Category: blog

What’s the best possible thing you can add to three educational blogging tools… a fourth :) Please welcome eslblogs.org to the edublogs stable. Basically it’s free blogs for ESL and EFL (English language) students.

Read more details here.

An edublogs.org user that I’m particularly happy to have is my dad who today, asks a very simple question “How do I podcast”? Good question… unfortunately whoever he spoke to did not give him a good answer though so, drumroll, here’s how you podcast using edublogs.org:

1. Record and create an .mp3 file (Audacity is free and good for this)
2. Upload your mp3 using the ‘Upload’ tool in your posting window.
3. Drag and drop it to your posting window
4. Write some stuff and click ‘Publish’

Not that hard eh!

Now all anyone who wants to subscribe to your podcast needs to do is to subscribe to your URL, i.e. username.edublogs.org

Technical notes (feel free to ignore): WordPress automatically converts the .mp3 file into an enclosure in your RSS feed consequently meaning that if you’re subscribed to it using a podcast aggregator it will automatically download the full ..mp3 onto your hard drive / music device
[NB: At the moment there’s a 25MB limit on upload space so you’ll probably only be able to fit 5 or 6 podcasts there for the moment,however, if you use OurMedia.org you can set yourself up with infinite bandwidth and storage]

I’m delighted to announce that the next generation of edublogs.org, supported by The Chalkface Project, is officially launched today!

Firstly, the generous support of Chalkface means that edublogs.org (and associated sites) are now running on their own dedicated server. That means more bandwidth, more storage space, better performance and an all round superior edublogging experience. To celebrate I’ve increased every blogs upload space to 25MB (remember that you can make unlimited posts in addition to that.)

Second, not only are Chalkface supporting us financially but are also partnering with us to provide all edublog.org users with free access to their excellent online assessment tool, Yacapaca. Click on ‘Yacapaca’ in your menu bar to set up a free account and get playing!

And finally to celebrate the occasion I’ve installed a new design (one that shortly will be the subject of a logo / colour scheme competition!), please visit the edublogs.org homepage to check it out and let me know what you think / where it could improve.

So, with all that I’m kinda thinking that we’re pretty much out of beta now… so Monday, Feb 20th 2006 marks the beginning of edublogs 1.0 :)

We’re moving servers as we speak to a brand spanking new one… just for incsub :)

This is going to give us far better performance and vastly improved performance. In short it’s gonna rock. However… there might be a moment or two when your blog isn’t available or hard to get to… for that please accept our sincerest apologies and we promise that it’ll be up, running and better than ever very very soon.

If you do have problems please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or email me as I’ll be able to use your issues to test whether it’s all been done OK.

I’ve just popped in two new plugins for a trial, namely the WordPress Contact Form and the Google Adsense Deluxe.

The contact form is pretty nifty, all you have to do is to click on the icon in the text editing bar (it’s stuck on the bottom for some reason in the WSYWIG… will try to fix, works better with the alternative editor) and you’ll get a fully working contact form which’ll email you (once you’ve configured it).

The Adsense one is an interesting plugin as splogs or non-educational blogs created purely for profit get suspended pretty quickly round here! However, I have nothing against people using adsense and that’s a legitimate part of blogging if you ask me. This makes it nice and optional and I think I can also work something into it which will take a 5% cut for edublogs to cover hosting costs etc. (well, to cover the price of a Mars bar a month more like it but it’s the principle ;)

Anyway, as I said these are up for trial… I’ve tested them a fair bit but not with a big ol’ bunch of users… so let me know how they go.