Jonesieblog

I’ve been working this afternoon on the code behind the ScotEduBlogs site, to speed up performance. Hopefully the blogs page should come up much more quickly now. I also reinstated the sponsors’ logos that I accidentally wiped a week or so ago!

To be honest, I am partly writing this post to check that the feed updating daemon is still working properly

Stumble it!

Since moving ScotEduBlogs to its new server, I’ve changed how the graphs are generated on the statistics page.  I’m now using Open Flash Chart, and have taken the opportunity to add a few more graphs - posts per month, posts by day-of-the-week and total posts for each authority.  East Lothian seems to be the most prolific by far.

Stumble it!

I make no apologies for the self-congratulatory tone of this post - the ScotEduBlogs service has a new home, thanks to some funding from Learning and Teaching Scotland  and the Scottish Qualifications Authority, and I’m chuffed to bits.

John did all the leg-work that lead to this funding, so big thanks to him.

Externally, nothing looks different, apart from the appearance of LTS and SQA logos on the front page, but the site is now running on its own dedicated server.  This provides us with much greater confidence in the stability of the service, and some room to expand the facilities on offer.

This funding and the kind comments from  Joe at SQA mean a lot to me personally.  John, Peter and I have put a lot of our own time into this project, and I’m proud of what we have produced together - we delivered all the functionality we promised and more, in a very short timespan.  This is pretty rare for an IT project!

In the early days there was a somewhat mixed response to our plans, with questions about our motivations, and a vibe that maybe we should leave this stuff to the professionals at LTS,  so it has been very gratifying to see the big institutions in Scottish education now officially recognising the worth of scotedublogs.org.uk.

If you’re wondering what exactly scotedublogs.org.uk is, read John’s post, which explains it all superbly.

Stumble it!

I’ve been playing with the data from Scotedublogs (I can provide this data in its raw detail, if anyone wants it!). Clearly we do not have every edublog in Scotland in the system, but I thought this visualization was interesting:

Stumble it!

I’m afraid that someone in South Korea is labouring under the misapprehension that putting encoded email messages into the tags of blogs at scotedublogs.org.uk will make something happen.  It doesn’t make anything happen, apart from wiping the existing tags for the blog, and causing me to send an abuse report to the isp of said South Korean.

I’ve put some code in place to catch nonsense tags, and am going to restore the tags from a backup of the database, but it might be worth checking the record for your blog to see if the tags are looking OK.

Stumble it!