All posts by John

I am a teacher, currently working in Banton Primary for North Lanarkshire Council. I also act as Product Owner/provide support for Glow Blogs. I like Blogs.

Jetpack sharing IE 11 Bug

We have discover a small issue with the Jetpack sharing module on Glow Blogs.

If Facebook and Twitter are selected to hide behind the share button they don’t show in IE11 it doesn’t work with Official buttons so the other option needs selected or they have to be shown individually.

Jetpack sharing settings screenshot

We use the Icon Only setting here on the help blog.

Jetpack sharing settings - buttons

 

We hope to fix this in a update soon.

Creating a School Website Videos

Mr Feist, a Principal Teacher & Digital Leader of Learning in Mosspark Primary School in Glasgow, has produced a series of videos on creating a school website. The video are hosted on YouTube and displayed in Mr Feist’s Glow Blog:

Creating a School Website for FREE! | The Digital Revolution

You can Follow Mr Feist 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (@mrfeistsclass) on Twitter.

Glow Blogs Clean Up

There are now well over 200000 blogs in Glow Blogs. Many have now fallen into disuse.

We are going to be removing some inactive blogs to help with the performance of those in use – this will include private blogs with no users and blogs with no updates for over 2 years. Further information will be issued in the next two weeks.

So if you have a blog you use, but it has not been updated for a couple of years it might be an idea to update it.

Glow Blogs Update

Glow Blogs had a small update this week:

WordPress – 4.9.2 > 4.9.4
event-organiser plugin – 3.6.2 > 3.6.3
google-language-translator plugin – 5.0.33 > 5.0.43
wordpress-importer plugin  – 0.6.3 > 0.6.4

These were small maintenance and bug fixes. They should not affect the majority of Glow users.

Glow Blogs Update WordPress 4.9.1

We will be having and update of Glow Blogs this afternoon/evening.

Work will start at 16:00 and service will be restored as soon as possible thereafter.

Here is an overview of the update, we will be posting details of any changes to the help ASAP.

Name Current Version Update Version
WordPress 4.8.3 4.9.1
Plugins
Event-organiser 3.4.1 3.6.0
Wp-postratings 1.84.1 1.85
Themes
twentyfifteen 1.8 1.9
twentyfourteen 2 2.1
twentyseventeen 1.3 1.4
twentysixteen 1.3 1.4
twentythirteen 2.2 2.3
twentytwelve 2.4 2.4

Help Pages related to this release:

Gallery Widget

 

WordPress Update

Glow Blogs have been updated from WordPress 4.7 to 4.8.2

The main features in this update:

New Widgets

There are new Text, Image, Audio & Video widgets More details and examples.

Improvements to adding links

Adding and editing links is now a better process.

See the Version 4.8 on WordPress Codex for more details.

PDF upload problem – Fixed

We have had reports with a problem uploading PDF files to Glow Blogs.

This issue is now fixed, here is an example 3 page PDF uploaded to blogs: Test PDF file

PDFs that are uploaded  to blogs are linked to the  image thumbnails of the pdf. This looks like the first page of the pdf.

The developers are investigating a fix which we will be implemented as soon as possible.

We have a workaround at rather kludgy workaround.

You can upload pdfs somewhere else on the internet and link to them in your blog.

The O365 OneDrive provide by Glow is a good place to do this. After uploading a PDF to one drive you can ‘share’ it. Make it public and copy the link. In the blog post you want to add the pdf to you can, instead of uploading the file, link directly to it like this:  Download Test PDF

 

 

e-mail Notification for comments

Glow Blogs now supports email notification for comments.

To enable email notification:

  1. Dashboard
  2. Settings
  3. Discussion
    1. Email me whenever:  A comment is held for moderation √
    2. Before a comment appears: Comment must be manually approved √

Screenshot discussions settings - email

Glow Blogs YouTube tutorials by @donaldfeist

Glasgow Teacher Donald Feist (@donaldfeist) is producing some YouTube help videos on Glow Blogs. Glow Blogs Tutorial – YouTube Playlist.

Want to know how and why we use Glow Blogs as an incredible classroom resource? Look no further!
This short series is on how to create your own Glow Blog for the classroom. This is primarily aimed at Scottish teachers, however, as the platform for Glow Blogs is WordPress, this works for all teachers across the world who are allowed to use WordPress as an educational platform.