Or rather, Audio in Posts.
They’re not iTunesey podcasts, yet, but they’re simple enough.
Your mp3 file must be less than 2MB and uploaded to your blog in the normal way.
Go find the menu in Dashboard–>Options–>Audio Player.
Read the check boxes, the third check box will automagically change your mp3 links in your posts to embedded flash players. Easy-peezy.
Click the images.
Before iBox
After iBox
Want to know how?
Start a thread in the forum, “How to iBox?”. When three STJ bloggers post, let me know and I’ll join in with the secret.
Find a “copyright-free” etext online at, say, Project Gutenberg or here or here
Start a new blog.
Parse your etext into manageable chunks and insert into your blog.
Add graphics and organizers. Edit theme. Voila.
Look at Castle of Otranto and The Jesuit Relations and the History of New France as examples.
Search for works by the following at Gutenberg:
Austen, Jane
Barrie, J.M.
Brontë, Charlotte
Brontë, Emily
Dickens, Charles
Burroughs, Edgar Rice
Carroll, Lewis
Chesterton, G. K
Christie, Agatha
Twain, Mark
Collins, Wilkie
Connor, Ralph
Conrad, Joseph
Corelli, Marie
Defoe, Daniel
De la Mare, Walter
Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir
Eliot, George
Galsworthy, John
Haggard, H. Rider
Hardy, Thomas
Henty, G. A.
James, Henry
Jerome, Jerome K.
Joyce, James
Kingsley, Charles
Kipling, Rudyard
Leacock, Stephen
Mansfield, Katherine
Maugham, W. Somerset
Maupassant, Guy de
McClung, Nellie L.
Melville, Herman
Montgomery, L. M.
Moodie, Susanna
Moore, Clement Clarke
Nesbit, E.
Oppenheim, E. Phillips
Potter, Beatrix
Sabatini, Rafael
Scott, Walter, Sir
Shaw, George Bernard
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Sinclair, Upton
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Stoker, Bram
Swift, Jonathan
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Trollope, Anthony
Wallace, Edgar
Walpole, Horace
Wells, H. G.
Wilde, Oscar
Wodehouse, P. G.
Woolf, Virginia
Yonge, Charlotte Mary
What a funny word, “bloggiest”. Should I say it is a “most bloggy” start to the year? Does correct English matter in a blog?
All students I teach have begun a blog, of sorts. For the most part, I’ve insisted the content of the blog must be school or course related, the myriad responses to Macbeth fit this category. Other responses are more like “snowflakes”, snowflakes is my term to describe the phenomena of no two responses to the same prompt being identical.
I aggregate(not related to the term aggravate) RSS feeds from each class to aid in tracking down assigned work. Each student has a spreadsheet I term the Data Collector that averages rubric scores and totals moderated comment feeds, too. I then collect the Data Collectors periodically to determine scores to enter into GradeLogic. The data collectors serve a dual purpose, a foundation to build a grade obviously, but a powerful device to bring a landslide of peer pressure and collaborative assistance on the lazy, slower, or reluctant bloggers. Those that finish first have always shown a willingness to “share their secrets” with others.
Students are also instructed to collect and deposit appropriate comments on each other’s blogs, too. It is proving to be a fine art to learn to comment. Last year I found the aspect of commenting to be more valuable than the creation of the posts. Comments must contain evidence of critical thinking, I said, not simply “gladhanding”. If you troll the blogs you’ll notice the biggest difference right now between a veteran blogger and a newbie is the quality/quantity of appropriate comments. Students complete work earlier to benefit from positive/any attention from peer “commentors”. Any student who doesn’t get their blog post done on time, gets punished by receiving low or no rubric scores from their peers. However, unlike class discussions, the very nature of blogging allows anyone to catch up at any time. The students themselves seem to have an unofficial pecking order for who writes the best comments. They have internalized their own standards for what they will accept as a comment on their blog and are very persuasive at convincing each other to measure up. A few students are positively verbose and comment on all they can. Others choose fewer responses yet measure their words very carefully. Those that finish writing a post early, are left to hustle remaining students.
The grade 10s are shifting their attention to Keyboarding modules for a while, although I keep prodding them about “Turing Tests”. iGod is our most recent fascination.
The grade 9s get their prompts from Mrs. Fraser’s class then I help them become a bit more tech savvy.
The Grade 11s are in the midst of Macbeth and may see no reprieve for at least 2 more weeks, I figure. The more traditional assignments I’ve used for the last 14 years are as appropriate in a blog as they have ever been in my class. Doing it with blogs is just so cool!
If I could figure out how to use Flickr smartly, so can you. Flickr is “third party” to snowotherway. Read it’s terms and conditions carefully. You are only invited, not required, to enable an account with flickr, but . . . what fun.
Quick SMS has evolved into “Snow-Mobile.” It’s still a cell phone text messenger, though.
Created a “Snowblower.” Look at snowflakes for a demonstration.
Enjoy.
PS. Thanks for your patience, if dropping Quick SMS borked your theme with a fatal error it’s not all that fatal. Click on “Sidebar Widgets” in your Dashboard and all is well again.
Out,
D. Sader
When adding an image to your page with a link to an image on another site, you may get unexpected results. This is called hotlinking: when images appear to be embedded on your page, but are simply linked to someone else’s page.
Advantages: no bandwidth or disk quota used from your account because you are not storing/delivering the image here.
Disadvantage: many “smart” sites forbid and display a 404 error. Some may just limit to a finite number, say 5 visits per day. Unscrupulous sites will surprise your visitors with a redirected hotlink path to images you didn’t want to show. YIKES! Hence, HOT- linking, as in play with fire? … gonna get burned.
The ethics of “hotlinking” can be equated to the ethics of stealing an image without the original author’s permission. Look for a “you are forbidden” message. But that’s not all, a web server can simply detect a hotlinked image and replace it with anything they like. Be warned, if I can program the snowotherway server to refer all attempts at hotlinking to a 404.html file, so can any other. Judge wisely, test and retest a “hotlinked” image before committing it to publication. Unscrupulous webservers fight this “theft” in unscrupulous ways, so be very careful.
Now, a smart web host, like snowotherway, will use server settings to eliminate the practice of “hotlinking” into your file folders to “steal” our bandwidth. And, no, I won’t refer redirects to “unscrupulous” images.
Commercial sites like Amazon.ca, and imdb.com, may even encourage the practice of hotlinking for obvious commercial reasons. But they are huge, have tonnes of bandwidth, and they may profit if you follow an image from their site.
Conclusion, a human is the only judge of what a picture image on the ‘net looks like. No computer or software can actually “see” an image. So be warned, what you tell another site to deliver in an image to your web page, may not be what your visitors get.
Out,
D. Sader
I have noticed some themes generate error messages under certain conditions. I am trying to fix code so broken themes, widgets, and plugins work perfectly.
The most popular errors in the server logs are when widgets are used to display content you haven’t created yet. For example, including a recent comments widget in your sidebar, before you actually have any comments will result in an error message. I included a Links widget in PingoLino, but I didn’t have any links, hundreds of errors.
Trying to sort out which errors I need to pay attention too, and which errors are merely the result of carelessness is tougher than I expect.Feed validator helps.
If you notice errors occurring in a particular theme, widget, or microcontent, let me know ASAP. Show me while you are at school.
When activating a new blog, don’t be in a rush to delete the default Mr. WordPress links or Hello World posts or comments. Having empty posts or comments or empty Blogroll causes errors to be reported as well. Most errors vanish after content, links, categories are added to your blog.
I’m certain you’ll see a rash of bizarre behaviour if you allow anyone else to be an administrator, author, contributor of your blog, I did in testing. If user A and user B both administer the same blog, all links/content appear on the pages they are supposed to, but when user A tries to Manage Links or Posts, only A’s posts and links appear and can be edited. This merely confused me, causing momentary panic, then confusion. Add users to your blog at your own risk. Do not make them Administrators, unless you know what you are doing and why. Anything you actually delete from your blog is gone. But stuff can be hidden in very many mysterious ways. Take care.
D. Sader