Year: 2007

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” /]

We’ve been thinking for some time that Edublogs needs to be a little more like MySpace… Heh, well, not really… but there are some great features that MySpace offers, one of them being the ubiquitous music player.

So, on Edublogs you can now pimp, play and generally share your favourite music with the world. Just go to Presentation > Sidebar Widgets and select the ‘Sonific Songspot’.

… play on!

We just can’t tell you how sorry we are for the slow loading times, errors and downtime over the last week.

Essentially what happened was that the growth of edublogs meant that we were getting drive errors on our servers, so we had to upgrade to SSCI disks (which allow for far more accesses) and purchase more servers to cope with the load… this was far more complex than we initially imagined and thus the difficulties over the week.

That’s just an explanation though as there aren’t really any excuses – you are entrusting us to look after your blogs and we should be able to provide you with fast and functional service. We can’t apologise enough for the inconvenience.

To make sure this doesn’t happen again we are investing in the highest specification servers available and hiring the best data technicians we can get to make sure every future maintenance goes as smoothly as is humanly possible.

We are always backing up all your data but we want to bring you far better speeds, we’re also going to be ramping up our upgrade schedule and providing you with a great deal of new features, themes, plugins and widgets over the coming weeks and months.

Can I personally thank everyone for the enormous amount of patience they have shown during this time, and assure you that we will do absolutely everything that we can to make up for the last week and repay your trust in us.

If you do have any continuing issues please don’t hesitate to post them in the forums (you need to register separately there) or email us directly at support /at/ edublogs dot/ org.

James

Just a quickie this week, because it’s going to be built into a whole new support structure very very soon, but check it out… we has videos.

Not quite I can has… but we’re working on it :)

This week we’ve been mostly working on getting our K-12 Edublogs site, hosted at http://learnerblogs.org up and running on the same database structure as our teacher version – which you’re enjoying now!

And so far so good, we know that sites hosted at learnerblogs.org have been unacceptably slow of late – partly do to a huge surge in popularity and partly to us focusing a bit too much on edublogs.org – but from now on that should be a thing of the past.

And just for fun we’ve also introduced another layer of comment spam protection – so now your school students can blog quickly and even more safely too.

If you care to wander past your ‘Presentation’ tab you’ll find four rather marvellous new themes, even if we do say so ourselves.

Terra Firma is an exquisite balance of boxes and beauty, Citrus Island will take you to the heights of web2.0 minimalist orange fashion, Reaching Darkness is one of the most well-put-together darker themes that we’ve seen in a while and – my personal favourite – would have to be ASCII2 (pictured) if only because it’s so wonderfully darn retro.

In fact we almost installed Commodore 64 styled themes and more – but decided not to as that might be a touch too geeky… however, we could be wrong, and there could also be plenty of other themes which edubloggers would like to see, so why don’t you let us know.

What WordPress themes would you like to have on Edublogs?