Let the domains begin!

Well, it’s been some time in coming, but we’re absolutely delighted to let you know that you can now map your own domain to your Edublogs blog… and it’s simple as pie!

All you have to do is to visit Upgrades > Domains and follow the information there:

You can choose to do two things – first up you can choose to buy a domain through us and we’ll configure it automatically for you.

Secondly you can choose to map an existing domain to your current blog – so, for example, if you own jamesblog.com – you can point it at your current blog by just changing the nameservers to ns7.edublogs.org and ns8.edublogs.org (you’ll get more information on that as you go through the process too).

And what’s more, you can even map subdomains! So, let’s say you work at Deakin University, you can get your tech people to set the A record on james.deakin.edu.au to 72.34.61.230 – and you’ll be away!

All you need to get started is to buy some credits via the Upgrades > Credits (it’s 25 a year for a domain and mapping or 15 for your own domain) and show off your shiny new blog domain (remember to add it to your email sig!)

The only think worth noting at the moment is that it will take 24 hours for the mapping to get put in place, so do it at a weekend if you want minimum disruption to service :)

Welcome to Edublogs 3.0

We’ve had a pretty busy weekend at the Edublogs ranch upgrading Edublogs to the new all singing, all dancing version of WordPress MultiUser and – while there are still a few tweaks in process – we’re more than delighted to confirm a complete upgrade and introduce you to our new admin look and some rather great new features!

New Colours! New Design!

Yep, the admin area has been redesigned from the ground up to make it easier to use, more pleasing to the eye and generally just better. You can even change the colors (just click on your username in teh top Right or on Users > Your Profile).

Finally a customizable dashboard

Simply rearrange your dashboard (what you see when our first log in) by clicking on the ‘Dashboard Widgets’ sub menu… you can add RSS feeds, blogs linking to your and we’ll be adding more as we go.

Oh my what a beautiful uploader

The new uploader is a thing of beauty, now you can simply upload multiple files, and create beautoful and simple galleries on the fly, check out this video for more:

Upgraded avatars

Scroll down to the bottom of Settings > Discussion and you’ll see a whole host of new avatar options for your comments. You can set users without avatar to look like mystery people, beautiful fractals or even monsters :) And what’s more, you now have the option to turn avatars off!

And that’s by no means all, but it’s all we’re going to put in this post for the moment.

For further explanation and exploration check out Sue Waters quick tour at The Edublogger and our brand new Video Tutorials.

So please, take time out to surf around your admin area for a bit and enjoy the new features and let us know what you think below.

And FYI, we’ll be upgrading Edublogs Campus sites during the summer break to cause as little disturbance as possible.

As ever, please post any support questions / unrelated stuff in the forums as it’ll just get deleted as a comment.

Three new themes makes…. 100

Edublogs now offers you and your students 100 themes!

The three new themes you get to play with are:

Chaotic Soul – It’s nice and dark with a split customizable header to appeal to our inner emo.

Greenery – Delightfully green, another one with a customizable header just waiting for you to wreck the colour scheme ;)

Sweet blossoms screenshot

Sweet Blossoms –  Apparently you guys wanted another pink theme, well.. here you go!

Other themes we have planned include some more ‘elementary’ themes for younger students, some magazine-esque themes to allow you to make your blog look like an online newspaper and some photoblogging themes.

So roll on 200!

Open Mic. – Using Edublogs with your students

Open micOK, since we recently started allowing student blogs on Edublogs it’s about time we heard from you exactly how you’d like to use blogs with them!

So, please use the comments below to let us know about creating blogs for your students, managing them once they’re going, aggregating them all into one place and also setting assignments, sharing materials and all that teachin’ stuff.

Also, are there any extra features that you’d like to see which would make using blogs with your students even more cool than it already is (or persuade you to start if you haven’t already done so.)

Please leave your ideas and thoughts in the comments below and we’ll respond with our thoughts too – and see about developing exactly what you want.

Also, take time to check out other peoples suggestions and comment on them too!

Edublogs gets a makeover

It’s not quite a brow-lift, nose-job, full set of Da Vinci crowns and a tummy-tuck… but we’re pretty happy with our new look nonetheless :)

And what’s more, your blog backend is going to get a makeover really really soon too (more details at the end of this post).

So here’s how we used to look:

Old Look Edublogs

And here’s how we look now:

New look Edublogs

We’re hoping that the new look demonstrates how far we’ve come as a company in the last year and also improves on your Edublogs experience. It’s a lot lighter on the load, contains some nice new useful links for logged in users, describes what we do much better, profiles The Edublogger better than before and shows off more Edublogs Supporters rather nicely too.

And of course, hopefully it also helps build awareness of Edublogs Campus too :)

As for your blogs, well we can’t confirm the date yet but most likely in the next few weeks we’ll be upgrading the site to the latest version of WordPress which means that your admin area is going to start looking a lot like the below:

New WordPress admin area

And it also means that you’re going to get a heap more of most excellent features, some of which are so cool it’s exciting just anticipating them :)

So we’ll let you know when that happens, and also (in case you’re worried) have a whole new set of video tutorials and other materials to help acquaint you and your students with the new admin layout.

Widgets, javascript, iframes and objects (and all that jazz)

After lengthy discussions and weighing up of the pros and cons we’ve decided to allow javascript, iframes and object code onto Edublogs.

This means that you can now just copy and paste pretty much most ’embedding’ code you can pick up around the web directly into your Edublog.

For posts and pages just click on the ‘Code’ tab and paste the code in there. For sidebar widgets just create as many Text Boxes as you need (under Presentation > Widgets) and copy and paste the code into them.

For example, say you wanted to play this classic game on your blog… simply go there, click on ‘Get Widget’, copy the code and paste it in your ‘Code tab and you’ll get something much like the below:

You can also use iframes to embed things like Calendars, put CoComment and Ligit in your sidebar or add live chat and extra Twitter options.

Why don’t you show us how you are using this new freedom!

Side note: As a result the Widgetbox, Box.net and Video Widgets will be replaced by this approach – so please recreate any widgets you currently have in Text Box form before we remove these widgets (next week).

Provide some details for your blog
No stress, you can always change this later on.
Use only lowercase letters (a-z) and numbers.
.edublogs.org

« Go back Register Account » Create a Site »