Fusion Finds

UPDATE 8/30: It appears that the issue has been resolved. Edublogs emails should be deliverable to our school email addresses. Yippee!!

It appears that our email spam filter, which is through MOREnet, and which we have no control over, has started blocking messages from Edublogs.

• This means if you register for an Edublogs account with your school email address, you will not get the email you need to verify your account and complete the registration process.
• This means if you have an existing Edublogs account that you created with your school email address, you won’t receive any emails pertaining to comments awaiting moderation on your blog or informational messages for Edublogs.

Ugghhh!

The only solution I have at this point is to use a different email address. Many of us have additional email accounts through our home Internet providers, or through free services such as gmail, yahoo, or hotmail. If you don’t, watch this short screencast on how to register for a gmail account.

• New Users: Use an alternative email address when registering for Edublogs, not your school email address.
• Existing Users: Edit the email address for your Edublogs account. You need to change it in 2 places. 1) Click the Setting link in the top right corner and change your email address. When you click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen, your email address will revert back to school email. But after you receive the verification email in your non-school email account, and click the provided click, it will be changed. 2) Click Users in the top right corner and then choose Your Profile from the menu bar across the top. Change your email address here as well.

This means that all emails from Edublogs will be delivered to your nonschool email account. Which is not ideal but doable. Many email services provide the option to forward copies of incoming emails to another email account. You can view this screencast on forwarding Edublogs emails to your school account that are addressed to your gmail account.

Maybe the setting on the MoreNET email spam filter will be changed in the near future to allow messages from Edublogs. Until that time, we can use this work around.

UPDATE: Please read this post from James Farmer on his blog incorporated subversion.

You may have noticed that your Edublogs’ Visual Editor is missing the Embed Flash and the Media buttons. These buttons are no longer need. Which is good news. The sky’s the limit on what we can now embed. The embedding process is now even easier, but with a quark.

Sue Waters, The Edublogger, provides step-by-step directions for embedding flash or media in an Edublogs’ post. An important tip she shared recommends pasting the embed code as the last step before publishing. Clicking Save and Continue Editing button may break the code and cause your embed not to display. Embed then publish, embed then publish, embed then publish. Got it?

tag: k12, edtech, blogging, Edublogs, embedding, flash, media, Sue Water, The Edublogger

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when my attempt to embed a Google Gadget in an Edublog’s post was successful. I didn’t anticipate it working, since the embedding of javascript and other code directly in a post has been disabled due to security concerns. After having a little time to read some RSS feeds last night, I see that Edublogs now allows you to embed javascript, iframes, and object code. You can just copy the provided embedding code, click the code tab while composing a post, and paste. This will also work in text box sidebar widgets. See Sue Water’s Edublogger post with some Tom Barrett’s screenshots illustrating the process.

Tips

• If you click the Visual tab after pasting in the code and don’t see anything where you embedded the object, that’s to be expected. It will show up when you publish or preview.
• Sue Waters recommends pasting in the code as the last step before publishing. As Mr. Farmer explains, if you edit and resave a post with embedded object code, it will break the code. He is hoping to fix this bug soon.
• Sue Waters also states that if you are embedding flash (swf) or a video, you should still use the toolbar buttons on the Visual tab. See the examples on Edublogger, along with the screenshots of how to embed a VoiceThread or Animato presentation.

I know of several teachers who will be thrilled with this new feature.
tag: k12 edtech Edublogs code javascript embedding widgets Sue Waters Tom Barrett James Farmer

Image Credit: Greasemonkey by xrrr

Download Video: Posted by leelefever at TeacherTube.com.

tags: blogging blog k12 edtech commoncraft Lee LeFever

When you are posting photos online photos consider your readers. I’m sure you have experienced the line by line by line download of an image. Did you have the patience to wait for the image to load? The higher the resolution of your image (dots per inch) the larger the file. The larger the file the longer the download, or display. Printing a photo requires a higher resolution (bigger file) to achieve a quality photo. But if you are just displaying an image on the Internet, you don’t need that big footprint. You should optimize your photos for web publishing before posting them on your blog or web page. Optimizing an image will reduce the file size, but keep the appropriate resolution, and make your readers happy with quick loading pages. Optimizing can NOT be achieved with a click and drag of the image border. You want to place your image on the webpage at 100% of its size. Some important tips include:

• Don’t edit your original photo. Make a copy in a separate folder for editing.
• Once you’ve optimized a jpg image once, you can’t do it again. You will end up with a blurry mess. You need to start again with the original image.
• Use the Sharpening and Auto Fix tools to tweak your image, but just do it once. The more you do it the more color it removes.
• Save the image as jpeg (jpe or jpg), gif, or png format.

I recommend Picnik for optimizing photos. It is browser based which means no software to install and it is available on any computer connected to the Internet. You don’t even have to register for an account! View this short video tutorial on using Picnik to optimize a photo. Easy smisy.

Another strategy is to use thumbnails. If you have a picture in which your readers will want to see details, provide a thumbnail in your blog post that is linked to a larger file of the image. This allows your page to load quickly with the small thumbnail, yet provides your readers access to a large, clear image.

tag: photos optimize blogging web_publishing Picnik images