The Blogs at Penn State has helped students, faculty, and staff publish content to their Penn State Personal Web space. Today's update to the blogs system enables creation of blogs in Penn State Protected Personal Web space as well. When a user creates a blog, they will be given the option to create the blog in their protected space. If this option is chosen, then:
Want to see how it works? Watch the screencast embedded below. New Blogs At Penn State? Visit the getting started guide
If you prefer, you can download the full size screencast as a quicktime movie..
In the video below, Stuart Selber, associate professor of English, Jeanette Novakovich, lecturer, Matt Weiss, GA, and a student discuss how ENGL 202C technical writing assignments are now created using more of the technology tools they will encounter in industry. Students design blogs to both showcase and reflect on those assignments.
In the video below, Schreyer Honors College Dean Chris Brady and two students describe a pilot in which the students are asked to blog about their college experiences. Students are asked to relate their posts to the Honors College mission of academic excellence with integrity, building a global perspective, and creating opportunities for leadership and civic engagement.
This video was produced as part of the lead up to the 2009 Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology.
So you've just spent hours crafting the perfect post and you click the Save button and your post is gone. The session timed out, the page isn't responding, or some other variant of the blogging nightmare happens to you. I've been blogging a long time and it has happened to me quite a few times. I'll offer a couple of really easy tricks to keep those posts around -- even in the event of an emergency.
Copy/Paste
One of the easiest tricks is to simply do a select all and copy of your post every few sentences. You can get really good at it if you learn the keyboard shortcuts -- "Command + A" to select all, and "Command + C" to copy. Doing this has a really recent copy of your post in the computer's clipboard making it easy to just paste it back if the browser quits, stops responding, or otherwise craps out. That is by far my top tip.
Unpublished Draft
Several times while writing posts I do my select all and copy strategy and then save an unpublished draft. It takes a little time, but could save you lots of frustration. Saving a post as an unpublished draft is simple little feature that lots of people overlook. Essentially what it is doing is keeping a server side record of your entry. You can leave it unpublished as long as you want and only have to switch the status and save again to make it public.
Writing Outside the Blog
If you have an idea you want to work on, but don't think you'll have Internet access to write in an outside application. Do your self a favor and don't use Microsoft Word as it deposits all sorts of nasty hidden characters and formatting elements into the blog when you copy and paste it in. I use a simple text editor to write externally quite a bit -- a good tool to try is the free Evernote application.
There are other options that allow you to not only write externally, but actually publish posts without going through the copy and paste procedure. As a matter of fact you can even use Google Docs to publish into your PSU Blog. I'll write up a separate post detailing that.
Final Thoughts
I guess all I am saying is take some time to capture or save your posts several times while writing them. It'll save you time in the long run and will keep the frustration to a minimum.
In this screencast we look at how to embed content from Youtube in your blog. This video uses Youtube as an example, but you can use this same method for many other media sharing sites such as flickr, google reader, vimeo, etc.
In this screencast we show you how easy it is to create a course blog that automatically pulls all your students' posts into a single page. This uses a simple tag search using the new Blog Search feature of the Blogs at Penn State. To make this work we are operating with a couple assumptions. Let's look at those:
If you need help with this, or would like to discuss it, just email us at blogs@psu.edu.
On the morning of Monday, August 25th, Blogs At Penn State was updated to Movable Type 4.2.
Current users of Blogs At Penn State will not have to take any action for the upgrade. Movable Type 4.2 features changes under the hood to improve stability and security. Movable Type 4.2 also features the ability to create blogs based on various templates such as the "Professional Website" template set. Click the image below to watch a screen cast detailing the features of this new template set.
Want to move your existing blog to the professional template set? Learn how.
Teaching and Learning with Technology
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