Support, documentation and tutorials for the university blogs
//With the recent upgrade to WordPress version 3.0, you will now find a Help button in the top right corner of any screen in the WordPress admin area. If you click on the Help button, it will display helpful information about the screen you are on. So, for example, if you’re in the Posts -> Add New screen, click on the Help button and you’ll see this.
//A recent upgrade to WordPress introduced oEmbed, a new and easier way to embed video and some other media in your blog post.Whereas before, You needed to either copy the raw HTML embed code and paste it in the WordPress HTML editor, or activate Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin, you can now simply copy and paste the URL of the video you wish to embed.
It only works for services that support oEmbed, but the number of those services is growing. Today, the following services will allow you to use the oEmbed method of embedding a video:
To embed media using one of these services, the tutorial is simple:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFsCFUCzwf0
//Over 100 new themes have been added for you to choose from. There’s quite a variety of styles and colours, from simple to crazy, from black to pink to white. As always, if you don’t find a theme that you like, you can browse through over 1000 themes on wordpress.org and let us know which ones you’d like to see installed. To preview and choose a theme that’s already installed, just go to the Appearance menu and click on Themes. You can browse through several pages of themes and preview each one by clicking on the thumbnails.
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As you may know, all University of Lincoln blogs, whose owners set them to be publicly searchable, are archived in the Community Posts site. One way of getting updates whenever someone updates their blog is by subscribing to the Community Posts RSS feed. However, some people prefer to get their updates via their social networks, so with the help of the University of Lincoln blogs robot, you can now subscribe to updates on Twitter and FriendFeed. Both of these social networks provide ways for you to receive updates, such as via email, RSS, SMS or Instant Messaging. Follow the robot and stay updated with what people are blogging about on blogs.lincoln
//Prologue, the WordPress theme which transforms a blog into a hub of discussion, has been updated and is now called P2. Here’s a video which explains how it can be used for realtime conversation. Use it for project members to stay in touch, for students to discuss their course or as your department’s noticeboard. As always, your site can be private, public or anywhere in between.
//Did you know that every time you write a blog post, it’s also archived on a ‘Community Posts‘ site? If the privacy settings for your blog allow it to be searched by Google and other search engines (look under the Settings-Privacy menu), your writing is automatically collected on the Community posts site so that people can more easily find your work.
You can browse by tag, category and date as well as search across every post. In addition, each search, tag, combination of tags and each category has an RSS feed which you can subscribe to and get updates whenever there’s a new posts relating to your chosen topic.
For example, if you click on the ‘RefWorks‘ tag, you’ll be shown all posts tagged with ‘RefWorks’. You’ll also be shown an ‘Extra Feeds’ link on the right-hand sidebar with the RSS feed for that tag. Likewise, if you search for ‘blackboard‘ you’ll see every post that includes the word ‘blackboard’ as well as being shown the ‘Extra Feeds’ link to the RSS feed of the search. This way, by using RSS, you’ll get updates whenever anyone mentions ‘blackboard’ in their blog posts.
//You can make your blog more easily viewable on a mobile device by activating two plugins. The process is simple:
//Your blog runs on the ‘open source‘ WordPress blogging platform. A new university blog has many features already built in such as tagging, password protection, revision history, auto-saving, the ability to add additional users and commenting. However, one of the most appealing things about WordPress is the large community of people creating plugins which extend the default functionality. Your blog has a number of plugins available that might be useful to you. Feel free to use them if you think they might be helpful.
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Staff in the Research Office are using Del.icio.us, the popular social bookmarking site, to provide up-to-date and well annotated information to researchers.
In their own words:
“Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website which allows you to store interesting and informative links and share them with others. The Research Office’s del.icio.us profile acts as a database of relevant research funding news and opportunities for staff.”
Social Bookmarking is simply a way to store your bookmarks or ‘favourites’ on the web, rather than on one computer so you’re able to access them at home, at work, on your laptop, mobile phone and any other device that has Internet access. They are ‘social’ because, unless marked as private, your bookmarks are publicly visible.
However, without two other relatively recent developments on the web, the benefits of sites like Delicious would end there. What makes your bookmarks truly ‘social’ is the use of ‘tagging‘ and ‘feeds‘.
When bookmarking a web page on Delicious, you are able to include one or more tags, (think ‘labels’ or ‘keywords’), which allow you to loosely categorise your bookmarks so that over time, you build up sub-collections of bookmarks. For example, the Research Office have tagged some of their bookmarks with ‘funding‘ and others with ‘Europe‘ (click on the links to see what I mean). So if you’re interested in funding-related resources, you can quickly identify them among the 500+ bookmarks that the Research Office have compiled. Even better, if you are interested in European funding, you can narrow it down further by clicking on ‘funding’ and then on ‘Europe’, isolating their bookmarks which include both ‘funding’ and ‘Europe’ tags.
Finally, you probably don’t want to be periodically checking the Research Office’s bookmarks to look for updates, but would rather that the updates are immediately ‘fed’ to you. This is easily done by subscribing to a news feed, either for the Research Office’s entire collection of bookmarks or subscribing to one or more combination of tags. For example, here’s the feed for bookmarks that are tagged with both ‘funding’ and ‘Europe’.
Depending on your web browser, there are different ways that you can view a feed. Most browsers have their own ‘feed reader‘ built in. However, they suffer the same limitation mentioned above in that they are saved to a single browser and so your feeds are not available from another computer. To overcome this, you can use an online feed reader such as Google Reader, where you can easily manage hundred of different feeds. By doing this, your feeds are accessible from any web browser and are updated every few minutes so that you no longer need to visit the originating web sites because the content is fed to you.
I subscribe to over 100 individual website feeds, far more than I would have the time or inclination to visit otherwise. I can quickly scan the updated feeds in my feed reader and if anything of significant interest appears, I can read either a summary or the full content. Most websites now provide one or more feeds for their content. For example, the BBC offer feeds for each of their website sections as do the Independent newspaper. Generally, if you click on a website’s feed icon, you’ll be taken directly to the news feed.
The use of feeds is a powerful way of aggregating information from the web. To learn more about feeds and how to use them, read this overview by Google. You can monitor the use of your own Learning Lab blog feed (who is reading it, how many times, etc.) by setting up a free account with Feed Burner and activating the Feed Burner plugin.
//When you use Facebook, Twitter or most other social networking site, you’re given the opportunity to upload an Avatar (personal image) to associate with your profile. Whenever you post something to the site, your avatar is displayed next to your contribution. You can use any image, so if you’d rather not use a picture of yourself, you don’t have to. In fact, it’s very common not to use an image of yourself.
The university blogs support the use of Avatars. You can upload your own avatar by editing your profile page, under ‘My Account’. You can also set up how your blog displays avatars by going to the Settings menu, click on Discussion and at the bottom of the page, select Show Avatar and then select your Default Avatar. You’ll notice that you have a choice of using Gravatars, Wavatars, Identicons or MonsterIDs.
Gravatars are Globally Recognised Avatars. It’s a service which allows you to upload an image and any site you use that supports Gravatars, can use that image. This saves you from having to manage your avatar separately on each site. If you don’t want to use a Gravatar, you can select the Wavatar, Identicon or MonsterID options. These are cool ways to convert an email or Internet address into a unique image.
See the comments on this page for an example of a Gravatar and a MonsterID. Using avatars is a simple way of building a sense of community around your blog, bringing discussions to life.