A Quick Tour of Your New Edublogs Features!

As James says “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!”

And I thought you might like a quick overview of the main changes since I’ve been working hard to get the new Help & Support section up to date.

Your Dashboard

The main area of your dashboard is now made of handy configurable modules such as Right Now, Quick Press, Recent comments — read using your dashboard to learn more about the cool features of each module !

These modules can be moved by left mouse clicking on their title, dragging to the new location on your dashboard and then release your mouse button. You can also expand and collapse these dashboard modules by left mouse clicking on their title bar.

Image of moving a dashboard module

Your Navigation menu

Image of using menuYour navigation menu is now on the left side of your administration panel.

Each navigation item can be expanded or collapsed to view their sub menu by clicking on the arrow on the right hand side of the item.

Action Links

Your administration panels for managing features such as posts, pages, comments, and media now all use action links. Hovering your mouse over a title brings up the action links associated with that item and then clicking on the action takes you to the required screen.

For example, in the Edit Posts screen hovering your mouse over a title of a post brings up links for Edit, Quick Edit, Delete and View. Clicking on the action link Edit opens up the post allowing you to edit the post.

Image of action link

Uploading Media Files

Media such as images, video, audio and documents are still uploaded using the Add Media icons.

The main differences are:

  1. The Flash uploader is greatly improved (I’ve not experienced any problems or needed to use the browser uploader)
  2. There is no Insert/Edit Image button in your formatting toolbar. All actions of this button are now done completely using the Add an Image icon. For example, if you want to add an image by linking to an Image URL you now use the Add an Image icon. Image of linking to an Image URL
  3. Once you’ve uploaded a video, audio or document file make sure you click File URL before clicking Insert into Post otherwise the link to the location of your file won’t be inserted into your post. Image of inserting into post

Adding Widgets to Your Sidebar

Your Design navigation menu has been changed to Appearance and this is where features such as Themes and Widgets are now located.

For blogs with more than one sidebar, all sidebars are displayed on the right hand side of your Widget screen. Clicking a sidebar expands it to show all its current widgets. This feature means you can add widgets to all your sidebars at the same time.

Widgets are added to a sidebar by dragging the desired widget to the desired sidebar. When added the widget opens up; all you need to do is configured it and then click Save. Click on Remove to remove a widget from a sidebar.

Image of adding widget to sidebar

Accessing all your blogs

Image of locating blogGone is the tabs for all your blogs along the top of your administration panel or “All My blogs” link.

Instead you need to go your My Blogs screen via Dashboard > My Blogs and then click on the link to the desired blog dashboard.

Image of dashboard

FINAL THOUGHTS

As I said this was just a quick overview of the main changes.

For more details check out our guide for Getting Started with Edublogs which can be viewed online or downloaded as handy PDFs! — I’m working hard to get it all completed…please send chocolate to keep my energy sustained

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How to Create a Static Front Page For Your Blog

There are a few situations where bloggers don’t want their front page (‘Home’) to display their latest post and want a static page instead.

About Static Front Pages

Educators occasionally use a static home page to provide background information to parents or students about the purpose of the blog. Their Home page normally contains content that rarely changes and latest posts are viewed by clicking on the link to the Posts page.

As this is a common ‘how do you’ question in the Edublogs forum, which can be tricky, I’ve decided to write detailed instructions. Yes, I’ve used screenshots of the latest version of WordPress MU since Edublogs is upgrading soon. The method is the same regardless of version.

Please remember this isn’t necessarily your best option. Take the time to first learn more about:

  1. Differences Between Blog Pages and Posts
  2. Differences Between Tags and Categories

How To Create a Static Home Page

1. Go to Page > Add New

2. Give the page the title Home, write the content you want displayed on the front page of your blog and click then Publish.

3. Click Page > Add New again and create a new page titled Posts. You don’t need to add content to this page since this is the page that will display your latest posts.

4. Go to Settings > Reading

5. Change your settings to A Static page with Front page: Home and Post Page: Posts and then click Save Changes.

The front page of your blog should contains the content that your wrote for the Home page and your latest posts are viewed by clicking on the link to the Posts page.

However with some themes you end up with two Home links. This happens because many themes are hard coded to display “Home” link even when there are no other pages on the blog.

To remove the second Home link you just edit the Home page to make it a sub page of another page.

How Make Sub Pages

1. Go to Pages > Edit

2. Hover over Title Home to bring up action links and click on Edit

3. In the attribute module change the page from being a main page (parent) to be locating under another page (its parent page) and click Update Page. In the example below the home page is now located under the About page.

Tip: If you’re planning to delete the About page you would locate it under the post page.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Can you share a link to your blog If you use a static homepage so others see how you are using it? Can you also explain why you have chosen this approach as opposed to a front post page?

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Here Is A Method To Help Know How Often To Post To Your Blog

I’ve been asked quite a bit recently “How often should I post to my blog?”

Since blogging frequency is a topic that most bloggers struggle with at some stage I thought it’s time we talked about it. And to be honest the key to success is more about a blogging routine than frequency.

How Often Should You Post To Your Blog?

There’s no magic formula when it comes to blogging frequency. Each blog is different and you need to consider what works best for:

#1 Your time commitments

Writing blog posts take time. Sure posts can be quick but posts are just the finished product of the whole blogging process. Researching informations, reading other bloggers’ posts and writing comments are all important aspects of blogging.

Think realistically how much time per week you can commit to blogging.

#2 Your Readers

Your readers are no different from you. They have commitments; limited time for reading posts and mightn’t handle a lot of content per day.

While bloggers often use frequent posts to build subscriber numbers, it can have the opposite effect and alienate readers. There are very few edubloggers whose readers cope with multiple posts per day. Larry Ferlazzo’s Website of the Day and Richard Byrne’s Free Technology For Teachers are great exception due to their type of posts.

Posting several ‘in depth’ lengthy posts on the same day means your readers will probably only cope with the first post and you’ve just wasted the other posts. It’s always better to schedule these types of posts so they publish a few days apart.

Contrary to what many think most readers don’t normally notice decreased posting frequency, and most won’t unsubscribe to your blog for this reason. Good quality content keeps most readers happy. Poor content, with increased posting frequency, won’t!

#3 What you want to achieve

We all have our own reasons for blogging.

If you’re after high reader comment participation you’ll find increasing posting frequency decreases readers interaction. If subscriber numbers are more important; frequent posts may build readership faster.

Developing a Blogging Routine

As I said “the key isn’t frequency but having a blogging routine”.

Make a decision on how many posts per week or month works best for you and then plan your routine to fit this. Every blogger, including myself, goes through periods where they struggle blogging. A routine, combined with your posting frequency, sustains your blogging while also getting you through blogger’s block.

As a general guide -most readers of edubloggers are extremely happy with two good quality posts per week.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Would love to hear about your blogging routine so I could share your advice to other readers. Please leave a comment to tell us about:

  • How often do you blog? And what determines your frequency?
  • Do you publish your posts on specific days? And if so why?
  • What other advice would you give to new bloggers in terms of blogging frequency and routine?

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Introducing The Campus and Other Important News!

Lots has been happening the past few weeks (besides my USA trip) and I know all readers, not just Edublogs users, would like to hear!

Introducing The Campus

Firstly we now have a new blog, The Campus, so if you enjoy reading The Edublogger I’m sure you will enjoy this new blog!

The purpose of The Campus is to:

  1. Focus on blogging in an educational organizational context
  2. Help schools, colleges, districts and universities take an organizational approach to blogging.

Through my work I’m fortunate to interact with a diverse range of educational organizations globally. What I’ve found is schools, colleges, districts and universities that take strong role in supporting their programs are achieving great outcomes. This is leading to greater adoption of all web technologies (not just blogs) by educators and their learners with involvement in some really amazing projects.

I plan to share on The Campus what I’m learning from my work, while providing helpful tips, and hopefully encouraging others to share their advice on using blogs in institutions.

The Edublogger will continue to share tips, tricks, ideas and provide help to the educational blogging community on a wide range of technologies while my personal blog will continue talking about elearning, Web 2.0 and technology while helping others (with, off course, the occasional chocolate story 8-) ). For those interested in WordPress MU you will also find me blogging on WPMU.ORG.

Check out Welcome to The Campus for more information! You can subscribe with this RSS feed or by Email!

Sales Manager position available

Edublogs Campus is looking for a Sales Manager.

We’re keen to hire asap, so check out the position details here. Maybe it’s not for you but if you share it around and we employ some one you send us we will pay you a $250 finders fee!

Edublogs Campus & Edublogs Upgrade

All Edublogs Campus sites are being upgraded to WordPress MU 2.8.2 this week. Your blog dashboard will look different and some features work differently.

Support material for site admin users has been completed and is located here (scroll down to the version 2.8.1 section). I am currently in the process of organising Campus blog users support material which will be located on this page of Edublogs Help and Support site.

Edublogs will be upgraded to WordPress MU 2.8.2 within the next few weeks. Watch out for more information about the upgrade in your blog dashboard and your support material will be located here on the Edublogs Help and Support site.

I will provide an overview of the main differences between the current version of WordPress MU and 2.8.2 in a blog post on The Edublogger, with a link to the user support material, once the upgrade has occurred.

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