Major PrimaryBlogger News

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Great news everyone!  After four years providing free blogs to Primary Schools, we are now allowing sign-ups from Secondary Schools, Academys, Colleges, and other Educational Institutes.

What does this mean? 

We’ve added academyblogger.co.uk, schoolblogs.org and secondaryblogger.co.uk to the options that are available when signing up for a new blog, which means academies and secondaries can now have a blog address that reflects their status.

Here’s an example

What are we trying to achieve?

This was a direct result of our users’ feedback and is part of a new committment to develop PrimaryBlogger as a service for all educational establishments.

Can I move my current blog to the new domains and can we have more than one?

At this time only new blogs can use the new domain names, and each blog is limited to one domain. You could however export your content, create a new blog and import your content again, creating a duplicated blog. Check out our guide on the matter.

Blog Address Availability

The new domains give you the opportunity to register a blog that may have already been taken under the primaryblogger.co.uk address, allowing a more memorable address to share with others.

Has anything changed?

No, nothing has changed. We have just added new domains completely free!

Use Your Own Web Address

Did you know you can use your own domain name to personalise your PrimaryBlogger experience even more? Once you’ve bought your domain name you can follow the instructions in Tools > Add a Domain. Want your own domain but don’t know how to get started? We can take care of it for you… Use our support site if you need any assistance.

Suggest A Web Address

We love to hear from our users. If you’ve got any domain name ideas that you think would benefit everyone who uses PrimaryBlogger, let us know.

What Does The Future Hold For PrimaryBlogger?

We’re looking to add more addresses to differentiate blogs thoughout education, we’ll update our blog each time we add a new address. We hope this makes people feel more comfortable and allows PrimaryBlogger to be accessible to every teacher, lecturer and educator.

One More Thing

You can now create a fully customised school website, directly in PrimaryBlogger for only £20 a month! Check out the PB Pro Themes area to check out 60+ customisable themes and counting. All PB Pro School Websites members get unlimited upload space, phone support, set up help and lots of special member only plugins. Judge that against your current website provider, how does it fair? Check out our features page and contact us for more information.

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Script to get an email when a new property in your area is registered on Gumtree

Posted on by John McLear

This script will send you an email when a new property in your area comes up on twitter.. Replace shoreditch with the area you want and add in some email addresses. You will also want to modify the price.. at current it’s set to a minimum price of £150 per week.

It was written to solve a problem where we would be out looking for flats/apartments and we needed to be one of the first people to respond. This script gave us the edge that meant we could secure a good property in the limited window of time we had.

You need to be familiar with NodeJS to use this. Execute it as a cron job or however you want.. It will store results to a database called db.db

The code was written by @pitapoison – He is an awesome developer, you should follow him. We literally made this over a cup of tea and a bowl of pasta, it took 15 minutes and saved many hours.

I think it’s interesting to see the approach we used to solving a housing problem, something that affects everyone yet so few will take the time to create a piece of software that gives them the edge.

var request = require("request");
var parser = require("xml2json");
var db = require("dirty")("db.db");
var nodemailer = require("nodemailer");
var transport = nodemailer.createTransport("Sendmail");

db.on('load', function() {
  request('http://www.gumtree.com/rssfeed/single-room-flatshare/shoreditch', function (err, response, body) {
    if(err){
      throw err;
    }
    
    var json = JSON.parse(parser.toJson(body));
    
    var items = json.rss.channel.item;
    
    items.forEach(function(item){
      try {
        var title = item.title;
        var price = /([0-9]+)pw$/.exec(title)[1];
        var content = item["content:encoded"].replace(/\&\#[0-9]+;/g," ");
        var link = item.link;
      
        if(price < 150){
          return;
        }
      
        if(db.get(link) === true){
          return;
        }
        
        db.set(link, true);
      
        var emails = ["person1@example.com", "person2@example.com"];
        
        emails.forEach(function(email){
          var mailOptions = {
              from: "gumtreebot@example.com",
              to: email,
              subject: "GUMTREE: " + title,
              text: link + "\n\n\n" + content
          }
                    
          transport.sendMail(mailOptions);
        });
      
      } catch(e){
        console.error(e.stack || e);
      }
    });
  });
});

Etherpad at the London Ajax User Group

Posted on by John McLear

On Tuesday, May 8, 2012, 6:00 PM at The Skills Matter eXchange Peter M from the Etherpad Foundation on Etherpad Lite

This is a must see event and only the second time Peter (The original author of Etherpad Lite) has given a public presentation about Etherpad Lite so attendees will be treated to some behind the scenes info and an insight to some of the amazing projects the foundation is involved with.

Register to attend now

Pep easing onto PrimaryWall

Posted on by John McLear

I just enabled Pep easing on the open source version of PrimaryWall. Easing is basically where the notes decellerate into place, making them have a much smoother move across the screen.

Using pep meant I can remove jquery UI which is a really overweight framework to include so hopefully page load will be faster too 🙂 Over the next few months I will be optimizing page load and including more bug monitoring and hopefully updating the PrimaryWall.com version.

Enjoy 🙂

Unable to reproduce TypeError: ‘undefined’ is not an object

Posted on by John McLear

Google Analytics shows that ~12% of our total users are affected by a Javascript bug of:

TypeError: 'undefined' is not an object

90% of the browsers are Safari 7534.48.3, 10% are Mozilla compatible agent. 75% of the errors come from iPhones, 23% from iPads. 1% from Macintosh, the other 2% is from iPod etc. None of the devices run Linux or Windows.

I have tried enabling debug mode in safari on both an iPhone and iPad but not able to reproduce the bug.

Here is a link to a page Google Analytics claims is showing the error. If anyone can consistently reproduce the error here I will be super happy because just a line number would be enough to get me started debugging.

Update: TypeError: ‘undefined’ is not an object (evaluating ‘safari.self.tab.canLoad’)

Managed to get that out of it once when clicking around, mostly on an iphone whilst clicking “Change country..”

Update: Solved this by making sure the element was available in the dom. Turns out the ajax call on success was trying to write to an element that wasn’t available.