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Making a move

Simon Robinson — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:08:09 +0000

Apologies to both of my readers who have been hanging out for posts. I haven’t been super happy with the Edublogs service for a while now. Poor performance, the introduction of advertising and uncompetitive pricing (to remove the advertising) has prompted a rethink. It goes like this…
“If I was going to pay for a hosting service I should be going for something that was going to perform consistently and deliver the goods.”
Maintenance outages and poor response times in a classroom setting (30 people hitting the site at the same time) have been issues for me in the past. On one occasion this year I had to re-plan 3 lessons on the fly when Edublogs was inaccessible for the whole school day. Fortunately I use an offline editor (Scribefire – it’s a Firefox extension check it out) so I created a Blogger account, reposted most of the stuff I needed and done “double book keeping” since.
So I moved to Squarespace. Not much difference in price, plenty more powerful and it’s where all the cool kids are at. It’s a bit of a pain moving everything over (still not done) but it’s worth it.
So visit me at the new site, add the feed to your RSS reader and sorry again “for an inconvenience caused.”

Feeling the pressure

Simon Robinson — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:25:45 +0000

Well I have been very surprised to hear that there are more than 3 people that subscribe to the feed or visit this site (thanks Mum!) I have never bothered to track stats by pushing my feeds through Feedburner as I was pretty sure it would be underwhelming. Now it looks like I have doubled my readership so I’m feeling the pressure to expand and provide more content. Edublogs has been irritating me of late (slow, flakey, membership fee issues) so I’m working on a shift. If I have to pay for an ad-free service I figure get your monies worth.
Watch this space.

This is the plan

Simon Robinson — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:33:59 +0000

St Columba’s Physics is going “web2.0″. Hang on and enjoy the ride!

Everyone needs to get a blog. Go to Edublogs.org and sign up for one. Choose your domain name carefully, you will be stuck with it.

Get a del.icio.us account so you can save, share and publish bookmarks easily.

Get an RSS reader of some description. If your web browser is Safari, Camino or IE7 the RSS reader is built in, Firefox you will need to download an add on like Sage. Flock is a great browser to use for this as it has a blog editor and RSS feed reader right within the browser. Nice.

Blogged with Flock

Post using ecto

Simon Robinson — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:12:29 +0000

ecto is another external blog editor for OSX. MarsEdit is quite good but unfortunately doesn’t work from behind the school proxy. I cannot find any proxy settings for ecto either but the interface for seems a bit nicer.

Technorati Tags: ecto

It provides more WYSWYG stuff with rich text editing or html depending on your preference. You can browse iPhoto post current iTunes track and some other stuff with the click of a button from inside ecto and there are neat check boxes for categories and tags. I’m going to try both for a bit and see which one I settle on. My money is on ecto. It’s a bit cheaper too I think.

Post from MarsEdit

Simon Robinson — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 12:48:33 +0000

I was interested to find out if MarsEdit would work with Edublogs. I tried it at school and it wouldn’t hook up (kept giving a password error – more on that later) so I thought I would try from home. Bingo! Worked first time.

Got me to thinking…

Maybe I didn’t read the password dialogue box very carefully. Maybe it was asking for my proxy password and I kept providing the blog credentials. i will try again tomorrow and post an update.

Above is the MarsEdit logo with a link to Red-Sweater (the peeps that make MarsEdit). Below is an image that I have added from my Flickr account just to test out the functionality of MarsEdit. The inline spell checking is nice and I have played around with the hotkeys to make the html tags easier. I guess going through the WordPress WYSIWYG input fields online means you can avoid all that but it can sometimes be a bit slow.

Now we have it figured

Simon Robinson — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 07:17:18 +0000

I have been creating pages and wondering why they have not been coming up in the posts. Then I read the instructions. Funny that. Can be very helpful at times.