Tag: blogging

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I’ve come across a couple of new, simple to use, almost throw away blogging tools recently:

Throwww

Throwww – The Simplest Blog. An example post: Minimal Blogging engines – Throwww.com

Throwww is the easiest way to write something and share it. Just start writing, post it, and share the url.

Posts on Throww can be tied to your twitter account, as my examples, or anonymous.

Authpad

Authpad my example
Minimal Blogging engines – johnjohnston’s Pad.

Authpad (beta) is a frictionless approach to blogging. Our goal is to take away any distraction that keeps you from focusing on what’s important — producing quality content.

Authpad has more of a traditional username/password setup, comments via disqus and themes.

Both support markdown for writing and work on iOS (I tested with an iPad).

Both also get away from the relative complexity of most blogging platform’s ‘dashboards’ and editors. Authpad has a slightly less minimal editor, as it has a toolbar:

Authpad Toolbar

Whereas with throwww you just type on the home page. Once you type a bit the Save button and a Formatting Help link show up, the latter will give you markdown help.

Authpad also gives you an option to publish as website or a blog style.

throww_editing
authpad_editing

 

Both, in my limited testing, are straightforward and easy to use. I an not sure that they are tools for the classroom, markdown and hosting images elsewhere might be a wee bit complex for pupils. They might fit with some teachers for their own publishing, certainly they are quick to use.

I am also not sure where they fit with the current trend to reclaim ones data from web 2, or a Domain of One’s Own or Un-Web 2.0 which I am finding interesting at the moment.

A couple of other similar things, Calepin which I’ve not tried and Scriptogr.am which I tested a while back: John Johnston | scriptogr.am.

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This is a quick test of a alternative way to post to my blog.

I tend to blog from my MacBook. I’ve been testing various iOS systems for blogging on the go. I’ve also read a lot about blogging systems that use Dropbox files to produce a post. In the past I’ve experimented with posting to a blog with AppleScript and thought I could knit something simple together. This consists of several parts:

  • a folder on my Dropbox called BlogThis
  • a Folder Action AppleScript on this folder on my always on work mac.
  • The MetaweblogAPI enabled on this blog and supported by AppleScript.

When a file arrives on Dropbox and syncs to my work mac the Folder Action AppleScript posts it to my blog. It uses the first line of the file as a title. If the file is HTML it posts that, if it is markdown it converts it to HTML first.

NOCs

This post was created with [NOCs](http://www.wisd.com/) on my iPhone. Once I’ve finished a local, iPhone, draft NOCs allows me to move it to any Dropbox folder.

Extending

About 6 years show I was testing posting images via the MetaWeblogApi and it should be easy enough to use a Dropbox folder for that, or to script an FTP upload. This would mean I could add an image from my phone to my Dropbox. This would upload to this sit and could be encorporated into a post. Until the I could use Flickr.

I am not sure if anyone is very interested in this sort of thing. If they are I’ll be able to post more details from a desktop. This is about as long a post as I’d like to write on a phone.

Not quite perfect yet, I had to edit the img tag here. More fun to be had.

Update: it was like magic watching my home mac when posting this from my phone, growl told me that a file had been addd to my dropbox and almost immediately that a file had ben moved (by the work mac).

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Like quite a few folk I’ve been kicking the tyres of Glew a wee bit over the last week or so. One very interesting feature is a plugin that Charlie has preinstalled into the wordPress blogs, FeedWordPress:

FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from feeds that you choose into your WordPress weblog; the content it syndicates appears as a series of special posts in your WordPress posts database. If you syndicate several feeds then you can use WordPress’s posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation (“planet”) website.

I’ve given this a quick test here: johnj (glew login needed, get one while it is hot!) where I’ve aggregated two of my blogs, my flickr stream and audioboo. The only one that doesn’t work too well is the audioboo one as the plugin does not grab the attachment.

I’ve only given this a quick test, but it seems to work very well. There are lots of options for adding categories or tags to posts from a particular feed too.

This could be used for either collecting things from a variety of publishing platforms to one blog, or perhaps be the holy grail for teacher struggling with the current glows e-portfolios: collecting all of your pupils post in the one place. The current glow solution of this is to have a list of links in glow that the teachers can click on to visit blog. I’ve told as many folk as I can that it is better to save a folder of bookmarks in their browser and open in tabs but this is not ideal.

FeedWordPress will handle a lot of blogs over in DS106 is pulling in over 500 blogs and spitting them out in lots of interesting ways (for example Dynamic OPML Files Generated from FeedWordPress).

For those interested in e-portfolios Glew also has the Mahara ePortfolio System, open source e-portfolio and social networking software built in.

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I’ve been aware of Radiowaves for a long time, it was one of the inspirations for Radio Sandaig and started me podcasting. I have not followed the development of the site with a great deal of attention but have been aware that it has been evolving in interesting ways. This is what they say about themselves:

Radiowaves is the social learning environment that provides social media for education. It enables schools to create and safely share videos, podcasts and blogs. With a free Radiowaves website you can easily start school blogging, join national campaigns and develop digital literacy skills.
…
Over 50,000 pupils use Radiowaves regularly to broadcast their school podcasts and videos to friends and family via the safe social network.

I’ve also met Mark Riches CEO at Radiowaves (and founding director of NUMU which looks interesting too) a few times over the years and he talked about RadioWaves on EDUtalk at BETT. At that point he told me that they were working on an iOS app and I asked him to let me know when it came out. On Friday he did. I am really impressed with this free app.

I’ve not really got my head round the Radiowaves site, its features and how teacher and pupils sites work together, but I love the app and though it worth posting some information about it.

You can get a free account at Radiowaves, this allows unlimited blogging for a school but you are limited to 30 minutes of audio and video. I created a free account to test this app. I didn’t read any of the help or explanations either in the app or online, just clicked around.

Makewaves

Makewaves 1

The app is called Makewaves (iTunes link) and is free. It runs on an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. On the ipad it runs as an iphone sized app but can be used at 2x size to fill the screen.

I really like the look and feel of this application. Simple and straightforward.A lot of recent apps that I’ve downloaded seem to be simpler and cleaner looking, less 3d drop shadows and gradients, more space and less colour.

The app is split into 5 main sections accessed through the toolbar along the bottom:MakeWaves, Buzz, Post, My Stuff and Settings.

The MakeWaves screens shows three streams of posts from the site, primary, secondary and Things to Do. Clicking on thumbnails lets you access the content on the app.

The section I was really interested in was the Post one, but before I went there I need to visit the Settings and add my account details, this was straightforward although I didn’t notice the setting for default item which was story rather than blog. I am still not too sure of the difference between the two.

Makewaves 2

As soon as I saw the Post screen I liked it. 4 simple buttons at the top to upload media, Pictures from the camera roll, video, audio and the camera. The video button lets you choose from the camera roll or take a new video.

In seconds I had taken screenshot, used the Photo button to choose it, written a line of text and posted it.

I followed by testing the audio button, the app lets you record a sound and upload it, again a very straightforward process.

I then tested Video, and used an iPad and iPod Touch as well. All preformed beautifully.

Later on I used 3g to post a short audio file from outside. It worked a treat, uploading quickly.

An interesting feature of the app and radiowaves generally is the teacher approval. I was acting, I think, as both teacher and pupil so had to approve my own posts. The process is pretty simple on the radiowaves site and there is a in app purchase (£1.49) that lets you approve your pupils on the Buzz screen.

The My Stuff screen gives you a view of your stories and blogs, lets yuo know the ones that are still awaiting approval and the work of others in your station. You can also see if anyone liked your work.

The setting screen is straightforward, the place you can log in, easy too to log out and allow the same device to be used by more than one pupil.

I am extremely impressed with this app. It is the first one I have seen that allows posting of images, video and sound. (When I saw the posterous app I immediately put in a feature request for audio recording).

The application, when used on an iphone or ipod touch, is not built for long form blogging, but it is ideal for the much more interesting, in my opinion, mobile and group publishing of rich media. This is done in a way that minimises the technical barriers allowing users to concentrate on digital storytelling.

This could be an amazing tool for trip blogging. It should even be possible to have, say, several ipod touch out on a trip using one iphone’s tethering to allow mobile blogging by a group.

Finally having struggled and mostly failed to find a simple mobile blogging method for glow blogs it would be great to have a similar app in he new glow.

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As usual at this time of year I’ve been looking back over the posts. In the past I’ve tried to summarise a few, but this year I though I’d take a different view.

Posts Per Month

Posts per month

In May I started posting interesting finds via one of my posterous blogs, these are shown in yellow. My posting to my main posterous blog (archive.org) has decreased this year and turned into a stream of iphone photo walks, but I’ve been posting a lot more to enviable stuff (archive.org) which in turn gets auto posted here, these posts haven’t garnered many comments but they get the odd retweet and as I enjoy posting them I am assuming they are worth doing;-)

Comments are down I think, this has never been a blog with lots of comments but except for the odd post not much discussion has taken place this year. I don’t really write for comments, a lot of posts here probably drop between stools (eg code to weird for educators and to poor quality for developers) and have a very small interest group

Titles

Titles 440

Putting eduscotict and glow together would probably make my two main interests in the year glow(and its development) and edutalk. I was interested to see that update stands out.

Tags

Tags 440

The tags point to a obsession with iOS devices this year. I’d bet most of the video tag will be on iphone posts.

The stand out tag is community which reflect the stand out tile words, eduscotict and edutalk. The second biggest tag in this blogs history, classroom is dropping back as is my most frequent tag blogging.

ds106 is starting to rear its head, I expect it will grow as I learn next year joining in the digital story telling class.

I hope eduscotict will be growing a bit next session as glow develops into its next stage, I hope too that my posts about glow can move from critical friend to fan;-)

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Last week at work (North Lanarkshire Educational ICT & Technical Services) we were being supported by Oggy East of Semantise, who is helping update the setup of our school websites. Oggy is an expert in FirstClass which NLC uses for emails, collaboration & school websites.

My colleague Ian suggested that Oggy entertain me with his interesting career path. This passed through doctoral study, pub management and educational technology.

At one point Oggy started telling me about an educational project he had worked on. This involved collaboration between pupils in the UK and France. They used text based chat to talk (alternating languages), translated each others horoscopes, passed audio and video files back and forth helped each other produce CVs and more. As I was becoming more and more excited about the project Ian suggested that Oggy tell me when this happened: 1998.

Edutalking

I got Oggy to record a quick podcast about this project for EDUtalk which you can listen to: Dialogue 2000 Electronic Village

Oggy is also involved in the wonderful Not School 1. I got a podcast out of Oggy about this too: Not School – EDUtalk.

Repeating

The fact that Oggy was successfully involved in the kind of project that is still seen as innovative 14 years later is telling. I remember in 2005 feeling very proud of jumping of the blog wagon with my class the previous year and meeting Peter Ford who had pupils blogging several years before that. We had a flowering of blogging in Scotland in 2006 and this year pupil blogging has been hitting the headlines again.

What is interesting is that quite often these bit of innovation don’t seem to be connected, wheels are reinvented.

I wonder when ideas of audience, purpose, collaboration and connection using technology will really become part of the mainstream. Perhaps Glow, with all is faults, is driving this in Scotland. I certainly hope so.

1.I became aware of not school when I went to Be Very Afraid and was very impressed by the Flash skills of the a Not School ‘student’. ↩

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Blogsy is a new iPad blog editor that has a lot of useful features. It allow you to blog photos from Flickr and a couple of other photo sites, video from YouTube and also to load a webpage and drag images into the post.

You type in a code view:

And then swipe to a preview combined with some text formatting and the drag and drop interface. You swipe again to go back to the code view. The text formatting works in both views.

You can also use the built in browser to add links to as well as photos from other sites.

A wee problem is that the app doesn’t upload photos to your blog but hotlinks the ones dragged in. This might give problems if the image is removed and also does not attribute the images in any way.

Blogsy works with wordpress.com, self hosted wordpress blogs and blogger ones. I could not get it to work with my pivot blog although pivot supports the MetaWeblogAPI. 

I am going to try to post this to a wordpress and blogger blogs using the settings (a couple of test blogs). I got an error trying to post to blogger. Since the HTML links to images and is nice & clean I’ll post it to My World Wide Wall Display blog by copying the HTML and pasting into Safari. Pivot’s mobile interface is nice

. 

If Glow blogs get the metaweblogAPI sorted out this could be a useful app for class blogging in Scotland.

Update: pasting works in a glow blog too, but the wordpress backend is not optimised for mobile (at least in the glow version) as pivot is.

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For historical reasons and to give myself some sort of illusion of control I tend to write blog posts in html. I use TextMate and its blogging bundle which does all sorts of nice things to simplify the process: for example dragging an image onto TextMate’s window, uploads the image to the blog and inserts the html code to put it in the post. What is even nicer is that you can drag images from ImageWell after a quick resize or edit without saving it.

I also use SafariStand which added copy html tag to the contextual menu when right clicking on a link and to Safari’s toolbar:

Copyhtmltag

I also save the TextMate files to my dropbox so that I can edit the posts on different boxes.

On the iPad

I am not hoping for the power of TextMate for editing html but wanted to do some blogging from an iPad. I’ve managed ok using the Notes app, and using dragon dictation to ‘write text’ but hadn’t found a solution to some other features. After a bit of testing I’ve now got a fairly useful toolkit.

Dropbox integration, html editing: Textastic allows you to open and save to dropbox, does syntax highlighting and to easily type various characters that are normally buried in the iOS keyboard.

Textastickeys

Images, there is not a way to upload images to the blog that fits in with html editing, but it is easy to upload images with the flickr app to flickr. Unfortunately neither the Flickr App or the mobile version of Flickr do not provide the html code. however toy can switch to the full site which works fine on the ipad. This can be pasted into Textastic. That makes posting images simple if a little long winded: Screenshot, edit in an app, save to camera roll. Open flickr app and upload, open Safari and grab html code, switch to Texttastic and paste.

Getting links, was the last piece of the jigsaw, as well as grabbing html link tags from Safari Stand or CoLT in FireFox, in TextMate you can select some text and press command-control-shift-L and TextMate will use google to provide a link, not always the right one but very useful. Getting links on the iPad was a bit tedious, switching between Safari and Textastic and typing the code, pasting in the url. I did a bit of a google and came up with nothing. I’ve now come up with a simple, if crude, system. I’ve created a bookmarklet that adds a bit onto the top of a webpage with a text box in it, the textbox contains the html tag to link to the page:

Linkhtml

The bookmarklet link has the following code:

javascript: (function(){document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('script') ).src='http://www.littlefishsw.co.uk/link.js';})();

I added the bookmarklet to Safari on my desktop which syncs with my iPad. The bookmarklet uses this JavaScript File, if you care about JavaScript I would not look at it;-) I just kept changing things till it worked for me. I can now add a link to Textastic by switching to safari, loading the page and clicking the linkHTML link on Safari’s toolbar. The switch back to Textastic and paste. As I mention the code is not exactly slick, I couldn’t get mobile Safari to pre select the link (it works in a desktop browser) which would save a couple of clicks but it does work well enough to use if I want to blog but only have an iPad.

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iPad stand by tim_d
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

I was pretty impressed with the iPad 2 which was launched this week. Some nice new features and the speed bumps especially in JavaScript sound good.

I’ve continued to test an iPad and this week I spent a wee bit of time using it to access glow. I’ve talked to a few pupils who access glow at home using an ipod touch, and have occasionally used my iPhone, but find it a bit of a strain on the eyes (The pupils I’ve talked to don’t seem to have the same problem).

On an iPad Glow works pretty well. The iPads limitation on now allowing file (picture) uploads in the browser is a bit of a draw back but a lot of the other feature are fine. Editing webparts works as well as it does on Safari on a mac. The text editor continues to frustrate me but I am resigned to avoiding it use by now.

I successfully posted to my glow blog: iPad Glow blogging without trouble. Again I could not upload photos, but it is easy to workaround using flickr, I used my flickr CC search toy which did the job and sorted the attribution.

The WYSIWYG editor did not work, but I was please to see that the html editor respected line breaks, adding paragraphs. typing <p> with an iPad is a bit slow.

I also tried using the iPad to edit a wiki page. Again WYSIWYG was turned off and this time there was no auto paragraphing. Again I could paste in the embed code for a flickr photo. The font size was a wee bit small for me, but would be fine for most youngsters.

What it would be nice to see would be support for the MetaWeblog API in glow blogs, this would allow the use of various apps to post to a glow blog. I guess it is hard to enable this due to the way glow accounts are matched to wordpress ones through shibboleth, if RM can manage this it would be make glow blogs a powerful tool for mobile learning.

.

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Republished due to a wee bit of bother with the backend of my blog.

At the weekend Robert added a new feature to ScotsEduBlogs: ScotEduBlogs Professional

ScotsEduBlogs exists to help educational bloggers across Scotland to find each other and to talk to each other.

It has been created by members of the blogging community, and is kept up-to-date by its users (that means you!), who can add blogs and tag blogs.

It also allows anyone to keep up with what is being said across all Scottish educational blogs at a glance.

You alway could subscribe to a set of blogs via ScotsEduBlogs RSS feature, for example ScotEduBlogs tagged glowscotland or physics but these are RSS feeds. Now there is a page for professional blog posts, separate from class, pupil or teaching blogs. This could be used for cpd or just to keep an eye on other teacher/consultant/whatever blogs. If you visit SEB less frequently you will be able to see the ‘professional’ posts less chance of them being buried by class blog posts.

Recently with twitter coming to the fore as a way of keeping up with online community there have been new Scots Educational bloggers who have not added their blog to SEB now might be a good time to do so. If you do and you consider yourself an educational professional be sure to tag your blog Professional.

Sebbloglisting

Glow Blogs

There has been an influx of new blogs since glow has added blogging to its toolset. Unfortunately the glow blogs rss feeds do not play nicely with ScotEdublogs. They don’t play with glows own xml web part either.

There is a workaround, if you use FeedBurner to republish your RSS feed you can use that feed in ScotEdublogs. Feedburner is a google service now, you need to have a gmail account. You visit Feedburner sign in and fill in your RSS feed address.

Feedburner 1

Your RSS url will be the url of your blog with /feed tacked on the end, for example my test glow blog’s url is:

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/JohnJohnston/

So its RSS feed is

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/JohnJohnston/feed/

After I put it into Feedburner I get a feedburner URL for the feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/org/NCnY

This last I can use to add my Blog to ScotEduBlogs:

add_a_blog

If you are a ScotsEduBlogger please think about adding your blog to ScotsEduBlogs and remember to tag it Professional if that cap fits.