Recent entries created by Mathew Mannion

BlogBuilder Update

Follow-up to New Features from Blogbuilder news

Hot on the heels of our previous release, we've released another new version of BlogBuilder this morning with some improvements and new features:

File Uploads 

BlogBuilder now allows you to upload any file to your blog and link to it from your entries. This means you can, for example, upload your CV, or a Word Document for a group, or even an MP3 of you and your band playing directly into your blog entries.

The easiest way to do this is when you are creating an entry; in the Textile2 editor click the image next to "To insert a file" - , or from the WYSIWYG editor click the File Picker button - and follow the instructions to either pick a file already uploaded to your blog or to upload one directly into the entry. You can also upload files from the Admin screen for your blog if you go to the Manage Your Files and click "Upload a file" at the top.

For the moment, we're allowing 10MB of upload space per blog to use as you wish (under the Terms and Conditions of Warwick Blogs). Should you require more than this, email us with a request and we can increase your quota.

Improvements to WYSIWYG Editor

There've been a couple of improvements to the WYSIWYG editor:

• The style of the editor should now more closely match what your blog looks like (apart from the colours)
• We've added buttons for Blockquote, Indent and Outdent to the toolbar that were missing before
• It's now possible to easily create an image as a thumbnail to a larger image from the image picker
• You can now switch between the Textile and WYSIWYG editors directly from the "Create entry" screen. Please note, you will lose any content changes since the last edit
• The Preview button should now work correctly

As always, any comments or suggestions can be made below

Mathew Mannion : 12 Jan 2007 11:38 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New Features

There has been a major new release of BlogBuilder this morning with a few new important features that users may be interested in.

Rich Text Editing

Users of SiteBuilder2 may be familiar with the JScript editor that is used to edit SiteBuilder pages, called TinyMCE. This editor has now been implemented into Warwick Blogs to allow users to create entries in a much more user friendly way than the current Textile2 editor.

As this is a new feature and has been generally untested, this is turned off by default. To turn it on, click "Admin" in the top right hand corner of your blog's homepage, then click "Settings", and finally change the setting of "Default editor for creating new entries" to WYSIWYG Editor. All new entries that you create will then use the new editor (entries created in the WYSIWYG Editor can only be edited in the WYSIWYG editor, and the same goes for the Textile2 editor).

Notable advantages of using the WYSIWYG Editor:

• You can use keyboard shortcuts and formatting buttons similar to most word processors
• There is a spell-check button that allows you to check the spelling on your entry
• There are easy buttons to allow you to embed images (both in your gallery or from your hard drive) and videos

Google Analytics

One of our most requested features is to provide statistics for users' blogs - how many people are reading the blog, where are they coming from, which entries are most popular. Rather than create a fully featured stats package from scratch, we decided to make it easy to use Google Analytics to monitor your blog.

For information on how to use this, please refer to this FAQ.

Other updates

There have been a number of other minor bug fixes and improvements, including:

• The photo editor has been upgraded to the latest version, with improved red-eye reduction and other improvements to features
  
• Bugs related to posting trackbacks have been resolved
• The "Create entry" page should now load faster than before (we realise it took a very long time sometimes)

As always, any comments, bug reports or notes can be posted on this blog entry or on the Blogs Forum.

Mathew Mannion : 09 Jan 2007 10:56 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (20) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New release

A new release of BlogBuilder today has added a few new features and fixed some bugs that may be of interest to users:

• We have tweaked the CSS in blogs slightly and as part of this have added two new styles to pick from, Simplicity and Floral, with a variety of colours. You can use these on your blog by going to “Admin” and then to “Appearance”
• It is now much easier to use the Textile function to do tables, as we have provided some global CSS classes to style them with:

outline:

table(outline).
|_. Header1|_. Header2|_. Header3|
|Cell1|Cell2|Cell3|
|Cell4|Cell5|Cell6|

Header1	Header2	Header3
Cell1	Cell2	Cell3
Cell4	Cell5	Cell6

border:

table(border).
|_. Header1|_. Header2|_. Header3|
|Cell1|Cell2|Cell3|
|Cell4|Cell5|Cell6|

Header1	Header2	Header3
Cell1	Cell2	Cell3
Cell4	Cell5	Cell6

divider:

table(divider).
|_. Header1|_. Header2|_. Header3|
|Cell1|Cell2|Cell3|
|Cell4|Cell5|Cell6|

Header1	Header2	Header3
Cell1	Cell2	Cell3
Cell4	Cell5	Cell6

You can also combine these classes by putting a space in between the class names:

table(outline divider).
|_. Header1|_. Header2|_. Header3|
|Cell1|Cell2|Cell3|
|Cell4|Cell5|Cell6|

Header1	Header2	Header3
Cell1	Cell2	Cell3
Cell4	Cell5	Cell6

• You can now choose how many entries to display on your blog’s home page by going to “Admin” then “Settings”
• We now allow per-blog and global aggregation by author with the user’s usercode, for example http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/news/author/cuscav

For the more technical amongst you, we also now support Microsummaries, allowing users to get live titles in bookmarks in certain browsers.

Mathew Mannion : 16 Nov 2006 15:59 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (26) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Slow posting of entries

Many users may have noticed over the past week or so that the posting of entries has occasionally (with no real correlation to time of day or what is being posted) been extremely slow, and this has led to a few cases where people have accidentally posted two of the same entry by clicking the “Publish Now” button twice.

We have made improvements to two areas which we believe may have been contributing to the problem, and have released these changes this morning onto BlogBuilder.

If you experience any issues with publishing an entry, for example where the entry takes more than 15 or 20 seconds to publish, then it would be extremely helpful if you could email us at blogs@warwick.ac.uk with the time of day, the content of your entry and all the settings on the “Create entry” screen (Who can see the entry, who can comment on the entry, whether the entry is show in collections, whether the entry has “Show trackbacks” and “Send Technorati ping?” checked).

Mathew Mannion : 09 Nov 2006 10:29 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New features

A new version of BlogBuilder has been released today with some new features:

Textile 2

In order to provide better editing capabilities for entries and comments, we have upgraded the markup library that we use to Textile2, which supports new features such as tables and footnotes. The full list of Textile2 features are available for viewing here

Obviously with such a large change there may be minor errors that occur. Any problems can be reported here or on the Blogs Feedback Forum

“Watch this entry for new comments”

You can now “watch” or subscribe to entries in order to be notified by email when there are new comments on them. You can stop watching them at any time by clicking the link in the notification email. To watch an entry, check the checkbox underneath the comment form when you make a comment or click the link at the top of the list of comments for an entry.

Requesting Deletion of a comment

If you make a comment and wish for it to be deleted by the author of the entry, you can now click a link at the bottom right of your comment and send an email directly to the author of the entry.

Scheduled Entries

It is now possible to schedule entries to appear at a time in the future, for example if you wish to maintain a regular posting schedule on your blog or if you wish for it to appear, for example, after a lecture or assignment deadline.

Collaborative Draft Editing

When you save an entry as a draft, you can now allow other people to view it before it is published by giving them the link to the draft entry. To get this link, click on the title of the entry from the Admin Entries screen.

As always, if there are any problems, feel free to comment on this entry.

Mathew Mannion : 30 Aug 2006 16:58 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (27) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New version

There was a new release of BlogBuilder today with some new features and improvements:

In–Browser Photo Editing

You can now edit photos to touch them up and make them more blog–friendly after uploading them by clicking the Edit image icon in the gallery (or the "Edit image" link on the Admin Your Images page). This will allow you to use a number of tools to perform minor modifications to your image (resizing, cropping, rotating, enhancing, even adding a lomo filter or snow) and save the changes to your blog.

Other Changes

There have been a few other minor changes, mainly in that any problems that users have experienced in writing single–line comments or entries and the end being cut off (particularly after using an acronym such as WGA) should not appear any more.

There have also been some minor changes to the way that blogs send RSS feeds to help speed up requests if information has not changed, and users can access ATOM feeds of pages by appending /atom or ?atom=atom to the URL.

Mathew Mannion : 21 Aug 2006 11:29 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Blogbuilder update

There has been a new release of Blogbuilder today with a few improvements and new features:

Alumni Permissions

As well as writing entries that can only be seen by staff and students, users can now write entries that can be seen by all Alumni users who log in with their WGA users. This will not work retroactively and Alumni users will not be able to see "University–only" entries (only "University & Alumni" entries). If you find that the Alumni permissions do not work for you, then you may well have one of the old Alumni accounts we created before we had a proper authentication system that points to the WGA. If you are having trouble, let us know and we'll check out your account.

If you have joined the WGA and wish to maintain access to your blog after your ITS usercode expires, see this entry

[media] Tag

The Warwick Blogs syntax (Textile) has been extended in order to allow users to post sound or video files on their blog that are hosted externally, such as MP3 files that are uploaded to a hosting account or video files from YouTube or Google Video.

You can put these onto your blog by taking the URL of the MP3 or video (or the URL of the YouTube/Google Video page where it is located) and wrapping them in a [media] tag as follows:

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_YMigZmUuk[/media]

Which will produce the desired result:

Mathew Mannion : 14 Aug 2006 14:15 |  Tags: BlogBuilder ITS Media Update |  Comments (28) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Entry permissions

Follow-up to New groups system from Blogbuilder news

As an extension to the way that webgroups are now integrated into Warwick Blogs, there has been a slight way to the way permissions work when you are creating an entry. You can now search for specific groups when creating an entry by clicking "Find a Group", which allows you to find students for a particular module or course on–the–fly.

Along with this, in the "Manage your Groups" page on your blogs Admin page, you can add groups to this also, so you can search for groups as well as users. These groups update automatically, so the people who are on the module "ES425" now are not the same who will be on it next year, so bear that in mind when creating the entry.

Update: We've also fixed a problem with posting special characters into comments with our nice new slide down AJAX comments

Mathew Mannion : 07 Jul 2006 14:22 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update Webgroups |  Comments (12) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New groups system

A new small release of Blogbuilder was released last night, with a few very minor bugfixes (apologies to anyone who hasn't been able to make game reviews for a while), and a transference to a new system for organising groups.

Unfortunately, as a result of this, any favourites that you have for groups before (such as the module IB104, Philosophy 4th Years) will have been removed and you will have to re–subscribe to these groups. You can do this by:

1. Going to the Blog Directory
2. If the Group that you want is not on that page, click on Departments on the left
3. You can then see a list of departments. If you are looking for an individual module, you can click the link at the top and search for it by typing it in the field

Once you are at a group page, you can click on the heart icon next to the title to add it to your Favourites.

Mathew Mannion : 04 Jul 2006 09:43 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update Webgroups |  Comments (13) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Major update

A new version of BlogBuilder has been released today with some small fixes, and two large new features:

Customisable Sidebars

Something which we've been working on for a while, and that some people have asked for, is the ability to customise the aspects of the sidebar on your blog. By going to the "Admin" area of your blog and then clicking on "Sidebar", you can now re–order, remove and add sidebar items to your blog.

There are two ways to add sidebar items to your blog: either from a remote feed (RSS or Atom), or from a plain text (Textile or HTML). We've also implemented a number of wizards that can help you to add your Flickr photos, del.icio.us links or a feed from Warwick Podcasts directly to your sidebar easily.

At the moment, when you display sidebar items, they can either be an image feed, a podcast feed or a normal text feed. If there are any other types that you'd wish us to implement, let us know.

For more information on what you can do with your sidebar, you can read the Frequently Asked Questions.

In–page Comments

The popup comments windows have now been replaced with an Ajax drop–down that opens when the link is clicked and can be closed again. When you access comments from one of these windows, you can also post comments without leaving the current browser page.

Other Minor Fixes

There have been a couple of other minor fixes, specifically with Chinese characters being previewed in entries and some minor CSS fixes, as well as fixes with the help popups and gallery captions

If you have any problems with the fixes, or any features in BlogBuilder, as always you can report it by commenting on this entry or by posting on the Blog Feedback forum.

Mathew Mannion : 27 Jun 2006 09:49 |  Tags: Ajax BlogBuilder Sidebars Update |  Comments (25) |  Close comments |  Report a problem