John McLearPrimary Blogger | John McLear

Classblogs

Admin Admin — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:29:54 +0000

Classblogs has been the hastag and general term we have used for school blogs for a long time. Recently a service has popped up “violating this name space” so I just wanted to let people know that this is the genuine ClassBlogs started by Tom. Enjoy

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WordPress.com Vs PrimaryBlogger Vs Self Hosted Vs Edublogs

Admin Admin — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 12:15:19 +0000

WordPress is the only CMS you should be considering if you are serious about a long term investment. I know Google fan boys will say how Google Sites is free and okay but when the key thing about Google products is that when you decide to leave you can’t take your content elsewhere, it’s closed source, it’s closed off. Google is Microsoft episode 2, we can debate this further but the fact is that if you use posterous, typepad or Google Sites you will be burned in the future.

Schools often ask me how they should be hosting their blogs, should they use wordpress.com, primaryblogger.co.uk or self hosted? I’m biased as I work on primaryblogger but I still feel like it’s worth answering the question.

Bad things about wordpress.com:
No Embed so no embedding primarywall, primarypad, wordle, voki etc. [Excludes youtube and vimeo]
No XMLRPC so no ability to use mobile apps such as classdroid.
You can’t use your own domain IE myschoolblog.com
You can’t heavily modify themes so changing the layout of your blog can be difficult.
No plugin uploads so you can’t access the millions of plugins available in the wordpress Codex.

Good things about wordpress.com:
No need to worry about growth, wordpress.com can handle millions of requests per second.
No need to worry about upgrades or updates.
Preview new versions of WordPress.
All of your data is backed up and protected for you.
Comes pre-loaded with a spam filter.

Bad things about PrimaryBlogger:
No ability to upload your own plugins, you have to put a request in via the community

Good things about PrimaryBlogger:
No need to worry about growth, PrimaryBlogger can handle millions of requests per second.
Can use your own domain name.
Comes pre-loaded with Edu-Focused plugins and themes
Has a community of edu-users
Each blog post gets manually read by a human
No need to worry about upgrades or updates.
All of your data is backed up and protected for you.
Comes pre-loaded with a spam filter.
PrimaryBlogger publishes all of it’s plugins and development open-source so the WordPress community can enjoy using them.

Bad things about self hosted:
You have to worry about scaling which can be a huge technical hurdle
You have to worry about upgrades and updates.
You have to worry about spam.

Good things about self hosted:
You have completely control about how to configure your blog.
Can use your own domain name.
You can integrate your blog with your own authentication mechanism.

Bad things about Edublogs free:
No ability to embed youtube video, animoto, vokis etc.
Your blog has a big edublogs advert on
Limited number of blogs per account
Limited access to themes
Very limited storage space
Dashboards can be unreliable
No stats
No Forum support
All of the plugins are kept closed source and sold through WPMUdev

Good things about Edublogs free:
Edublogs is a big community
You can pay more to get more features, storage etc.

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Primary Blogger upgrades

Admin Admin — Tue, 17 May 2011 02:41:00 +0000

The PrimaryBlogger upgrades have been successful, you should hopefully notice a speed improvement when logged into your blog’s dashboard.

Enjoy

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PrimaryBlogger updates

Admin Admin — Mon, 16 May 2011 21:44:04 +0000

We had scheduled some PrimaryBlogger maintenance time in tonight to update the file system and that meant that some admin pages would not be available. We didn’t expect a) it would take so long, b) it would be so disruptive, c) teachers would still be adding posts to their blogs at 22:30.. We have put it off till midnight when it will start again..

Apologies!

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How to embed PrimaryWall in PrimaryBlogger

Admin Admin — Tue, 10 May 2011 16:31:30 +0000

1. Login to your PrimaryWall pro account wall
2. Click Share
3. Select the embed code and right click, copy.
4. Goto PrimaryBlogger and login
5. Create a new post.
6. Click HTML [top right of edit box]
7. Right click in the edit box and click Paste.
8. Click Publish.

Note: Make sure your Security options are set correctly.
Note: You can adjust the width/height so it looks great in your blog. Below is an example:

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PrimaryBlogger stability

Admin Admin — Thu, 05 May 2011 18:42:59 +0000

Primaryblogger’s stability should now be 100%. The bug that we isolated was due to a rogue plugin and some compression being applied without our consent. Apologies for the slightly rough 24 hours. We have learned a lot while applying the required fix (rm stupidfilename.php) and we will be having some strong words with the developer.

We feel it’s important to stress that we host over 2000 school blogs on PrimaryBlogger and we have a lot of complex technology in place to ensure we can offer the service free of charge. PrimaryBlogger is far from being an “out of the box” or self hosted wordpress solution. Here is a video explaining a problem we had previously and a bit about the infrastrucure we have in place to deliver your blogs!

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Server Errors when trying to visit PrimaryBlogger blogs

Admin Admin — Wed, 04 May 2011 10:10:12 +0000

We are currently working on a problem with PrimaryBlogger where some blogs are not available. We hope to have this fixed within the next 30 minutes.

Apologies for any inconvenience!

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Moderating Blog posts and comments on PrimaryBlogger

Admin Admin — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 19:43:59 +0000

When it comes to being e-safe online without thwarting creativity PrimaryBlogger has your back.

Moderation of comments:
a) Spam filtering software detects unwanted spam.
b) Pupils cannot see unmoderated comments.
c) Teachers moderate comments.
d) Pupils can only see approved comments.

Moderation of posts:
a) Teachers can receive emails when a new draft is published by a pupil.
b) Teachers can select to moderate posts before a pupil publishes it to the internet.
c) All posts on PrimaryBlogger are checked by a human after being published

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How to achieve a free digital signage solution with WordPress

Admin Admin — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:43:18 +0000

I have written before about how WordPress can be used as a digital signage solution but never gone into much detail. I figured the prompt Charles gave me was enough to get me to publish something more verbose.. So here goes…

1. Create a wordpress blog.. I recommend schools use PrimaryBlogger (I’m massively biased) as it has all the plugins already available..

2. Next, goto plugins and activate Showtime Slideshow.

3. Create a new post, Paste in [showtime] to the body of the post

4. Click add an image, upload some images that you want to be visible on your home page slideshow. Click save all changes

5. Select a suitable theme, remove any widgets you don’t want.. [See Appearance] — I used “Strange little town” in the example.

6. Is your slideshow too fat/thin? You can change the settings in Media -> Showtime Slideshow

7. To bring in a sliding animated news feed goto plugins and enable Vertically scroll rss feed

8. Click widgets, drag the scroll rss feed widget over to your sidebar.

9. Enter the RSS feed of your choice.. If you don’t know any then maybe use the RSS feed from your blog or from the CBBC news feed or something..

Alright, that’s it.. Visit your blog, press f11 to go full screen and then go from there..

You will probably want to add more widgets and play around more with the objects available on the screen, you can do this by tinkering and having fun

Enjoy!

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PrimaryBlogger updates

Admin Admin — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 15:43:39 +0000

We updated PrimaryBlogger to WordPress 3.1.1 on the 9th of April, everything has gone to plan.

Enjoy the new features and access to new plugins! Please report any bugs on the community page.

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