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” /]

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