I gave presentation/workshop to a few groups at the UWS this morning about Glow Blogs. Rather than use a presentation I made a blog: Glow Blogs – An Introduction This goes over some of the basics about Blogging and a few tips. Far too much to cover in an hour.
It may be useful to you if you are learning or explaining about Glow Blogs.
Some of the pages are pretty sketchy, but it was made to be expanded on in person.
Mel Choyce (24ways.org)This is the foundation of the new WordPress editor. Take atomic pieces, and combine them to make whole sections and layouts. Best yet, no fumbling with floats if you want to put some text next to an image!
A nice example of what Gutenberg can do. I am not using it here, the old editor suits me and supports all of the IndieWeb plugins. It will answer some of the requests we have on Glow Blogs when it arrive there.
I am very pleased that I’ll be continuing my part time role as product owner for Glow Blogs. When my recent contract finished in June the job was opened for applications. I was successful and am just sorting out the paper work. I do this work over an above my class teacher role. I would have been gutted if I didn’t get the job.
This post was inspired by Andrew Canion’s Blogvember Prompt List. This arrived in micro.blog at he same time as #mbnov, microblogvember.
A test of snapthread which has been updated to version 2. When I tried the 1.8.1 version I rather liked it. It was then an app to stitch live photos into wee videos on iOS. Version 2 adds a lot more features. I still like it.
This video should not be used to judge the quality of the output, I used CloudConvert to squash the 38MB 1440 × 1080 mp4 down to 4.5MB 1.
My class used the free version, limited to 30 seconds of video, last session a bit, we had a few crashes, but I think it is a promising app. Ease of use, limited time of the free version and lack of stickers, for now 2, are useful for the classroom. My class use iMovie and Clips too, but sometimes we might not want the greater complexity of iMovie or the wacky possibilities of clips.
Unfortunately CloudConvert doesn’t work for me on the school network, I’ve tried a few apps that convert and squash video but no really found a good one for pupils to use. I would like my pupils to be able to do that, to save space on their blogs and to speed up uploading. I am not sure on the official line on posting to silos in North Lanarkshire. Social media, especially twitter, is very popular. That is staff rather than pupil posting, I’d like my pupils to be involved in the uploading of video to their e-Portfolios and the class blog without my interference.
For Glow Blogs, I’d also like the app to change the file type to mp4 or m4v as .MOV files, that are apples favourite, don’t play nicely with all browsers. We made a change to standard WordPress functionality to accept .MOV files as video, but some browsers don’t play them. Strangely, just editing the file extension, from .MOV to .m4v works, at least for Chrome. I can’t find a way to change extensions on iOS but I’ve tested on the desktop.
FWIIW Snapthread’s videos are .MP4 when exported to the camera roll, so only need squashed for my needs.
Following from this conversation
Tom Woodward whipped up a plugin to clone posts on a WordPress Multi-site blog to one of your own.
I think this could be a really useful way of giving pupils a template for e-Portfolio post. I’d be very interested in exploring getting this into Glow Blogs. I’ve been asked about this sort of functionality a few times.
The new WordPress editor is now official. It comes with a new editor Gutenberg. I’ve tested Gutenberg on and off for a while, mostly worrying about iOS in particular iPads. That has improved steadily.
My concern is pupils using Glow Blogs will find the new editor more complicated.
I am somewhat relived that pasting from Apple Notes on an iPad works fine in the blocks editor, paragraphs generating new blocks. Adding images above or below a particular block seems a little footery but nothing pupils will not handle 1.
Now WordPress 5 is out I need to think about my own use. I don’t usually write in the web editor, preferring to either cut and paste from a text editor or post via micro.blog or xml-rpc. TextMate has a lovely blogging bundle, and I use drafts and shortcuts on iOS.
I’ve installed WordPress 5 on a couple of other sites, and had a quick play. Posting from TextMate, via xml-rpc put the content in a classic block if Gutenberg is enabled.
I’ve also enabled the classic editor plugin on these sites and this one. The ability to toggle back and forward between editors seems like a good idea, but on the sites I’ve tried it has mostly failed 2. This would be a good way to introduce the editor to Glow Blogs users, start with the classic editor, add in the ability to toggle to Gutenberg. I do worry that having two editors will lead to folk having problems or getting confused. I am not looking forward to updating the Glow Blogs help. This is probably a bit in the future as we should wait and see how Gutenberg is going on multi-sites before upgrading.
My other personal worry is that at the moment the indieweb post_kinds plugin is not compatible with Gutenberg. This is compounded by the fact I can’t update that plugin on this site at the moment. I am presuming that things will get shaken out and improve over the next year or two.
My plan is now to upgrade this blog to WP 5 but use the classic editor, waiting to see how the indieweb plugins evolve. I’ll continue writing in TextMate, drafts and the like while I keep half an eye on developments.
Some of my class have been editing the tagline of their e-Portfolio #glowblogs. I had to look up kawaii.
WordPress 5.0 could be as soon as August with hundreds of thousands of sites using Gutenberg before release.
Source: Update on Gutenberg — WordPress
Although GlowBlogs will not be getting this until later in the year and after much testing I am still watching and occasionally testing Gutenberg.
From a selfish POV (my class uses iPads) I am still seeing some of the same issue on iPad as I mentioned before: Gutenberg on iPad. A lot better now, but the active text still goes behind the keyboard on occasion. I hope to do a bit more testing over the summer break.
I got a request from a teacher who wanted to download a years worth of images from a Glow Blog (for end of year slideshow).
Although there are plugins that can do this these are not available on Glow Blogs. I was stumped apart from going through the site and downloading them 1 by 1. But after a wee bit of thinking I though I’d try using the REST API via AppleScript.
The REST API will list in JSON format the media:
http://johnjohnston.info/blog/wp-json/wp/v2/media/
Look at that in FireFox for a pretty view.
JSON Helper is
an agent (or scriptable background application) which allows you to do useful things with JSON directly from AppleScript.
So I can grab the list of media from a site in JSON format use appleScript to download all the files.
The script I wrote is not great, you can’t download from a particular year, but a quick look at the JSON will help in working out how many files to download.
I am sure there are more efficient ways to do this and I’ve only tested on a couple of site, but it seems to do the trick and might be useful again sometime.
In Glow Blogs, we have the Glow Blogs Reader (Follow Blogs)
The Glow blogs reader allows you to ‘follow’ a number of Glow Blogs. In following blogs you will be able to see which of these blogs has been updated in your dashboard rather than have to visit each site to check for updates.
Useful because 1. it allows you to follow private blogs which an RSS Reader will not and 2. For teachers unfamiliar with RSS and readers it will be a lot simpler.
It doesn’t have the facility to mark off or record posts that you have commented on which is of interest to Aaron.
