Two fully working plugins – and a call for more

Yes, definitely a good week. I’ve installed for your pleasure two new plugins which you can now turn on or off at your leisure. These are the ‘static front page‘ plugin (which allows you to create a page called ‘Home’ and for that to become the front page with blog posts appearing as a category… very useful for some projects) and a fully working Google Analytics plugin (the last one wasn’t doing the job).

So just go to your ‘Plugins’ menu and turn em on if you fancy.

And now a ‘call for plugins’… could you use the comments below to tell me what plugins you’d like to see installed at edublogs.org.

Unfortunately there are quite a few which don’t / won’t work using this architecture but with any luck there may well be some that do. Please provide a link to the plugin as well as the name :)

All latest posts

Well, that went so well that I’ve added a cute feature to homepage to celebrate (when you’re on a roll why not keep on going huh!)
Now you can visit Latest Posts at the top to get excerpts of all the latest posts in the edublogs.org community, it refreshes about every 15 mins or so.

Oh, and did I mention that you can also now log in from the front page.

And if you really really fancy it you can just subscribe to every edublogs.org post through this feed!

Upgrades-a-go-go

Well, it’s been a long time in coming but now it’s here with any luck we won’t have to roll it back… a major backend upgrade for edublogs.org.

This should fix a number of things including password protected posts, some commenting problems, category issues, uploading and dragging of files using browsers other than Mozilla and so on (although Safari still has troubles with the text editor… apparently that’s safari’s fault though).

So, how can you help… Well, leave a comment telling me how it’s worked for you, any bugs you’ve encountered and general feedback.

Coming soon: ‘Call for Plugins’, edublogs logo design competition and more (and better) customisable themes.

Update: Looks like it’s taking a little longer to auto-update than I expected… if you get a ‘need to update’ your database option just click through and you’ll be fine… if the posting area looks a little funny that’ll fix itself with a refresh or two. Thanks for yer patience :)

Supporting edublogs.org

 

It’s pretty much at the end of each month… when the bandwidth limits are drawing near… that the only downside of running edublogs.org kicks in.

Essentially we’re going to need a dedicated server very very soon as in the first place we’re running out of bandwidth / space and in the second I figure we’ll all be happier with better performance (especially around backups). The problem is, however, that it costs. And when you’re sustaining yourself of a lecturers salary with a new mortgage, well, you know how it can be.

But I’m fundamentally against putting any advertising on blogs. Down the line I’d like to leave that option up to you (i.e. advertise if you want to & for yourself) but I certainly don’t want to slap ads on any edublogs.

So, it’s going to have to be sponsorship & partnership. Here’s the deal…

  • Plain old simple advertising as a ‘supporter’ on edublogs.org
  • Inclusion (and write up) in the edublogs.org newsletter
  • Inclusion in the ‘backend’ of each blog (this can be done in a number of ways)
  • Partnership in offering edublogs.org users tools and services

And if you’d like or anyone can suggest other approaches / arrangements please leave a comment or contact me.

We can negotiate arrangements for 3, 6 & 12 months. If you’re interested or know anyone who might be interested please get in touch or let them know!

 

[Oh and for January so far we’re dealing in 32,665 uniques & 1,113,482 pages… and rapidly growing!!! Getting a 12 month agreement in now could be an enormous marketing bargain!!!]

Themes News

fauna themeTwo big bits of theme news today. The demise of the grey bar & editable themes!

First up I’m sorry, really really sorry, I was having a look at those little grey bars at the top of the themes today and they’re *so* bad. Utterly amateur. I do want us to have something on each blog that indicates that it’s an edublog (and advertises the service a bit) but that’s just naff. So as of today they’re history [well, as of me getting to a decent connection…]

Secondly I’d like to welcome the outstanding Fauna theme to edublogs. This is a biggie not just because it’s gorgeous but also because when you select it you’ll see pop up “Current Theme Options” which allows you to edit the ‘about’ section, select different headers and generally edit the theme to your liking.

As we develop I’m hoping to add more and more of these themes so that in the end there’ll be as wide a selection of themes as we currently have now… just with added flexibility!

Update: Upgraded to Beta 3 Thanx Ady :)

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