Tag: WordPress

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The Advent calendar in Glow Blogs has now 15 wee activities for mid-upper primary. 5 minutes of Christmas fun or a brain break for each day. New ones appear at 1 minute past midnight.

I have learnt a bit about the Site Editor when making the Calendar page. I used the new, to Glow, Grid Block. Each grid contains a group with a display post shortcode. The Display posts plugin allows me to show a thumbnail for the post published on a particular day. If there are no posts it just shows text of my choice. In this case ‘wait for the date’. The posts are queued up by scheduling.

There is an Advent Calendar in H5P itself, but I like the display post approach.

Each post has a simple H5P activity. Matching games, quizzes and the like.The Site Editor in Glow blogs is a really powerful tool for creating different looks. I’ve enjoyed testing the cover block a bit this weekend.

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Listened to Episode 85: WordPress in Education – WordPress News on the WordPress Briefing.

This episode covers some suggested uses of WordPress in Education. I was please to hear it was not concentrating on tertiary education. The host Josepha Haden Chomphosy (Executive Director of the WordPress project!) gave some good reasons for using WordPress in schools. She also talked about the learning resources in WordPress. I am certainly starting to link to and embed these more in the help for Glow Blogs.

The show notes point to the Uganda Website Projects Competition 2024 – Problem Solving with WordPress. I feel a little bit jealous. I wonder if something of the sort could be done in Scotland?

I, obviously, believe the blogs & WordPress have a lot of offer education. There are three main components of Glow, Google Workspaces, MS 365 & Glow Blogs. Google & MS have a lot of onboarding and help aimed at schools. I wonder if a project of this sort could exemplify the use of WordPress.

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Likes My current Webmention setup by Nick Simson.

but I thought it may be helpful to share my configuration settings and demonstrate how I’m using both the Webmention plugin and IndieBlocks on the same site.

Helpful indeed. I wish I’d taken some notes as I went along on this site. I think I may have woven a tangled web.

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Bookmarked Disabled PostKinds Plugin by Ton Zijlstra.

My main issue with it was that it places key elements such as the weblink you’re responding to outside the posting itself. It gets stored in the database as belonging to the PostKinds plugin. Meaning if you ever switch it off, that gets wiped from your posting (although it’s still in the database then). This was a dependency I needed to get rid of.

This crosses my mind from time to time. I depend on without fully understanding the Post Kinds plug-in. I am halfway between Post Kinds and IndieBlocks as I use Blocks a bit more. I’ve used them a lot on Glow Blogs and am less worried about switching to them full time. I wonder about,

deploying small templates that allow me to mark a posting as reply, rsvp, favourite, bookmark, or check-in, within the postings I’m writing.

as mentioned in Ton Zijlstra’s post.

I wonder if these are an alternative to IndieBlocks or something else. Can you make templates with the correct microformats in the Site Editor? But that would not work as semipress is not a block theme so I guess the template would be php?

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I’ve now been running blogs with & for my classes since 2005. I still find them a really useful tool for teaching and learning. The focus and content has changed continually over the years.

Back in the noughties I was keen on having my class blog kept up by pupils (archive.org link).

I find this harder to organise now, not sure if it is my age, the demands of the curriculum or something else. Pupils in my class now post to their e-Portfolios1 and add pieces of work to the class blog which I collate into posts. I also pinch quotes from their e-portfolios for the class blog2.

Like my own blog here I still find my class blog a great resource to remember & review. Of course it is a curated view. Much depends on what I am finding most interesting at the time. I both enjoy reading back and use it as a tool when asked for feedback or a record of some sort.

I was somewhat cheered up by Matt Mullenweg’s birthday. Sometimes it feels like WordPress is focused on content management. Matt’s post show that blogging is still loved.
While content management is a main focus of Glow Blogs my love is blogging. I still think we are only scratching the surface of the use of WordPress in school3.

Posts Last Term (Oct 2023 – Dec 2023 on my class blog )

  1. Glow Blogs – WordPress blogs for Scottish Education ↩
  2. example of quote collection↩
  3. H5P for example ↩
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Liked Scripting News: Sunday, November 12, 2023 (Scripting News)
Some news. I've been working with Automattic for most of this year on a new version of FeedLand that runs in their cloud. The advantage is it will scale like the most popular websites in the world do, as WordPress does. It's meant a lot of internal changes in the software, but at the same time, it still runs on a Digital Ocean server, and on desktops as well. The next FeedLand works at all these levels, for a person, a workgroup and the world. Obviously, lots more to say about all this.

This looks like really interesting news. I’ve been using FeedLand , for a while, even had it running on a Raspberry Pi until I got into a snarl with domains.

Looking forward to the lots more Dave has to say.

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Bookmarked Jetpack AI Assistant – WordPress AI Content Generator Plugin.

Is the Jetpack AI Assistant available for free?
Yes, the Jetpack AI Assistant block is currently available for free up to 20 requests. We encourage you to try it out and share your feedback. You can upgrade your plan to continue using the AI Assistant after the initial 20 requests.

I was quite interested in this, but not enough to pay £7.50 a month for it. The need for an account and payment also rules it out of Glow Blogs too.

I’ll continue to occasionally dabble with ChatGPT.