- They comment on other people’s posts.
- They like other people’s posts.
- They share them.
- They…
from: What do nice Internet users do?
Click through to see all 12 points from Dave Winer who should know, having blogged as long than anyone.
From a education PoV good advice for reading and responding to pupils post, but applicable everywhere.
Featured image: Nice to be important by Michelle Grewe on Flickr shared with a Creative Commons — CC0 1.0 Universal license, which was nice.
Here’s a fun thing to try if you’ve been blogging for a while (Warning: may not actually be fun). Get a random date from when you started blogging until present (eg using this random date generator), find the post nearest that date and revisit it.
….
- What, if anything, is still relevant?
- What has changed?
- Does this reveal anything more generally about my discipline?
- What is my personal reaction to it?
from: Revisiting my own (blog) past | The Ed TechieThe Ed Techie
I’ve a random button1 here and occasionally look back without the the discipline that Martin Weller suggested. I gave this more thoughtful approach a go.
I came up with this: Impermanence and Comments from 10 years ago.
That post was just a placeholder to link to a favourite post by one of my pupils. There was not much analysis, but hopefully pointing out that pupils posting and engaging with an audience is a powerful tool in the classroom.
I do think this is still relevant, there are a lot more primary school using Social media and blogging now as there was then. I also think that it is good to have examples of pupils doing the blogging and that can have value. Now it seems like a lot of posts come from teachers as opposed to learners.
It is also particularly relevant to me as I’ll be returning, with some trepidation, to class teaching after more than eight years next week.
What has changes is the average 10 year old is a lot more used to publishing to the Internet, plenty use FaceBook, instagram or have a YouTube channel. I wonder if writing for the web will have the same excitement.
I am not sure such a short post reveals anything about my discipline, except that I’ve consistently believed that blogging should help to give an audience and purpose to pupil writing and learning.
My personal reaction was quiet pleasure at finding the pupil’s poem and the cross continent conversation that went with it. I do hope I can help provide opportunities for pupils to do the same again.
Finally I remembered that the Sandaig Site will probably be decommissioned very soon. This made me a little sad. It did let me edit the post and click the amber button to send the original poem post to the Internet archive.
The Featured image on this post is one of my own flickr photos, created by blending two random CC flickr photos, with this toy or its slightly older sibling.
In regards to sharing openly, Doug Belshaw recommend s creating a canonical URL. The intent is to provide a starting point for people to engage with and build upon your work and ideas. This could be one space in which to share everything or you could have a separate link for each project. What matters is that it is public.
Arron Davis on the importance of sharing and linking.
As well as being a great link this is a test post, pulling in content from my pinboard links with FeedWordPress and saving them as a pending post, with the custom format of pinboard. The posts are marked as pending, allowing me to mark up the quote and add some text.
The title of the post should link to Arron’s blog rather than mine. I hope there is a nice wee pinboard icon on the left.
I know we are in the days of lots of free space, but it is worth remembering when blogging (or making webpages) shrinking images is worth doing for your visitors.
I don’t always do it, but today as I updates a Glow Blogs Help page, I saved nearly half the space by using, ImageOptim — better Save for Web.
There are other tools, but this one is free & open source, works on a Mac, but lists and links to windows & linux tools.
Last week I attended the morning of the Always on (them) event at the University of the West of Scotland. This was organised by Professor David McGillivary. It looked at Digital and Social Media use in Education.
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.
William Makepeace Thackeray from: The_History_of_Henry_Esmond- William Makepeace Thackeray – Wikiquote
This is my 1000th post on this blog. Just over a year since I marked 10 Years Blogging here on John’s World Wide Wall Display.
The main benefit from blogging these 1000 posts has been the thinking that goes into them and their unpublished siblings. The main beneficiary of my blogging has been me (I see my stats). Even without many readers it is worth it.
Thinking about this post has given me the chance to think about where and what I post. This blog would be bigger if I had not hived off my DS106 blog where I’ve over 200 posts. I move them when I though it might make this blog a little strange. If I could figure out how not to break links I would now recombine them.
I am becoming more and more interested in the indieweb concept of publishing all of your content to your own space and pushing that out to silos. I’ll be thinking about all the other places I post content soon.
The second greatest thing about blogging is reading other blogs.
Serendipitously 1 I read this:
Other than writing a daily blog (a practice that’s free, and priceless), reading more blogs is one of the best ways to become smarter, more effective and more engaged in what’s going on. The last great online bargain.
…
Here’s the thing: Google doesn’t want you to read blogs. They shut down their RSS reader and they’re dumping many blog subscriptions into the gmail promo folder, where they languish unread.
And Facebook doesn’t want you to read blogs either. They have cut back the organic sharing some blogs benefitted from so that those bloggers will pay to ‘boost’ their traffic to what it used to be.
BUT!
RSS still works. It’s still free. It’s still unfiltered, uncensored and spam-free.
from: Seth’s Blog: Read more blogs
One of the most enduring features of my blogging years has been the reading of other blogs via RSS 2. I’d suggest that if you are interested in using the Internet to read, RSS is a great thing to learn about.
The post linked above shows one way, but there are many other services and app that will help you read, news and blogs from across the Internet. Currently I uses inoreader.com and Feeddler RSS Reader Pro 2 (iOS), to read blogs.
Featured image credit: thoughts are just water drops by Benjamin Balázs on Flickr kindly shared in the Public Domain. I though this on was interesting given my recent interest in the accidental allure of blended images.
1. one of my favourite words: searching here serendipitous 7 & serendipity 12 posts ↩
2. I like to write about RSS too. Currently I’ve mentioned RSS in 161 posts ↩
I’ve started a new blog Glowing Posts | Collecting interesting #GlowBlogs Posts.
The title says it all. The purpose of this new blog is to collect some examples of interesting ways that Glow Blogs are being used. I’ve found some good ones already.
The idea is to highlight posts rather than whole blogs. If you know of any you can let me know via a form on the site, twitter or any other way you can thing of.
Posting to WordPresss is pretty simple on the go. Recent versions of WordPress have a fairly good performance on Mobile Safari. the WordPress app performs a little better the body field is less ‘jumpy’ and uploading photos a little simpler.
There are a few other blogging apps but I’ve not stuck with any.
I tend to write posts in drafts as there is even less chrome and more space to type. It also has some clever shortcuts, helps with markdown and can do cleaver stuff with text and scripts.
A while back I noticed that the new version of Workflow had actions for posting to WordPress. I made some quick tests sand it seemed to do the trick.
Today I started thinking about it again. Workflow allows you to make posts, pages and media. When I tried uploading media I was disappointed that uploading an image returns the url to the attachment webpage rather than the attachment itself.
I’ve tried to extract the url form the page but the best I have is to extract all of the urls on the page and present this as a list to choose from. This is copied to the clipboard.
So I have an workflow that is an action extension. This allow me to pick a photo then run the workflow. It is presented as a document picker in other apps, for example pixelmator. When this workflow runs it resizes the image and uploads it to my blog. It then grabs the attachment page and pulls a list of links out of that. I can pick a link to copy to the clipboard.
The next workflow I have is one for making a post. This runs from drafts.
It first set a variable to the draft. Then it shows the photo library. When a phot is picked it uploads the photo to the blog. As in the first script it downloads the attachment page, extracts the urls and let’s me pick one. This time the one picked is put in another variable.
The workflow then get the first variable, and posts it to the blog as a draft. It asks for a title and used the url to the uploaded image as the posts featured image.
It also asks for tags when it runs.
The featured image for this post is a couple of screenshots taken on my phone. They were stitched together with workflow and the result edited a bit in snapseed.
The University of Dundee seems to be making its voice heard about glow and so it should! It’s here, let’s use it. But, it made me start to think about why I personally have got into blogging so much when some of the professionals around me just don’t want to?
from: Making This Blog Count | Katie-Rebecca’s ePortfolio
Further evidence of the blogging boom in the University of Dundee. Katie-Rebecca’s post about why she blogs makes me very glad to have worked on Glow Blogs.
I am posting this with the WordPress.com desktop app on my mac. The app has been out for a while but I’ve just got round to testing it.
I’ve done nothing to set this up other than log on with my WordPress.com username and password, I am presuming that I can post with the app because I’ve got jetpack installed.
The editor looks pretty much like the WordPress.com editor as opposed to the web interface to my self-hosted WordPress blog.
The application feels a bit like a site specfic browser.
On my site I am having problems uploading images so will be switching to the browsers to finish this post off.
It does not give me access to things added to my editor by plugins. For example the post to medium plugin or the indie-web post kinds plugin.
I guess the writing ‘experience’ is a bit smoother than the browser. I am surprised that there is now distraction free mode for writing.
Hitting preview opened Safari but pointed to the post without &preview=true the first time I clicked Preview. The next time was fine.
There are a huge number of Revisions saved. I don’t know if this is a good thing.
An interesting editor but I think I’ll stick to writing posts locally with TextMate for now. This gives me local/dropbox backups and lots of shortcuts.
It is worth noting that this app will currently not work with Glow Blogs. I suspect that the WordPress.com connection would worry the security folk at Scot Gov.
From what I’ve read this app is part of major changes happening with WordPress and the Rest API hence the featured image!
Featured image credit: wordpress revolution | Flickr – Photo Sharing! CC BY NC by Tom Woodward.
