This is the plan

St Columba's Physics is going "web2.0". Hang on and enjoy the ride!

Everyone needs to get a blog. Go to Edublogs.org and sign up for one. Choose your domain name carefully, you will be stuck with it.

Get a del.icio.us account so you can save, share and publish bookmarks easily.

Get an RSS reader of some description. If your web browser is Safari, Camino or IE7 the RSS reader is built in, Firefox you will need to download an add on like Sage. Flock is a great browser to use for this as it has a blog editor and RSS feed reader right within the browser. Nice.

Blogged with Flock

Multiple edublogs

Rather than have everything on the one blog I reckon it will be easier to

manage (and control access where necessary) if I use multiple edublog accounts. It means I can separate specific content into separate domains and lock down certain sections to be user login only should if be required. Ecto deals with multiple spaces well although ecto 3 displays all blog posts for all domains rather than by domain. This may be fixed when it gets out of beta.

Post using ecto

ecto is another external blog editor for OSX. MarsEdit is quite good but unfortunately doesn't work from behind the school proxy. I cannot find any proxy settings for ecto either but the interface for seems a bit nicer.



Technorati Tags: ecto

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It provides more WYSWYG stuff with rich text editing or html depending on your preference. You can browse iPhoto post current iTunes track and some other stuff with the click of a button from inside ecto and there are neat check boxes for categories and tags. I'm going to try both for a bit and see which one I settle on. My money is on ecto. It's a bit cheaper too I think.

Post from MarsEdit

I was interested to find out if MarsEdit would work with Edublogs. I tried it at school and it wouldn't hook up (kept giving a password error - more on that later) so I thought I would try from home. Bingo! Worked first time.

Got me to thinking...

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Maybe I didn't read the password dialogue box very carefully. Maybe it was asking for my proxy password and I kept providing the blog credentials. i will try again tomorrow and post an update.

Above is the MarsEdit logo with a link to Red-Sweater (the peeps that make MarsEdit). Below is an image that I have added from my Flickr account just to test out the functionality of MarsEdit. The inline spell checking is nice and I have played around with the hotkeys to make the html tags easier. I guess going through the WordPress WYSIWYG input fields online means you can avoid all that but it can sometimes be a bit slow.

Now we have it figured

I have been creating pages and wondering why they have not been coming up in the posts. Then I read the instructions. Funny that. Can be very helpful at times.