Month: July 2007

Pretty special edublogging day today as not only is it our second birthday, but it’s also the release of edublogs 2.0!

That’s right, 2.0 in the social, logo, look ‘n feel and general evolutionary sense.

Not only do we have a new look, but you can also catch the hottest blogs of the last hour, a massive tag cloud of all things edubloggy (here’s how you get your posts in it), featured edublogs, search and a whole lot more.

And we’ve even made a video… to help you persuade all your colleagues that joining edublogs is most definitely the right thing for them to be doing in the 2007 – 2008 school year!

So, we hope you enjoy the new look and feel, there’s going to be a *heck* of a lot more cool stuff coming this year and as ever… happy edublogging :)

We love out widgets here at edublogs, we surely do, and there’s nothing so much that brings a smile to our faces than some swinging sidebar shenanigans!

And, given that, I’m delighted to officially unveil out Twitter and VodPod widgets:

As ever, just click through to ‘Presentation’ > ‘Widgets’ and you’ll be able to select these two which allow you add your latest, ahem, ‘tweets’ to your sidebar and all your fave VodPod videos.

We’re going to be launching a rather cool new look for edublogs pretty soon to complement our new hardware and functionality.

And as a part of this we’d like to display some testimonials… and not just ones we’ve made up :D

So, if you have a few minutes could you email us (support (at) edublogs [dot] org) or leave a comment below with your thoughts on Edublogs.

What’d be even better (although don’t feel obliged to do so) would be if you could include your name, your location, your institution and your blog URL… could get you lots of nice traffic off the homepage too!

And we’ll be eternally grateful!

It’s been an exciting week at the Edublogs ranch as not only have we had more new blogs created in the last week than ever before, but we’ve also revolutionized your Presentation area.

Yep, you heard us, we’ve added 20 new themes and you’ll find that many of them (and several of your old favourites) now have completely customisable headers too.

So just sidle along to your ‘Presentation’ area – select a theme like ‘Cutline’ (pictured below) and click on ‘Custom Image Header’ – we think you’re going to like it.

 

The more discerning of you may have noticed that there’s something a little different about your Edublog backend as of today.

In particular I suspect you’ll rather like what you see when you visit your Presentation tab (uploadable, ahem, croppable, headers anyone… 20 new themes, perhaps?)

Or check out the multi-blog management drop-down menu that your blog name (in the admin area) has become.

Then, you might enjoy the extra helpful links in your Dashboard… and notice that the site is swanning along at quite a nifty pace.

And, while you’re at – upload an Avatar… you’ll be happy you did (and there’s even a widget to pop it in your sidebar).

More information (and funky functionality) coming very soon… told you we’d make this worth your while, didn’t we!

Ian Hancock asked a good question in the forums today about embedding Voicethreads into an edublogs post.

The problem being that when you copy and paste ’embed’ or ‘object’ code into your blog it disappears (it’s a security thing).

But never fear, there’s a really simple workaround… all you have to do is grab the link to the actual thread out of the code, make a note of the height and width of the object (you can manually make it smaller too to fit narrower blogs) click on the F button in your ‘Write Post’ area and take it from there.

In fact, you can do this for any flash object :)

So, for Ian’s podcast we have the code:

From which we take: http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=3088

We click on and paste the link in (only the link, mind). Here we’re also going to make it a little smaller so we insert 600 width and 400 height and…

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=3088″ width=”600″ height=”400″ wmode=”transparent” /]