Happy New Year for 2010 from Useful Wiki and the Usefulwiki Blog.
In 2009 we moved from generic hosting to a local UK host and we’re pleased with that move so far. The theatre breaks blog is running much more smoothly under the hood.
I’ve no idea what 2010 holds for us, but it’s going to be fun!
Thinking about the theme that is used for the Theatre Breaks Blog, I wonder if we should consider a magazine theme like the one being used at City Escapes Theatre Breaks?
There are no changes to report during the month of August when the education sector is largely taking a summer break.
The root page or top level entry point for the domain usefulwiki.com has been in need of attention for some time now, but it was the act of ordering some Moo cards for the London Theatre Breaks blog that really pushed me into finding the necessary round tuits.
I could decide to put the full url on the cards as http://usefulwiki.com/londontheatre which is OK, but a bit of a mouthful to mention. What if somebody only remembers the “Useful Wiki” bit. Ah, I’d better put a link to the theatre breaks stuff on the top level index.html page – but that was so ugly. All it did was to send people forward to the wiki itself and mention this blog.
I could have spent some time hand coding a nicer index page, but hadn’t got around to it in all the elapsed time up until now, but then the idea of moving this blog up one level popped up and it seemed like an ideal solution. Let WordPress take care of the fixed pages as well as the blog. I’ve already done this on the capitalstyle domain so I knew it should be possible without upsetting any of the stuff underneath, and by having a fixed page as the front page of the blog, it saves redirecting all of the archive of individual posts here because they can just be assigned to another page called “blog” which puts them back exactly where they were again 
And now we have a nice looking (well, I think so) index reference page for anybody who goes directly to usefulwiki.com together with all the functionality of a WordPress blog to add sidebar widgets, blogrolls, updates and plugins.
Yesterday I set about polishing off some of the outstanding requests and issues for the usefulwiki.
The status of these jobs is currently tracked on the More setup tasks page, but may get mentioned in the development category on the blog too, like this. So now we have
The google analytics and hierarchy extensions might wait until there is a need.
Onwards and upwards with the content, community and contexts.
Spam Karma 2 , Sh-autolink and redirect all installed on this blog today.
We’ve got a lot of disk space and bandwidth available at usefulwiki, so we don’t need to rely on external hosting for pictures. There’s nothing wrong with uploading digital pictures to flickr.com and then displaying them here, but it’s nice to be able to offer the facility to upload directly, in the same way that, for example, wikipedia does.
But we haven’t just enabled the uploading of photographs, oh no. Get this – you can also share Word documents and pdf files at usefulwiki through the same upload system.
This means that at last there is a system available for educators, assistants and parents to easily share and write about educational resources without having to first register, login and email adminstrators with attachments then wait for the owner to get around to approving and uploading your stuff. This opens up enormous possibilities for usefulwiki.com to make big strides forward in building relationships between remote educators, resources and practices.
Using the Flickr Wordpress plug in I’ve effectively created a page that aggregates all the photos of the Flickr groups I belong to that relate to education.
Scroll down the usefulwiki photo album page past my own content and you can access the photo pools of any of the education related groups I’m a member of. They can be viewed right here in usefulwiki along with any comments that relate to them. Cool
Can’t switch users easily for the photos but choosing ‘everyone’ and using a unique tag like BetterReadingPartners seems to work.
Not sure why the words on the second line of this post are oddly spaced…
Ok, I installed the wordpress flickr plugin as requested, and linked it to my photo albums to test. This allows easy retrieval of flickr photos for blogging
Since this is a multi-author blog Linda will probably have to remove the link to my photos in the “configure” page for the plugin and link it to her own.
