Jonesieblog

Now that the days are long and the weather is sometimes pleasant, I’m spending much less time reading blogs and no time at all writing mine.  Life seems to be full of better things to do.  I guess I’ll get back into it in the Autumn!

Stumble it!

I’m a relative newcomer to the blogging game. It’s not rocket science, but there are a few things that I wish I had been told when I started. I’m aware that there are a lot of new bloggers in East Lothian - this post is for you guys! I’ll explain how you can help your blog to get connected to the bigger world of blogs.

The blogosphere (a hideous term used to describe all the blogs out there) is held together by the connections between blogs. These connections do not form by themselves - you have to get out there and make them yourself. It’s like going to a party - if you stand in a corner and don’t speak to anyone then you are unlikely to have a good time!

Technorati is your friend

Technorati sits at the centre of the blogging universe. Register with Technorati (it’s free) and claim you blog. You will then get to something like this:

Not particularly impressive stats, but the number of links is an important measure of how widely your blog has been noticed. It’s nice, as time goes by, to see the numbers go up

Write some posts

Before you launch yourself onto the world of blogging, try to have several posts on your blog already. When bloggers become aware of a new blog, they are very likely to have a look at it. If they find an empty blog, or one where the last post was written 2 weeks ago, they may never come back! There’s good advice on launching your blog here.

Learn about RSS

RSS feeds are tiny files that each blog produces. They list all the recent posts on a blog, and can be used with an RSS reader to keep an eye on lots of blogs without having to go visit them all every day. Register with Bloglines (free) and add feeds from your favorite blogs. If you’re in Scottish Education, you might like to use this OPML file as a starting point. You can import this into Bloglines and you’ll get feeds from a whole bunch of education related blogs. More on the importance of RSS on edu.blogs.com.

If you want to get comments, make them

The most important way to get noticed is to start commenting on other people’s blogs. Be sure to enter the address of your blog in the relevant field, so that readers can easily get to your blog. Commenting on each other’s blogs is the central means of communication in the blogosphere. It’s good to talk

Learn about Trackbacks

The exact workings of trackbacks depend on what blogging software your are using, but basically a trackback is a message from one blog to another, saying “I mentioned this post on your blog.” If you look at the comments on some blog posts, you will see these trackbacks at the bottom. If you read an interesting blog post, and feel inspired to write about it, be sure to put a link to the post, and enter the address into the trackback field in your post editor if such a thing exists. That way the author of the original post and other readers of the post will become aware that you have joined the conversation.

Use you Blogroll

All blogs have some form of blogroll - a list of blogs that the author recommends. Use yours! Every blogger you list will notice that you’ve done so (via Technorati or a similar tool) and may potentially become one of your readers.

Have fun

Blogging is fun. Don’t let it become a chore

Stumble it!

My colleague Craig Stebbing has recently seen the light and begun to keep a blog to use with his maths classes: Stebblog. He is using it in a way that I haven’t seen before. Rather than it being a scribe post blog, it is a place where he posts homework assignments. He is encouraging his classes to post questions about the homework as comments. Then either he or other students can reply to the questions.

The pupils seem quite enthusiastic about this, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out. I suspect that in time Craig may decide to run a separate blog in which to reflect upon how things are going.
Meanwhile, I spent some time on Wednesday helping Paul Goodall at PL to set up a class blog for his S5 maths class. I’ll post the URL once he’s got started properly.

Stumble it!

The Scottish edublogosphere (that’s a mouthful!) seems to be growing at an amazing rate.  As a relative latecomer to the party, I was welcomed and encouraged.  I guess that now I am one of around 20-40 blogging education department employees in East Lothian. It’s a cozy little crowd

I wonder how it will feel when we have 200-400 staff blogging?  I’m very excited by the prospect, but am also aware that we will need to think about how we, as a community, manage that expansion if we are going maintain a sense of community. I would like the 401st blogger to have as positive an experience as I have had.
What do you all reckon?

Stumble it!

For the last few weeks, I’ve been putting interactive whiteboard posts on this blog, as I knew that old exc-el site was going to be transferring to a wordpress system. That transfer has happened, so I’m going to put interactive whiteboard and specifically mathematical stuff back on my exc-el blog from now on. If this fragmentation bothers you, why not just subscribe to this feed which is combination of the feeds from the two blogs, courtesy of rssmix? Aah - can’t you feel the Web2.0 goodness?

Stumble it!