Update: Applications for this position are now closed.

Edublogs is planning on taking a step up in 2010 and beyond, and to help us do that we’re after a special someone to lead the way when it comes to telling the world who we are.

We’re looking for a person who can write great copy – be it for our main site, blog posts, email newsletters, sales emails, tweets and more.

And, equally importantly, we’re looking for that person to be full of enthusiasm, drive and ideas for how to promote Edublogs around the web and into school districts, colleges and classrooms.

And to carry out those ideas to fruition!

Experience / Qualifications

To fit this role you’ll have to be able to demonstrate:

• Outstanding writing skills in pretty much every online medium
• Previous (impressive) experience in driving sales and awareness

You’ll also be happy to take a look at our site, https://edublogs.org, and tell us:

• One thing we’re missing (what do we need to add)
• One thing we can get rid of (what’s superfluous or annoying)
• One thing we can most improve (and, briefly, how)

You’ll also be happy to work from home, manage your time accordingly, be independent, able to take the lead and be seriously ambitious.

Conditions

We’re happy to offer the right person an attractive package complete with flexible holidays, performance bonuses and the opportunity to lead up this area of Edublogs down the track.

Apply

Update: Applications for this position are now closed.

We’ve got some big plans for Edublogs.org for 2010 — including cool new features.

So to kick start the New Year we’ve just installed these new features on Edublogs!

Add New Users

This is a nice simple feature, but very powerful tool for creating and adding new users to your blog in batches of up to 15 users.

This is the fastest way to add students quickly to your class blog — if they don’t have a username.

Off course this means there’s now four tools that create usernames slightly differently so here’s a quick summary of their differences.

Limiting who see comments in dashboard

You told us you didn’t want students who are contributors or authors seeing unapproved or spam comments — to prevent younger students from seeing inappropriate comments.

So we’ve:

1. Removed the Recent Comments module from the dashboard of contributors and authors
2. Made it so they can only see approved comments on their comments page

Now they can’t see any comment until you’ve approved it!

Giving Contributors ability to upload media

You want to moderate all student posts by making them a contributor but that’s been annoying you because contributors can’t upload media such as images, videos….

Problem solved!

We’ve adjusted the role of contributors so they can now upload their own media and you can review their posts before publishing them!

My Blogs

Sick of the endless searching for your students dashboard on your My Blogs page?

We heard your pain….and transformed your one column into four!

Clicking That Pesky File URL

Been caught out by remembering to click on File URL before Insert into Post when you’ve been uploading audio, video etc files to your posts?

Yes it’s driven us crazy too so we’ve done a quick patch to solve the problem….now you don’t need to remember as it does it for you!

Free Trial Of Edublogs Campus

Heaps of schools, districts and Universities are taking advantage of our 30 Day free trial of Edublogs Campus, get in touch with us any time to start yours!

Christmas has come nice and early for Edublogs supporters, with two fabulous new features in your Supporter Tab.

Premium Support

Do you have a question about Edublogs, need personal help or would rather not use the forums?

Supporters can email us support requests using the form located in their Premium Support Tab, and we’ll get back to you as a matter of priority.

How freakin’ cool is that :)

Now supports just a click away!

Please Note:

1. Our reply is sent to email address shown in Settings > General.
2. We recommend you include an alternative email address in your support request if your email address has changed, or there is a chance your organization’s filters will block our emails!

Premium Themes

Supporters now have an extra menu item under Appearance, namely ‘Premium Themes’ (and you’ll also see it under your ‘Supporter’ menu).

Under this menu you’ll be able to see new gorgeous themes that are only available to Supporters.

Currently you have three new themes (WPMU-Dixi,  WPMU-Triden and WPMU-Nelo) — and more themes to be added in the new year!

These three themes are incredibly popular on Edublogs Campus sites.  They are massively, massively configurable and with each you can choose between using blog homepage or a custom homepage.

The custom homepage is very popular on Edublogs Campus sites for their school websites and main blog of the sites.

Here’s Dixi in action

As a blog homepage on my personal blog:

And Nelo doing it’s thang:

As a custom homepage on John H. Leichty Middle School campus site.

Please Note:

1. WPMU-Dixi,  WPMU-Triden and WPMU-Nelo all include nested comments — to enable go to Settings > Discussion
2. Don’t use the Threaded Comments plugin on these themes because it won’t work and isn’t needed because they include nested comments
3. For tips with using WPMU-Nelo check out Getting More From Your Homepage with WPMU-Nelo

Enjoy!

We’ve got some big plans for Edublogs.org for 2010 to make your experience better and improve our service and functionality.

So we’ve put together this really, really quick survey to help us find out how we can best help you.

And, to sweeten the deal, we’re giving away several Amazon Kindles to survey participants!

So please, take 60 seconds to complete the quick and easy survey, it’s designed to help us identify how we can best help you.

And as the usual response rate to surveys is about 5% there’s a great chance you could be a winner!

Here’s the link to the survey again (it’s also a great example of what you can achieve with Google Docs :)

Many thanks for opening this email and taking part in the survey – we can’t wait to implement your feedback to provide you with a much improved experience.

P.S. A whole heap of schools, districts and Universities are taking advantage of our 30 Day free trial of Edublogs Campus, get in touch with us any time to start yours!

We’re hoping the new school year is going well for all Edublogs users and we’re looking forward to providing you with some great blogging tools for the next year!

And we’d also like to say a huge thank you to all of you who have become Edublogs Supporters or looked at Edublogs Campus for your schools… you are the people that make Edublogs possible so give yourself a huge pat on the back!

But while you’re doing that, have a think about whether you’d like to take this whole Edublogs thing a bit further and come and work with us providing help and support for Edublogs.org and Edublogs Campus users!

That’s right, we’re looking for a help and support ninja.

Someone who can figure out how to make widgets dance, plugins gambol and posts and pages sing!

You’ll be working alongside the existing team, manning the forums, tweets and emails… and putting the EDU into blogging :)

There’s no specific experience required – except that you are an existing Edublogs or WordPress user – and naturally we have a preference for people with educational backgrounds.

What’s more, we’ll be looking at a flexible, hours-based, arrangement at first so that you can easily do this kinda thing alongside your current work… especially if you spend a lot of time in front of a computer already :)

We’re not saying that you moonlight per se…. oh, ok, we are… moonlight away!

So… if you’re interested, please contact us here (or by emailing support (at) edublogs [dot] org) and we can have a chat.

Let us know a little about yourself, point us to your Edublogs / WordPress experience and ask us any questions you might have.

About a year ago, we started selling domain names and the ability to use your own domain names on Edublogs blogs.

Well, after we did that for a while, we changed over to the Supporter model and that became tricky… but no longer, because we’ve decided to bundle free domain mapping in with Supporter, so that every single supporter can now use their own domain… at no extra charge!

How does it work? It’s really easy… let’s take Sue as an example:

So, Sue’s old personal blog had the very catchy URL of “aquaculturepda.edublogs.org” which was a bit off, seeing as it started life as ‘Mobile Technology in TAFE’ and then became ‘Sue Waters Blog’ ;)

So, we did the very simple thing of going out and purchasing suewaters.com (for less than $10), and then configured the A record by following our handy Using Your Own Domain guide.

Then we visited Tools > Domain Mapping, and simply entered the new domain there:

And that’s all there was to it… now you can catch Sue Waters at… suewaters.com!

As mentioned above, this is a new feature for Edublogs Supporters, at no extra cost, which we think is pretty darn cool.

Let us know any bugs / questions / comments / thoughts below :)