Tag Archives: blogging

Moving Home

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After blogging somewhat infrequently for the last 5 years, 3.5 of which have been here on this self-hosted WordPress blog I feel like it’s time for a change.  The last time I changed this blog theme I tried to make it a little easier to use and more like a Tumblr blog.  However reading Will Richardson’s thoughts about blogging and his move to Tumblr I was inspired to give it a go.

It’s rare that I get the chance to write long thought posts any more, but I often have smaller snippets to share. I’m incredibly busy since becoming Assistant Head and I’m looking for something that sits somewhere between the limitation of 140 characters on Twitter and the time it takes to write a post on here.  Tumblr seems to fit the bill nicely and is more than capable of handling extended writing, whilst being extremely simple to post to.

I already owned www.danielstucke.com, I think it’s important to own your own space on the Web these days, it used to redirect to this blog but now has my Tumblr on it. I also feel like it’s time I wrote under my whole name. 5 years ago I registered most things online under ‘mrstucke’, feeling like I’d rather it was harder for students to identify me. Since then I’ve gained so much professionally from writing and sharing online that I’d rather write under my full name.

So for the time-being at least I’ll be writing over on www.danielstucke.com and not here.  I won’t cross-post everything, as I had experimented with, as that just clutters the conversation.  I’m also using www.ifttt.com to work with that content, bookmarking and saving to Evernote each post that I write.

I can be quite fickle so may well switch back again at some point, if not I hope I’ll see you there!

 

Wonderful WordPress – Or how to leave edublogs…

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As I have previously blogged, the introduction of adverts on Edublogs was enough to make me finally move out and set up on my own.  This proved to be both a simple and satisfying process.

Eggs in 2 baskets: After reading up a little around the web about hosting your own blog it became apparent that registering your domain with a different company to where you host is a pretty good idea.  That way if there are problems with your hosting you can take your domain name off with you.  With that in mind the first thing I did was find the cheapest / most kosher looking place to register my domains.

Domains: I think it’s important to have a managed and thought out presence on the web, and this blog is mine.  If employers, prospective employers, parents or pupils want to Google me then this is what I want them to find.  With that in mind it made sense to be at www.mrstucke.com.  I was tempted to just stick with a .co.uk domain, but what if someone else registered mrstucke.com in the future?  I couldn’t have that so I decided to register mrstucke.com and mrstucke.co.uk.  At this point I got a little carried away, I also decided to register danielstucke.com and danielstucke.co.uk.  One day in the future I might use these for more personal stuff rather than professional.  But again I felt that while I was sorting this out I wanted to ‘bag’ my name on the Web while I could.

I scoped out a number of registration companies and ended up registering the .com domains with GoDaddy.  I registered these for 5 years at a cost of £50.  I registered the .co.uk domains with 123-reg at a cost of around £13 for 2 years (the maximum you can register a .co.uk for).  All of these companies will let you quickly check the availability of your potential domain names.

Forwarding Domains: It was a relatively simple process to log in to these two accounts and forward all of them to mrstucke.com.  If you try any of those domains they will all point straight to this blog.

Hosting: I took some advice from some friends who host their own blogs, Doug Belshaw recommended that I check out Bluehost as a place to actually host the content of mrstucke.com.  Doug has hosted numerous blogs over recent years so that was a good enough recommendation for me!  I signed up for 12 months, this came in at around $8 a month or £50 a year, it would have been cheaper if I’d chosen a longer contract but I opted for a short one initially.  Registration was pretty simple.  I told them the domain name I would be using and everything was set up almost instantly.  (I have just noticed that Doug’s blog is currently moving hosts – I hope this isn’t a bad sign about Bluehost!!!)

WordPress: The dashboard that you are faced with at Bluehost is a little daunting at first but after a little playing about I found my way to the Software/Services section and clicked on Simple Scripts.  This loaded up a menu of things that I could install on my space at the click of a button.  A few clicks later and a blank WordPress blog was succesfully installed and showing up at mrstucke.com – fantastic!

Migrating Edublogs: Edublogs is a WordPress installation so migrating from one to the other couldn’t be simpler.  Log in to Edublogs, click on ‘Manage’ and then on ‘Export’, your whole blog will be saved to your machine as a surprisingly small .xml file.  It is as simple an operation on your new blog to ‘Import’ the file, make sure to import all your comments with it.

Themes/Widgets/Plugins: The whole process above took a couple of hours, I then spent the best part of a day customising this blog to look as it does now.  There are a staggering array of Themes (the general look and feel of your blog), Widgets (the things you see on the right hand menu bar) and Plugins (little snipets of code that tailor the blog, such as the bookmarking buttons at the end of each post).  WordPress.com is a good place to start for ideas, after this a Google search for “Top WordPress Themes” or something similar will bring up  a wealth of options.

Easy Peasy: I couldn’t be happier with the move, there is a sense of satisfaction of knowing that I own my very own piece of the Web.  The process was really quite easy, I could have probably done it for a little less money if I’d not got carried away with domains and if I’d gone for an all in one hosting/domain package.  But I think it’s a small price to pay for the network I have developed thanks to this blog.  I hope that through my career this becomes something of an advert for Mr Stucke!

6 Quick Steps:

  1. Pick a domain name
  2. Check availability and register
  3. Buy a hosting package
  4. Install WordPress
  5. Export/Import old blog
  6. Customise

If you want any further advice feel free to ask and I’ll try to help!

Leaving Edublogs

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Last week I began hearing some twittering about ads appearing on Edublogs blogs.  A little investigation on the Edublogs forums showed a post which, to be fair, dates back some months detailing the fact that ads will be added at random to free accounts.  They can quickly be removed for $40 a year as part of the Edublogs Supporter scheme.

As you will see on the forum post and twitter link above the backlash has begun.  Whilst it seems unfair to kick a free service I can’t help feeling let down by Edublogs.  The service was always heavily promoted as being free and ad free.  To suddenly turn on ‘in post’ Google ads without so much as an email to members informing them of this decision is disappointing.  There are already tales of inappropriate adverts involving guns, dating agencies etc appearing on school blogs.  The fact that these are planted inside posts makes it appear as if the author is promoting them.

I’d been thinking on and off over recent months that I should really own my own little part of the Web, so really I should thank Edublogs for spurring me on.  The process of buying a domain and importing this blog was easier than I thought.  I will detail the process in due course for anyone who is interested.  Whilst costing a bit more than $40 a year, I’m pleased with the result.

I think it is important that we teach pupils to manage their on-line identities, and it will be increasingly important what employers, pupils and parents see of us online.  If someone wants to find me then I think mrstucke.com is an obvious place to look!

So farewell Edublogs, I hope you get over this hurdle.  I am thankful for getting me started so easily on this journey but I’m off to pastures new….

CC image from kamoda on flickr

CC image from kamoda on flickr

Pupil blogging with a wiki

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I have finally started one of my classes blogging. I decided to use a wiki from the excellent Wikispaces for this purpose rather than a blog. I took inspiration from Kristian Still’s excellent wiki at his previous school (which seems to have dissapeared now Kristian has moved schools?). I also made the choice as I’m a big fan of wikispaces, our Scheme of Work is now completed in a basic form on a wiki and I would like to get the pupils to add resources to this over time, so it seemed logical to keep the pupil blog on the same platform. I find that the ability to add code of almost any description means that you can embed a fantastic variety of resources using wikispaces.

It took some time agreeing how to go about this with my school, concerns over pupil safety and representation of the school were obviously paramount, but to be fair school have been wholly supportive of the project. I have kept the terms of use as simple as possible and spent half a lesson discussing the correct use of the wiki and how important it was the pupils used it respectfully. They have taken to it fantastically, they are taking great pride in seeing their work online.

At present I am simply letting 1 or 2 pupils per lesson be our blogging scribes, recording the details of the lesson and then afterwards I am adding copies of anything that I think useful (for example photos of pupils work and copies of the IWB pages). This has proved fantastically useful at the start of each lesson as a means to recap what we have done so far in the topic.

At first I asked pupils to sign up to wikisapces themselves as a homework, this was not successful and I ended up with only two users. Instead I spent a little time setting up accounts for each pupil using the gmail address trick, each pupil having an address of myclass+THEIR NAME@gmail.com. This also has the advantage that any messages sent via the messaging function in wikispaces automatically get sent to my email account.

I must admit that wikispaces messaging function hadn’t crossed my mind at first, it is effectively an email system within wikispaces. The pupils found it within about 5 mins! This was a concern at first, especially as I read this at the same time the issue arrived at my door. However after a little reflection I decided that it shouldn’t be a great problem and sent a simple message to all pupils asking them to use it responsibly for discussion on topic and nothing else. AS I was receiving copies of all messages I was rather pleased to see a “maths has become cool” replied by “yeah!!!!! this is better than doing work” which made my day.

Please head over to the blog and leave the pupils a comment if you feel inspired, I’m sure they would be delighted. I plan to continue with this for the next half-term and if successful I’ll roll it out with some other classes. Some ideas in the pipeline at the moment are getting each pupil to add something as part of a homework, and also to get them all to take pictures using their mobiles for use with one of the forthcoming topics.