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
All posts by John
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.
Glow Blogs Update September
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:
Featured Images
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 Content in 2014 Example Showing Featured Content in a grid on the homepage.
- Featured Content in 2014 Slider Showing Featured Content in a slider on the homepage.
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.
Yammer Embed
To embed a Glow O365 yammer feed in a Glow Blog you just need to paste in the url to the feed.
Visit the Glow Yammer Group you want to embed, copy the URL from the Address bar and paste it into the post or page editor. Visitors will only see the feed if they are logged into Yammer, if they are not logged in they will see a link to do so.
https://www.yammer.com/glowschools.org.uk/#/threads/inGroup?type=in_group&feedId=12265915&view=all
Here is a Gif showing how I embedded the feed above Click to see full-sized:
Language packs
You can now set the language for the Dashboard for your blog.
Settings-> General
Scroll down to the Site Language choose a Language and save:
Here is what the new post page looks like in Gaelic or Gàidhig
And in Chinese:
Note not all parts of the interface have translations, for example the Jetpack plugin which includes the Contact form which you can see in the screenshots.
Scratch Embed
Glow Blogs now support the embedding of Scratch projects. Just paste in the URL to the project into a post or page.
Example:
WordPress update July 2016
The recent Glow Blogs release incorporated a new version of WordPress, this add features from both WordPress 4.4 and 4.5 to Glow blogs some of the highlights are listed below, taken from Version 4.4 « WordPress Codex and Version 4.5 « WordPress Codex
Features from 4.4
Responsive images:
WordPress now takes a smarter approach to displaying appropriate image sizes on any device, ensuring a perfect fit every time. You don’t need to do anything to your theme, it just works.
Embed your WordPress content:
Now you can embed your posts on other sites, even other WordPress sites. Simply drop a post URL into the editor and see an instant embed preview, complete with the title, excerpt, and featured image if you’ve set one. We’ll even include your site icon and links for comments and sharing.
For example I’ll paste in the url for a recent tip page from this site:
- New Theme – Twenty Sixteen
Modern take on the classic blog design
Flexible header and fun color schemes will make your content shine
Mobile-first and responsive
Features from 4.5
Customizer Improvement
Device Previewer Buttons in the customizer controls footer shows how your site looks in mobile, tablet, and desktop contexts before making changes to its appearance. Theme installer previewer has the same function.
Visual Editor Improvement
Inline Link Editing enables users to direct URL input without switching to modal dialog.
Version 4.5 adds new shortcuts in Visual Editor.
- Use `your code` to transform
my code - Use --- to transform <hr /> create a rule
Comment Refinement
Refreshed Moderate Comment Screen has formatted comment content for display, navigation via a text link, updated message styles and so on. The comment form now enforce the maximum length of each field.
Optimization of Image Generation
Image sizes are generated more efficiently and remove unneeded meta, while still including color profiles in Imagick, for reduced sizes of up to 50% with near identical visual quality.
