Update: Applications for this position are now closed.

Edublogs is planning on taking a step up in 2010 and beyond, and to help us do that we’re after a special someone to lead the way when it comes to telling the world who we are.

We’re looking for a person who can write great copy – be it for our main site, blog posts, email newsletters, sales emails, tweets and more.

And, equally importantly, we’re looking for that person to be full of enthusiasm, drive and ideas for how to promote Edublogs around the web and into school districts, colleges and classrooms.

And to carry out those ideas to fruition!

Experience / Qualifications

To fit this role you’ll have to be able to demonstrate:

• Outstanding writing skills in pretty much every online medium
• Previous (impressive) experience in driving sales and awareness

You’ll also be happy to take a look at our site, http://edublogs.org, and tell us:

• One thing we’re missing (what do we need to add)
• One thing we can get rid of (what’s superfluous or annoying)
• One thing we can most improve (and, briefly, how)

You’ll also be happy to work from home, manage your time accordingly, be independent, able to take the lead and be seriously ambitious.

Conditions

We’re happy to offer the right person an attractive package complete with flexible holidays, performance bonuses and the opportunity to lead up this area of Edublogs down the track.

Apply

Update: Applications for this position are now closed.

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.

If you’re in an observant mood you may have noticed the new Stats tab in your admin menu (just after Comments).

And, if you’re an Edublogs Supporter, then you might even have noticed that it’s collecting information about the number of visitors to your blog, where they are coming from, the most popular content and even the search engine terms people are finding you under!

And it’s not just doing that any old which way, you’re getting great interactive flash charts and archives stretching over the last week, month and year.

So, if you’re already a supporter tell us how you like it? Anything you’d like to see improved?

And if you’re not, well, sign up today for little more than a cup of coffee a month (actually, I had a more expensive coffee the other day ;) and as soon as you do we’ll start logging yer stats!

We’ve got a tangy new feature for you to kick off 2009 – Audio and Video comments powered by Riffly!

If you’re an Edublogs Supporter, just head on over to your Plugins tab to activate the plugin and enjoy the results.

And while you’re there, you might also note that Supporters have access to a whole range of new plugins too, including threaded comments and full Twitter integration… and there’s more to come.

So., why not try out the audio & video commenting facility below by telling us about some of the extra features you’d like us to make available for Supporters?

Or maybe just saying ‘hi’ :)

A few weeks ago, Edublogs passed a pretty big milestone, the 250,000 blog mark.

We were and are absolutely delighted that so many teachers and students have been able to use the service for so many different reasons and we want to continue improving, expanding and developing the site so that we can see in 500K, 750K and so on!

And to do that we’ve been working feverishly to set up, configure, manage, and deploy hardware and a system which will allow this to happen – so that you and your students sites will be quick, reliable, safe and ever improving over the years to come.

But in doing so, of course, we had to revisit our business plan because planning on hosting a million+ blogs is a pretty costly endeavor!

Now, a lot of you may know about Edublogs Campus – our institutional and district-wide blogging platform used by clients ranging from Cornell University to the Department of Education in Victoria, Australia. Well, that’s one means that we support free blogs on Edublogs and that’s carrying on just as normal.

The other method has been via Edublogs Supporter, which has allowed teachers to subscribe to receive extra features and more storage.

Well, today we’re improving that.

As of now, Supporters will not only get the same features that they had before, but also massive amounts more storage (we’re increasing 0.5GB to 5GB… a 10 fold increase!), along with exclusive access to tools like the Blog & User Creator, existing plugins (and new ones to come) and other great features.

Also, occasionally, we have displayed ads on sites to assist with covering hosting costs. This is someting we’re going to have to increase on free blogs, but of course Supporter blogs will not have any third party advertising on them.

And more importantly, what we’re also now allowing supporters to do is *turn off* advertising on up to 30 different sites (a whole class of students) – as well as your own blog being turned off automatically.

There are a couple of catches, first up we’re having to increase the price of supporter to $39.95 per year (that’s still less than $4 per month!).

Also, as I mentioned previously, extra functionality (plugins, blogs & user creator and a few others) will only be available for supporter blogs, and there will be a reduction in storage for free blogs too.

Is this ideal? Well, in a utopian world we’d like to give everyone, everything, entirely for free and without any ads! But that’d be a utopia… so, barring that, we hope to still provide great free blogs alongside an absolutely premium supporter service that is more than worth the price of a large coffee per month.

We welcome your feedback, thoughts and requests for new Supporter features in the comments.

Also, if you are experiencing any issues with your supporter subscription or previous credits that you may have lost, please email us at support (at) edublogs /dot/ org and we’ll fix you up (there are always hiccups in a big move).

You can find a bit of a better write up about what Supporter offers here.