Tag: betchablog

Posted on

The WordPress Tango

For a few years now, this blog has been an important place for me to do my “thinking out loud”, and in the process it’s been extremely rewarding to have been able to share some of that public pondering with others.  I’ve learned a great deal from the whole blogging experience and although the frequency of posting has sometimes varied with life’s little circumstances, on the whole it’s been wonderful to evolve this blog as my own little place in cyberspace.

I have absolutely no intention of changing the role of this blog as a place to think about, share and discuss ideas that interest me.  Despite the rise of Twitter and other microblogging services, there’s a lot I can’t say in 140 characters so I plan to be writing here for quite a while yet.

The theme for this blog has been pretty much the same since I started it here on Edublogs.  Almost from day one, I chose the Andreas theme, a WordPress theme designed by the incredible Andreas Viklund because it has a number of design features that are important to me – two sidebars and an “elastic” resizing that stretches the main column to fit any size browser window. It has the usual ability to embed various widgets and feeds, but most blog themes can manage that.  And while it has a few customisation options for changing colours and so on, visually it’s a pretty basic sort of theme.  Some might even say it’s a bit boring. I’ve often thought about changing it, but I’m wary of just swapping themes at random and besides, although Edublogs may offer 100 different themes there’s only handful that I actually like.

Although I’ve said many times that I blog mainly for myself, it’s still nice to think that there are readers out there who actually spend time reading this stuff. While it might be fun to just swap themes whenever the mood strikes me, I’m sure it would be a little off-putting for visitors if the site looked different every time they dropped by. For me, providing some visual consistency with the aim of building readership has been more important than simply swapping blog themes for my own amusement when I’m bored, even though I am often tempted to.

Lately though, I am really getting itchy feet to do a site overhaul.  There are some really interesting WordPress themes and plugins around at the moment, and I’m feeling the need to take advantage of them.  Of course, this may necessitate a move from the legendary Edublogs service to a self hosted WordPress server.  That makes it quite an emotional decision, because both James and Sue have been awesome in what they’ve offered to the global blogging community over the last few years.  They have both been personally very helpful to me when I’ve had requests, needed assistance or I’ve just been able to hang out with them.  The thought of not having my blog running on the Edublogs servers is hard to imagine.

But in the last few months I’ve had to get a bit of WordPress backend experience.  We installed our own WPMU server at school after Edublogs placed restrictions on non-supporter blogs, and to be honest, managing the server has been really quite straightforward.  It took a bit of fiddling to get some of the RSS running just the way I wanted, but once it’s done it works just fine.  I also helped my partner Linda set up her new self hosted blog and was quite stunned at the additional power and options she got from it.

The other thing I did which helped me understand how this stuff works was to install WordPress locally on my MacBook Pro.  It’s quite straightforward and takes advantage of the super-useful MAMP stack, a neat little bundle of tools that, with one easy click, runs Apache, MySQL and PHP on the machine, effectively turning it from a regular old laptop into a powerful web server capable of delivering server-side applications like WordPress and Moodle.  By running MAMP and installing the WordPress code, I now have a fully functioning WordPress server on my laptop that lets me experiment and play with all sorts of themes and plugins from WordPress.org.  If you’re even only slightly technical, you should find it very easy to do, and extremely worthwhile.

If I do make the move to a self-hosted WordPress installation, the other thing I haven’t really worked out is how to handle the subscribers feeds.  The blogs currently has nearly 1200 subscribers and I’d rather not just lose them and start again.  I do redirect my subscription feeds through Feedburner, so it may be as simple as just telling Feedburner what the new site URL is.  Then again, it might not be that simple either.  I need to take a closer look at how that stuff works.

Either way, moving from Edublogs to a new server, moving from the current blog design to a new one, are all decisions that I’m still wrangling with. It’s easier to just leave things as they are, but perhaps it’s time for a change.

So I’d really appreciate your thoughts… assuming I can look after all the technical backend stuff to get the same or more functionality from the blog, but with a nice fresh clean theme, what do you think? Should I make the change?  Do you even care?  If you could take a moment to do this quick survey I’d really appreciate it.

And thanks for being a reader!

Image: ‘Do you Tango? [snag]‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36613169@N00/378823

Posted on

Vote Early, Vote Often!

Yes, it’s that time of year again! The annual Edublog Awards are in full swing, and after a few weeks of people making nominations for various blogs, tweets, wikis and social networks across a really broad range of categories, I’m extremely honoured to have had not one, but two of my online projects – Betchablog and The Virtual Staffroom – mentioned for an “Eddie” this year.

These awards (which are great to be considered for, but hopefully not to be taken too seriously!) aim to highlight and recognise some of the great work taking place in the online educational sphere.  Education is certainly one sector that seems to have really embraced the use of blogging as a tool for reflection, sharing, helping others and generally assisting teachers and students to “find their voice”.  I know that I’ve personally found the act of blogging to be critical in helping me “think out loud”, processing ideas in a public space where they can be exposed to the scrutiny, support and suggestions of others.  Having a blog has certainly helped me find my own voice and given me a platform from which I can share easily and freely with the world, whether it’s some resource I’ve found, a tutorial I’ve made, or just some vague idea that’s been floating around in my head looking for a place to be expressed.  I blog for myself first and foremost, and the idea that someone else might also find some value in any of it is just the icing on the cake, although it is certainly very tasty icing! I really do value the sense of community that my blog has created for me and although I say that I write just for myself, I must admit that it would be quite a hollow experience without the wonderful support of those who read, comment and engage with me.

To those that nominated Betchablog or The Virtual Staffroom this year, thank you!  To those that might consider casting a vote for either of them, thank you to you too.  But mostly thank you to everyone who reads (and subscribes) to some of these things I’ve been doing online over the last few years… you are the ones who make it all worthwhile for me.

Posted on

Insightful

Thanks to yet another bloody good idea from my mate Mr Robbo, I was inspired to do the same thing he did…

This is a Wordle tag cloud that gives an overview of the general zeitgeist of Betchablog.  It analyses the words used in my blog posts and presents them in various sizes according to their frequency of use – the more often the word occurs, the bigger it appears – giving a nice insight into the main ideas contained in the text.  It’s a neat little tool, and I’ve used it to create word clouds for lots of text in the past, but oddly enough, I’d never actually used it to analyse this blog.  Overall, I think it’s a pretty good reflection of what gets talked about here (although I think the word “amazing” may be just slightly over-represented thanks to a certain recent blog post that mentioned it once or twice!) I’m not sure exactly just how far back in time it goes… I’m sure it didn’t analyse all the way back to when I started this blog, but either way, I like it!

If you want to try something similar, just point your browser at www.wordle.net and give it the URL for your blog (or any other chunk of text)  Thanks to a little bit of Java magic, in mere moments, you too can have a similarly beautiful typographic masterpiece!

Thanks for the suggestion @mrrobbo!