After messing around with pivot’s moblog settings for a while I eventually gave up. I know it worked in the past so I think I’ve probably just messed the config files about so badly that I’ll need to up load another one.

I decided to try another tack. I set up a flickr account for the school/phone and an email address to post photos to flickr.

Flickr is blocked by websense in Glasgow schools, so I used the Flickr API and phpFlickr to pull the photos from Flickr: Photos from sandaigprimary and download them to the sandaig site. The photos are then shown of a web page: Sandaig MoBlog. The page is pretty crude at the moment but I think I can add some features as we go along( pagination, sorting by tag, maybe HaloScan commenting ).

A couple of children in my class posted a photo today and managed to add a description pretty quickly, unfortunately I had not set permissions on the server correctly and we go a page full of very odd characters. I think I’ve fixed it now that I am home and will try a relaunch of moblogging next week.

I had put my own sim card in the phone but it looks like my virgin payg account is not the cheapest way to send email. I talked to someone in the T-Mobile shop and bough a payg sim from them. According to the salesperson, data cost so much per kb but it is capped at £1 a day. I though this would work out well as we will mostly use the phone on school trips and should be able to fire off a bunch of photos for a pound a trip.

I also asked about emailing from abroad, but this seems a lot more expensive, I wonder if I could buy a sim card in holland to fire off photos for the week we were there, if anyone knows anything about mobile provides in Holland please let me know.

Ewan sent me an early heads up about ScotEdupedia

ScotEdupedia offers everyone the opportunity to share their knowledge and expertise by adding to an existing article or creating a new article on an aspect of Scottish education.

LTS have taken the unusual step of providing an empty shell for users to fill up.

The wiki looks pretty sweet: friendly and approachable, hopefully it will fill up steadily.

Just testing a wee snippet I’ve made for the blog that should let children publish video with less intervention from me.

It is still a bit convoluted:

Upload a jpg with the image tool.

Upload a flv file with the same name as an enclosure.

Change:

[[download:butterfly:icon::]]

to:

[[flashvideo:butterfly.flv:320:240]]

Where the size of the video is 320 by 240 pixels.

Given the infrequency of video being published I don’t know if the children would use this independently, but it will at least save me having to open up an old post, copy out the html to embed the flash swf, image and flash video file for any video posts.

Absolutely nothing:

Ewan would be proud of me (as long as he did not notice the disorganised folders in mail.app ), I often have hundreds of messages in my inbox, I am not quite at the GTD stage but it is a start.

And This:

I might even get a nice desktop picture now I can see the desktop.

One of the things I like about blogging is how posts disappear into the archive to be forgotten.
One of the things I hate about blogging is how posts disappear into the archive to be forgotten.
I thought I might spend some holiday time trawling through my archives and pulling out some posts,:

1. January: I mostly pointed to interesting stuff, started blogging with appleScript and made the suggestion for folk to comment my class I’ll comment yours for the first of many times.
2. February: I discovered cocomment, went to holland for a couple of days to podcast with the De Rank children, started thinking about communicate06 with a nice example of blogging and played with flash.
3. March: I went to communicate06 and the MasterClass New Technologies Course/
4. April: I posted a brief how to podcast overview, played with google maps and tested a few things.
5. May: The first Scots Edu Bloggers meetup, more google maps, the children told me what they though about podcasting and I just like the photo with this post.
6. June: started thinking about video blogging pointed to andy’s blogging course and though about commenting again.

I realise this post (or the second part) is not much use to other folk, but I found it quite useful to have an overview of what I’ve been doing, I’d recommend it as an interesting exercise.

After Andrew’s comment yesterday I’ve been trying to collect all the rss feeds from the scotedublogs.

I uploaded a first effort:  scotedublog.opml.

I got the links by downloading an export of the wiki. I then extracted all the links for the html, downloaded the files and checked for an rss link. I used that to build an opml file, mostly automated with SuperCard, I guess it would have been faster with perl if I knew any perl. I did a little bit of hand weeding to remove broken stuff and make the opml file validate. The screenshot is of the opml feed imported into flock.

I’ve got a couple of ideas for the blogs here that are nearly ready but both need me to commit to a particular technology, so this is a cry for advice.
1. Now we have access to a suite of pcs I want to trial individual blogs for my class. I want to host the blog here rather than on external sites for ‘control freak’ reasons. The Sandaig blogs run with pivot, but I’ve been thinking about wordpress mu or lyceum which is a multi-blog derivative of WordPress. (test install) I’ve also tested Nucleus CMS v3.23 and tried out a few more systems over at OpenSourceCMS (which allows you to try live installs of a pile of cms, blogging systems etc).

So far I cannot get wordpress mu to work here, it doesn’t seem to like www. urls.
Lyceum seems to work ok, but you cannot have multiple blogs without multiple emails. I suppose I could use 20 of those gmail invites to set up 20 emails on a temporary basis but it seems a lot of hassle. I also have not used wordpress/lyceum enough to know enough about which templates will work with lyceum so that the children can have their own look and feel.

So I am thinking of setting up another install of Pivot with 20 subweblogs showing one category associated with one user. Which means setting up 20 categories, users, style sheets and templates.
I thought that I might be able to edit the settings directly, I seem to be able to do so for users and categories but sub-weblogs look way to complex for me, I’ve a fair idea of how the templates/ css works in pivot but it will take quite a while to set everything up. I don’t want to give the children access to the admin side as the template and css editing are not wysiwyg.
This would mean limiting them to designing a header graphic and telling me if they want some colour changes.
Using Pivot would also mean that the children would be able to use the main blogs and their own without much thought.
So the dilemma is which blog software to go for, given the limitations of my knowledge and our setup.

2. The second thing is presenting movies in blogs. We have dipped our toes in on the The Dream Dragon and here and here, the second 2 are just very Q&D made with a digital cameras, I think this has a lot of promise.
So far I’ve just uploaded Quicktime movies and displayed them with scripts from embed the video!. I see a lot of blogs displaying video in flash, but all my attempts to convert QT to flash using Flash 8 Video Encoder have given poorer quality and bigger file size than Quicktime. I want to keep the files on our site rather than use a video hosting service, as I suspect we may run into problems with filters. So any handy tips about encoding video for flash would be appreciated. Or opinions about sticking with quicktime.

technorati tags blogging video