Posts tagged wordpress
Blog Upgrade
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All the staff blogs for Weber School District have been upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. We were using version 2.6, and are now at version 2.9. You shouldn’t notice any change to how your blog actually looks, but the administration panel will look quite different. Don’t be too confused by it, though. The only real major difference is that the menu bar is now vertical instead of horizontal. There are also a few very useful widgets on the dashboard such as a “Quick Post” box, and the ability to customize how the dashboard looks. Note that if you have multiple blogs, they are now accessible from “My Blogs” under the Dashboard menu item. This upgrade fixes some problems with the Flash uploader, allows many newer themes to be added, adds support for nested comments, and a lot of other features.
The following is a brief instructional video by Justin McFarland about the changes.
Some new plugins have been added as well:
Admin Management Xtended
Enabling this plugin will alter your Dashboard, and provide some extra features that you may enjoy. You can more easily change page orders, manage categories, toggle post and link visibilities, and a lot of other changes. Try it out, and if you don’t like it, you can always deactivate it.
Advanced Spoiler
This plugin allows you to hide parts of your posts and pages, by placing them inside spoiler tags. The reader can click a “Show” link to display the hidden text. This is great if you want to save space on your blog, by providing a brief summary of your post at the beginning, then the full content in a hidden spoiler.
Google AJAX Translation
This plugin replaces the old Translate plugin, and provides a lot more languages a reader can translate your posts to. This plugin can translate on a post-by-post basis or a sitewide basis (use the widget for sitewide functionality), and can even translate comments, whereas the old plugin was a sitewide-or-nothing deal.
Quick Search
If your blog theme has a search box, this provides very nice real-time search results that goes beyond what WordPress offers natively. Search results are broken out into Posts, Pages, and Comments.
WP-Archives
This plugin allows you to create a nice, cleanly-formatted archives page. Just add <!–wp_archives–> anywhere on a blog page or post, and it’ll make a list of all your posts, organized by date. Click the “Archives” tab at the top of my blog for an example.
Snazzy Archives
Try Snazzy Archives if WP-Archives isn’t flashy enough for you. It’s another way to create an archive, but with a graphical twist. It has different layout options to organize your posts. There’s quite a few options available for it. Snazzy Archives seems to work better on blogs with wide pagespace.
Tweet Blender
This is a plugin that lets you enter specific users, hashtags, and more from Twitter, and display them as a real-time feed in a sidebar widget. You can see I’m currently using this under “Tweeting Educators” with the “#edchat” hashtag, which many educators on Twitter use to discuss educational topics.
WP-PageNavi
If you don’t like the “Newer Posts” and “Older Posts” link that appear at the bottom of the page, try activating this plugin. It provides numbered pagination boxes for easier navigation.
WordPress Hashcash
This is a good spam prevention plugin. In the near future, I’ll probably force it to be turned on for everyone’s blog. It basically requires that a commenter have Javascript capability in their browser. The vast majority of human web surfers in 2010 have Javascript-enabled browsers. However, spambots usually ignore Javascript, which means that spambot comments will be automatically flagged and pushed to the spam folder. This is quite different from normal spam prevention techniques, which typically read the message itself, look at IP addresses, user-agents, or other things to determine if a comment was written by a human or not.
Firestats
This plugin was actually added awhile ago, but I should note that this is now automatically turned on for everyone. It is available under the “Dashboard” menu item. You can turn it off, but I highly recommend you leave it on, because it is now used to calculate the “Visitors per Day” ranking on the WSD Blog Statistics page. This plugin helps you see who visits your blog, how many hits you get each day, the search terms people use to find it, other sites that are linking to your blog, and a lot of other helpful information. You may have been using the Slimstat plugin before. That has been removed and replaced by Firestats.
If you notice any problems with the new blogs or the plugins, please let me know. Also remember, if you find a theme you like and would like to see added, let me know about it as well. Make sure it is “widget-enabled” first, because we won’t add any that aren’t.
New Features: Weber Blog Statistics and Improved Search
2The blogs have been a fantastic tool for Weber School District. I didn’t expect such rapid growth and usage of them since we launched them in August 2007. If you’re a district employee and haven’t used your blog yet, I encourage you to do so. It’s a great way to share your important thoughts, keep in touch with staff, parents, and students, and receive feedback from them. Just go to this page and click the “Login to Your Blog!” button. Enter your Novell username and password and your blog will be automatically created. We are also offering E-volve training on how to use the blogs, so if you need further assistance, get your school administrator to enroll you in these specialized classes.
As with all Weber School District technologies, please use the blogs responsibly and keep their educational purpose in mind. We’re not concerned if you post some personal pictures of yourself and maybe even your family, so the students and parents can get to know you better. However, don’t use them to post religious content, or sell products for a business, and make sure you keep your language clean. Remember, elementary students have access to and may be reading your blog! If you wish to post class pictures or videos of students on your blog, PLEASE get parental waivers first and work with your school administration on proper procedures to follow through with this. Make sure you don’t at any time post both a student’s photo and name together. If you post a student’s photo, do not include a name. If you post a student’s name, do not include a photo. One or the other, not both.
On to the cool new features. Blog statistics are available for anyone to see! Our employees can see how their blogs rank compared to others. I hope this encourages more active blogging, and well-thought-out content on the posts. I wish to see the blogs transition from being “a place to upload my assignments” to “a place to have conversations with parents, staff, and students.” All statistics are updated daily. Here’s how they work:
Visitors per Day
This is the average number of daily visitors each blog receives, from data collected over the past 30 days. This is kind of a tricky thing to track, and due to the nature of standard web logging techniques, will only be about 98% accurate at best. This tracks unique IP addresses for a given day. So if you have a user who visits your blog from the same computer multiple times during the day, it will only be counted once. If another user hops on to that same computer and visits your blog that day, it will not be counted. If a single user uses two different computers to visit your blog during the day, it will be counted twice. This particular statistic does not omit bots that may come across your site, so all your visitors may not be human (usually just 2 or 3 of your daily visitors will be bots).
Posts per Month
This is the average number of posts each user makes a month, from data collected over the past 90 days. Keep in mind that all posts you make appear on the Latest Blog Posts page, so write relevant content that users will want to read.
Inside Comments
One of the most powerful features of a blog is the ability to leave comments on it. A great way to respond to feedback and encourage discussion is by responding to the people who leave comments on your own blog, and this statistic tracks that. It counts the total number of comments you’ve left on your own blog. The way this is tracked is by the email address which is entered when you leave a comment. Make sure you use your district email, so the blog statistics can recognize you. Also, this doesn’t count unapproved comments. Always make sure you check and approve appropriate comments that are left on your blog, if you are moderating them.
Outside Comments
These are the total number of comments that employees have left on others’ blogs inside the district. Blog-centered conversations would not be possible if it weren’t for people leaving comments on others’ blogs. For now, this statistic only counts employees (not yet students or parents); the reason being that we’re trying to encourage employees across the district to network with each other a little more, and the blogs are a good starting point for this. Again, make sure you use your district email when commenting, so the blog statistics can recognize you. This statistic also doesn’t count unapproved comments.
New Blog Search
Lastly, the Blog Search feature now does more than just return matching names. You can enter any keywords and it will scan the blog posts themselves and return a list of the most relevant results.
