Edublogs upgrade

Well, odds are you’ve noticed that Edublogs has just undergone a pretty radical upgrade – and that your admin area is looking a heap of a lot different!

In particular you’ll notice that the admin menu now goes down the side – rather than the top, and that everything has gone all drag ‘n drop pretty, but that’s not the all of it.

There’s also vastly improved uploading / media management, far better management tools for posts, pages, links, tags, categories and almost everything that can be managed!

And there are some plain excellent new features, like QuickPress – now featuring in your dashboard:

If you and your students need some assistance we’ve also been working like dogs to get the new Help & Support section up to date… it’s pretty much there but we’ll be adding new stuff to it as we go into the 2009 – 2010 academic year.

In particular you might like to share around our guide for Getting Started with Edublogs – it also comes with handy downloadable pdfs!

If you;re looking for someone to thank for them (or to complain about to if you hate them ;) the you’ll want to catch up with Sue Waters aka The Edublogger.

But that’s not all there is!

This year we’re going to be adding amazing new features, themes and plugins to Edublogs.org blogs and Edublogs Campus so now is the time to let us know of any extra features that you’d like to see.

As well as any bugs you might encounter with the new upgrade… but we’re hoping there are very few of them :)

Here’s to a great Edubloggin’ 2009 – 2010!

Batch Supporters – Save up to 80%!

We asked you how you thought Edublogs Supporter could be improved and you resoundingly said

“I’ve got 3, 5…. a class of 30 blogs and I want to make them all Supporters but it’s too expensive!”

Well, we heard you loud and clear, so we’ve introduced batch Supporter subscriptions, with some pretty stunning discounts!

You can find them under your ‘Supporter’ tab and we hope that they make it much more affordable for you to keep a whole batch of Edublogs for yourself or give an entire class or school Edublogs Supporter status for significantly less than Edublogs Campus would set you back.

So, what are the magic numbers… well:

5 Supporter blogs no longer cost you c.$200 – instead they are just $99.95 – that’s 50% off!

30 Supporter blogs won’t cost you c.$1200 – instead they are just $359.95 – that’s 70% off!

100 Supporter blogs won’t cost you c.$4000 – instead they are just $799.95 – that’s 80% off!

And of course, every Supporter blog can turn off ads on up to 30 otehr blogs – so if you wanted to get your school blogging, a 30 blog subscription could remove ads from 900 student blogs.

Stats!!!

If you’re in an observant mood you may have noticed the new Stats tab in your admin menu (just after Comments).

And, if you’re an Edublogs Supporter, then you might even have noticed that it’s collecting information about the number of visitors to your blog, where they are coming from, the most popular content and even the search engine terms people are finding you under!

And it’s not just doing that any old which way, you’re getting great interactive flash charts and archives stretching over the last week, month and year.

So, if you’re already a supporter tell us how you like it? Anything you’d like to see improved?

And if you’re not, well, sign up today for little more than a cup of coffee a month (actually, I had a more expensive coffee the other day ;) and as soon as you do we’ll start logging yer stats!

Audio and video comments

We’ve got a tangy new feature for you to kick off 2009 – Audio and Video comments powered by Riffly!

If you’re an Edublogs Supporter, just head on over to your Plugins tab to activate the plugin and enjoy the results.

And while you’re there, you might also note that Supporters have access to a whole range of new plugins too, including threaded comments and full Twitter integration… and there’s more to come.

So., why not try out the audio & video commenting facility below by telling us about some of the extra features you’d like us to make available for Supporters?

Or maybe just saying ‘hi’ :)

Edublogs and Supporter

A few weeks ago, Edublogs passed a pretty big milestone, the 250,000 blog mark.

We were and are absolutely delighted that so many teachers and students have been able to use the service for so many different reasons and we want to continue improving, expanding and developing the site so that we can see in 500K, 750K and so on!

And to do that we’ve been working feverishly to set up, configure, manage, and deploy hardware and a system which will allow this to happen – so that you and your students sites will be quick, reliable, safe and ever improving over the years to come.

But in doing so, of course, we had to revisit our business plan because planning on hosting a million+ blogs is a pretty costly endeavor!

Now, a lot of you may know about Edublogs Campus – our institutional and district-wide blogging platform used by clients ranging from Cornell University to the Department of Education in Victoria, Australia. Well, that’s one means that we support free blogs on Edublogs and that’s carrying on just as normal.

The other method has been via Edublogs Supporter, which has allowed teachers to subscribe to receive extra features and more storage.

Well, today we’re improving that.

As of now, Supporters will not only get the same features that they had before, but also massive amounts more storage (we’re increasing 0.5GB to 5GB… a 10 fold increase!), along with exclusive access to tools like the Blog & User Creator, existing plugins (and new ones to come) and other great features.

Also, occasionally, we have displayed ads on sites to assist with covering hosting costs. This is someting we’re going to have to increase on free blogs, but of course Supporter blogs will not have any third party advertising on them.

And more importantly, what we’re also now allowing supporters to do is *turn off* advertising on up to 30 different sites (a whole class of students) – as well as your own blog being turned off automatically.

There are a couple of catches, first up we’re having to increase the price of supporter to $39.95 per year (that’s still less than $4 per month!).

Also, as I mentioned previously, extra functionality (plugins, blogs & user creator and a few others) will only be available for supporter blogs, and there will be a reduction in storage for free blogs too.

Is this ideal? Well, in a utopian world we’d like to give everyone, everything, entirely for free and without any ads! But that’d be a utopia… so, barring that, we hope to still provide great free blogs alongside an absolutely premium supporter service that is more than worth the price of a large coffee per month.

We welcome your feedback, thoughts and requests for new Supporter features in the comments.

Also, if you are experiencing any issues with your supporter subscription or previous credits that you may have lost, please email us at support (at) edublogs /dot/ org and we’ll fix you up (there are always hiccups in a big move).

You can find a bit of a better write up about what Supporter offers here.

The University of Blogs

Welcome to the latest addition to the Edublogs family… The University of Blogs!

Can you study for a BA in blogging? Get a job lecturing on comments? Or hang out in the union bar overlooking the tag cloud?

No, of course you can’t :) Because it’s actually just a demo Edublogs Campus site… one that allows you browse through, edit and add to an example Campus blogging site to see how it could work at your institution.

Not that your institution has to be a university… it could equally be a primary school, education district, government department or community organization!

A couple of quick notes about the site…

  1. It contains some cutting-edge very new developmens for Campus that haven’t yet been added to many existing sites (but will be soon)
  2. The site is reset every hour on the hour, so nothing you add will be retained (it’s a sandpit site)
  3. If you’d rather skip browsing the front page etc. you can just log in and take a look at the good stuff here. (username: admin / password: pass)

So, we hope you enjoy playing around in the sandpit, and please feel free to get in touch with us to discuss getting your very own Edublogs Campus installation!

The University of Blogs

Here’s a quick video tour too:

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