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
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:
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
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:
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.
my codeComment 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.
