usefulwiki.com

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

• a moveable search box,
• rss rendering,
• embedded media ( youtube and googlevideo) ,
• simple create a page
•  adsense template,
• uploading of pdf files enabled with direct linking,
• and a favicon.

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.

http://cogdogblog.com/2006/12/27/cugdugplugins/

I’d like this flickr plug in please

This plugin will also add a new Photos tab (next to the existing Upload tab) in your WordPress edit screen which will allow you to easily insert your Flickr photos into your blog posts with just a couple clicks (much like the Flickr Post Bar plugin). Your inserted photos will then be linked back to your WordPress Flickr photo album.

I use this all the time on the other blog and it could be helpful here too.

Autosave doesn’t always work - lost a whole post tonight

maybe the youtube one - not sure where you get it but it sits in your post toolbar & lets you add youtube videos to blog posts with one click. Might be good for screencasts on how to edit the wiki?
adsense deluxe v8

democracy poll is good

and can we have a nicer header with the logo in please?

I’ve made this post published but private now. Wonder what that does?? On my other blog it means you can only see the post if you are logged in as admin. Does that work the same here? Not that it really needs to be private.

Here’s the first attempt at a logo, based on the rlgrey mediawiki skin. I quite like it but how might it be improved?

Here it is again with .com added