Edugeek

Gary Kruchowski and I are putting together a series of blog training classes for both employees and students.

The first session will be for employees, and especially targeted at those employees who are looking for an easy way to read entries from multiple blogs … such as faculty who have a whole class of bloggers. It is easy to keep up on new blog posts from a large number of blogs if you use the right tools.

Reading Blogs - How to Use a Blog Aggregator
Friday, February 9, 2007
1:00 - 2:00, room E2402
This session will be repeated at least one more time - date and time to be announced.

In this session you will learn how to setup a Bloglines account, how to add feeds to the account so that you can easily see when a new blog entry has been posted, and how to organize the account for maximum efficiency.

Gary K will be leading some sessions in the near future for how to write blog posts and utilize the functionality of the blogs. Stay tuned for more info about these sessions.

The LSC Blogs received a new plug-in the other day. It is the Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA). I do not have it activated on this blog, and I probably won’t be doing so. Can’t say that I care for it much. Here’s a bunch of people who don’t like it at all.

On all of these plug-ins, the default setting is for them NOT to be activated. The only way that they will appear on your site is if you decide to activate them on the Plug-ins page.

If you are annoyed (like I am) by the Snaps other sites, then you can globally turn this feature off (disable) in either of two ways: 1) Click the options link in the top-right corner of one of the pop-up bubbles, select to disable for ALL sites, or 2) The other way is to visit the SPA FAQ, also available from the above box, or directly at\ http://www.snap.com/about/spa_faq.php#2

Do a Google search, you’ll find lots of info about this, both pro and con. BD

Update 2/3/07: in case this doesn’t make sense to you, be advised that the blog administrator disabled the Snap Preview shortly after this post was made.

Steve was having a hard time posting an mp3 file to his new blog site. Here is an example of an mp3 embedded with a flash player in a post.

First step is to make sure you have activated the audio player plug-in on your dashboard.

In the Audio Player Options (this tab will only appear after you have activated the plug-in above), I suggest that you choose the third option as shown below. This will replace all links to mp3 files with the flash audio player. Make sure you save your changes.

Now you are ready to embed an mp3 file into a post. In the Write Post editor, Browse to find the mp3 file on your computer and then upload the file.

Browse to the uploaded file and then click on the file link to select it.

To link the mp3 file in your post, choose the “Send to editor” in the drop-down menu of choices.

If you go back to the audio player options, you can play around with the color combination for your embedded players to your hearts content. If you have problems with this, then I failed miserably at this attempt at instruction. Good luck!

The LSC web team has installed various plugins to the WordPress blogging site. Most of these can be very useful depending on your blogging intention. One plug-in that you don’t need to activate is the “List-All” item that will create a list of all blogs on a WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) site. That plug-in was needed for site management, but not for individual blog management.

The first two I’ll talk about have to do with monitoring the amount of traffic to your site. Most bloggers want to know whether anyone is reading their stuff. This requires some sort of stats or analytics monitoring. For someone who already uses the free Google Analytics service, you can easily activate Google Analytics on your LSC blog by activating the plugin and then following the very simple on-screen directions.

For the less geeky (not already a Google Analytics user), you might just want to activate the Fire Stats plugin which will give you a viewer report right on the blog dashboard. It will tell you the number of unique hits, total hits, unique hits in last 24 hours, where the viewers came from (referrer link), most popular pages, browsers used, operating systems used, a “Hits Table” with much more detail about the blog readers.

On your dashboard, click on the Plugins tab. All available plugins are NOT active by default. Click the Activate link for any that you want to use.