The micro.blog photo challenge reminds me of my love of tags. When I started blogging using pivot a tag in my post linked to a technoratti page of posts with the same tag from around the world. We could combine that with Flickr and delicious even in the small ScotEduBlog world.
Year: 2017
@douglane #squares
The humble blogroll is long overdue for some updates in form and functionality on the open web.
Chris is rebooting the blogroll idea. I used to have one but it got lost when I moved from pivot to WordPress. We held on to the links in GlowBlogs. The idea of giving the blogroll more importance is attractive, but would bring a deal of maintenance with it.
It is always good to be reminded about OPML, I’ve found Chris’s indieWeb one useful as well as Aaron’s Feeds. I subscribe to both in inoreader, so when they add a feed I do too.
Is there a worry that the already depreciated Links Manager feature in WordPress will go away altogether? I think I recall discussing this with the developers working on Glow Blogs and the links technology in WordPress is old and doesn’t really fit with the way WordPress is developed now.
It seems like my site has lost the ability to receive webmentions since I moved it to my VPS. I wonder that the F is going on…
@MrHenko This is a test of webmentions.
Morning in the bin lane.
Good morning Banton
Reading & enjoying House Training my Phone. Is reading about distraction my distraction?
Not much to argue with here. Image CC-BY Dean Shareski
How to improve Glow Blogs?
I’ve been involved with Glow Blogs as product owner for a few years now 1. I think my main aim has been to avoid the stagnation that happened with the previous system and to keep the service as useful as possible for teachers and pupils 2.
So far we have I think managed that by keeping up with WordPress releases and adding features to improve various different aspects.
Since the rebooting of Glow in October 2014 there have been around 3 major releases of Glow Blogs every year. At the end of last session it was decided that these gradual improvements were going smoothly enough to drop back to one major release each year 3.
It was also decided to formalise the way we get ideas for improvements a little. To do this we are trying to gather suggestions in one place as opposed to the rather ad-hoc system that was in place before.
It seemed like a good idea to use the blog service itself to gather these ideas so a page has been added to the Help Blog for suggestions.
Anyone who is interested can suggest ideas and these will be triaged into the release for next summer.
This doesn’t mean that all suggestions will be taken forward. I’ve learnt my lesson a few times with suggestions of my own. Some ideas might be too expensive, some might be insecure or too difficult to implement in our setup. It was surprising how complicated adding features to Glow Blogs turned out to be. Glow Blogs is, I believe, the biggest WordPress set up in Europe so changes cannot be made lightly. On the other hand the service needs to met the needs of teachers & pupils in Scotland.
If you are a user of blogs I hope you will take a bit of time to think of how the service could be improved. Then it is just a case of filling in the form and we will take it from there. If you leave contact details with your suggestion I’ll certainly get back to you, possibly with some questions. We will also post the suggestions as they are made to the help blog to allow others to comment or express interest.
One more time, here is the link for suggestions. The cut for next years release will be at the end of November.
Featured Image: Image from page 196 of “Suggestions for handwork in school… | Flickr No known copyright restrictions.
Done.
