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 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.
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:
Glow Blogs have been updated from WordPress 4.7 to 4.8.2
The main features in this update:
There are new Text, Image, Audio & Video widgets More details and examples.
Adding and editing links is now a better process.
See the Version 4.8 on WordPress Codex for more details.
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
Glow Blogs now supports email notification for comments.
To enable email notification:
This is no longer included in Jetpack.
If you have the jetpack plugin Activated there is a setting to add snow to your blog in December.
Dashboard->Settings->General
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.
Glow Blogs has just had a small update which included:
Speeding up the loading of the Local Authority Home pages.
Add the ability to add O365 Forms, Office Mix and Stream.
You can embed all of these by pasting the URL into the post editor. No need to copy the embed code.
Example Form:
Screenshot of the Form editor, click to expand:
and a gif showing how easy it is click to expand:
A feature of WordPress that not too many Glow Bloggers use at the moment is the Featured Image.
Features images can be added to posts and will be used by the blogs theme, either to display on the post and or to provide navigation.
for example in TwentyFourteen, the home page grid or slider is provided by posts with featured images. For example:
Featured images will also be picked up by twitter if you post a link to a blog. Like this:
They are also shown if you paste the link to the blog into another post and on the LA home pages of Glow blogs.
The featured image on this post is Water feature in Muang Boran (Ancient Siam) in Samut Prakan, Thailand found on flickr, taken by Uwe Schwarzbach and used under a Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.
