Edublogs Supporter could be improved and you resoundingly said

“I’ve got 3, 5…. a class of 30 blogs and I want to make them all Supporters but it’s too expensive!”

Well, we heard you loud and clear, so we’ve introduced batch Supporter subscriptions, with some pretty stunning discounts!

You can find them under your ‘Supporter’ tab and we hope that they make it much more affordable for you to keep a whole batch of Edublogs for yourself or give an entire class or school Edublogs Supporter status for significantly less than Edublogs Campus would set you back.

So, what are the magic numbers… well:

5 Supporter blogs no longer cost you c.$200 – instead they are just $99.95 – that’s 50% off!

30 Supporter blogs won’t cost you c.$1200 – instead they are just $359.95 – that’s 70% off!

100 Supporter blogs won’t cost you c.$4000 – instead they are just $799.95 – that’s 80% off!

And of course, every Supporter blog can turn off ads on up to 30 otehr blogs – so if you wanted to get your school blogging, a 30 blog subscription could remove ads from 900 student blogs.