We’ve been running WordPress at the university since 2008 and were the first university in the UK (in the world??) to implement BuddyPress, the social network that runs on top of the WordPress blogging platform. WordPress has come a long way in the four years we’ve been using it, moving away from being simply a blogging platform to a fully-fledged web ‘content management system’ (CMS) that now powers almost 72m websites (around 15% of sites on the Internet). Why is WordPress so popular? Arguably, because it’s open source software that has attracted thousands of contributors from around the world. Anyone can download and install WordPress for free and anyone with the skills can extend WordPress for their own purposes, all free of charge. It’s not simply a tool to build a website, but rather a technology platform that’s at the cutting edge of development on the web. It’s a great tool to learn if you’re a student or member of staff, and can be used to support degrees, courses, portfolios, projects and departments.

A new look

Today, we’re pleased to announce an upgrade to the look and feel of the university blogs. We’ve applied our own custom theme to make it look more consistent with other sites that you’ll see across the university soon. The theme uses some of the latest features in web development and was developed by Alex Bilbie, a student, who also works part-time in ICT services.

Some new features

Recently, we also switched on group forums, allowing group members to have extended, threaded discussions. Groups are ideal for communication around projects, courses or even departments that need a way for members to message each other. Groups can be private, invite only or open to anyone at the university, it’s up to you. You don’t have to run a forum either, as groups come with their own news feed where you can post updates.

We’ve also tweaked the social networking profile fields to differentiate between staff and students, too. If you’re a member of staff, you’ll soon be asked to use the blogs to maintain your university staff profile. Any member of staff can edit their profile as they wish and it will appear on the main university website within hours. Here’s an example of my BuddyPress profile and here it is on the staff directory. Students have their own profile fields to fill out and if you want to suggest other fields that you think will be useful, do let us know.

We hope you like the new look and features available on the university blogging platform. Remember, if you’re keen to learn more about how to use the blogs in your work and studies, there are a number of ways to learn more.

We’ve also made improvements to the default ‘CWD’ blog theme. Similarly, this will now reformat for the Apple and Android devices.

If you use a different theme for your blog, you can activate the WPtouch plugin. This will reformat your blog for a number of mobile phones devices. Just activate WPtouch from the plugins panel in your Dashboard.

Finally, there are iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps available for WordPress. Search for them in the respective apps store. To use these apps, you also need to allow them access to your blog. You can do this by going to your blog’s Settings > Writing and checking the XML-RPC box next to ‘Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.’

It was always our intention to provide a basic public-facing social network for the university community, but until recently, BuddyPress, the software that provides the social networking features for WordPress, didn’t offer granular enough privacy controls.

Now, each member of the community can choose which information they may public, make visible to only the community or make private.

You’ll also notice that your profile page is simply http://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/username and when you go to that address, you land directly on your profile page. Currently, there are just a few profile fields for you to complete. If you think it would be useful to add more, send a note to @jwinn. Thanks.

It only works for services that support oEmbed, but the number of those services is growing. Today, the following services will allow you to use the oEmbed method of embedding a video:

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• DailyMotion
• blip.tv
• Flickr (both videos and images)
• Viddler
• Hulu
• Qik
• Revision3
• Scribd
• Photobucket
• PollDaddy
• Google Video
• WordPress.tv (only VideoPress-type videos for the time being)

To embed media using one of these services, the tutorial is simple:

1. Copy the URL of the video/image/audio i.e.

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFsCFUCzwf0

2. Paste it into your WordPress editor.
3. That’s it!

1. Read First Steps With WordPress
2. For a good overview of how to understand and use the WordPress Dashboard, watch these short video tutorials
3. Read the WordPress community documentation about each of the administration panels.
4. There is a contextual ‘Help’ button in the top-right corner of every WordPress administration page.
5. Watch WordPressTV
6. Browse the official documentation for WordPress.com. In most cases, it will apply to your site, too.
7. Ask Google
8. Ask Joss to join your class, team or department meeting or faculty away day. I can provide training in an hour or just an overview in 20 mins.
9. Look out for the ‘Working with WordPress’ workshops for staff, announced on the daily alerts.
10. Call Joss on 01522-886075 (but try the above first!)

In April 2008, CERD quietly started to pilot WordPress on the Learning Lab, here at the university. A few of us started blogging and then a few more people joined us. Then, in February 2009, realising we were onto a good thing, we set up BuddyPress, a social networking layer for WordPress and moved off the Learning Lab on to blogs.lincoln.ac.uk, the permanent home of the blogs.

More recently, ICT Services have agreed to back the blogs with a new, dedicated server and professional technical support. Consequently, I’m very pleased to tell you that today, the blogs moved to the new server and out of the pilot phase. Hoorah!

Now we have a dedicated, permanent home for WordPress, you’ll start to hear more from us about how it can be used to support your research, teaching and learning. Any member of the university community is welcome to set up a personal, team, project, department or faculty blog, just like the Research Office, the Library, Nick, Julian, James and Sue, have.

Lending a hand

Together with the Research Office and Library, we offer monthly staff training sessions on using the latest web tools to support your work. There’s also the opportunity for staff and students to drop into a monthly lunch-time interest group to chat about using the social web. In addition, CERD also run occasional ‘Blackboard and Beyond’ sessions which demonstrate WordPress and other web technologies that might be of interest to you. We’re also happy to visit classes if you’re thinking of using WordPress in your teaching and learning.

If you’ve just logged in and don’t yet have a blog, that’s OK. There’s no rush. Have a look around, watch some video tutorials, look at what other people are doing and create a blog when you think you’re ready. You might even want to follow our robot on Twitter.

If you’re already blogging, let us know how it’s going. If you want to extend your blog with new plugins or a new theme, let me know via Get Satisfaction and I’ll see what I can do.

Maxwell’s Equations

You can browse by tag, category and date as well as search across every post. In addition, each search, tag, combination of tags and each category has an RSS feed which you can subscribe to and get updates whenever there’s a new posts relating to your chosen topic.

For example, if you click on the ‘RefWorks‘ tag, you’ll be shown all posts tagged with ‘RefWorks’. To find the news feed for these posts, just add /feed/ to the location bar (i.e. http://tags.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/tag/refworks/feed/). Likewise, if you search for ‘blackboard‘ you’ll see every post that includes the word ‘blackboard’, so the news feed for posts about Blackboard is http://tags.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/tag/blackboard/feed/

You can use the Community Posts site to browse, search and subscribe to topics that interest you. To learn more about how to use WordPress RSS feeds, read Joss’ post, Addicted to Feeds.

p.s. Don’t forget that you can browse and search the titles of university blogs, too.

1. Go to your Dashboard and click on Plugins, on the right of the screen.
2. Look for the WPTouch and WordPress Mobile Edition plugins and Activate them.
3. That’s it. Do NOT change your Theme. The plugins will automatically optimise the display of your blog when viewed on a mobile phone, iPhone or iPod Touch. WPTouch has various Settings which you can experiment with if you wish.
4. If you use an iPhone, you can download the WordPress app and update your blog from your phone. Nice!

What’s a plugin?

It’s an extra piece of software code that adds functionality to your blog.

What plugins are available?

You can see what plugins are installed by going to your blog Dashboard and clicking on Plugins in the menu bar.

How do I activate a plugin?

Just click on Activate which is to the right of the plugin description.

I’ve done that but it’s not working.

You may need to configure the plugin. Check your Settings menu or the Plugins menu on your Dashboard for any new options. You should also read about how the plugin works by clicking on the title of the plugin listed on the Plugins page.  This will typically take you to a web page where the plugin is explained in more detail.

I want to use a plugin but I don’t really understand any of this stuff!

You can read more about plugins or if you want to discuss this further, contact CERD.

I’ve been using a plugin but it’s stopped working!

Because plugins are not part of the core WordPress software, some plugins might ‘break’ when we upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.  Usually, the author of the plugin provides an update within a few days. Contact CERD if a plugin you use has been broken for more than a week.

I’ve heard about a great WordPress plugin but it’s not on the list for me to activate.

There are thousands of available plugins and only a few have been installed for use on the university blogs. Generally, a plugin is chosen for the university blogs because it will be useful for a large number of people and is actively being developed by its author. Many plugins are old and abandoned by their author and do not work with the latest version of WordPress.  If you find a plugin and have a genuine use for it, do contact CERD and we’ll evaluate it with you on our test server.

In their own words:

“Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website which allows you to store interesting and informative links and share them with others. The Research Office’s del.icio.us profile acts as a database of relevant research funding news and opportunities for staff.”

Social Bookmarking is simply a way to store your bookmarks or ‘favourites’ on the web, rather than on one computer so you’re able to access them at home, at work, on your laptop, mobile phone and any other device that has Internet access.  They are ‘social’ because, unless marked as private, your bookmarks are publicly visible.

However, without two other relatively recent developments on the web, the benefits of sites like Delicious would end there.  What makes your bookmarks truly ‘social’ is the use of ‘tagging‘ and ‘feeds‘.

When bookmarking a web page on Delicious, you are able to include one or more tags, (think ‘labels’ or ‘keywords’), which allow you to loosely categorise your bookmarks so that over time, you build up sub-collections of bookmarks.  For example, the Research Office have tagged some of their bookmarks with ‘funding‘ and others with ‘Europe‘ (click on the links to see what I mean). So if you’re interested in funding-related resources, you can quickly identify them among the 500+ bookmarks that the Research Office have compiled.  Even better, if you are interested in European funding, you can narrow it down further by clicking on ‘funding’ and then on ‘Europe’, isolating their bookmarks which include both ‘funding’ and ‘Europe’ tags.

Finally, you probably don’t want to be periodically checking the Research Office’s bookmarks to look for updates, but would rather that the updates are immediately ‘fed’ to you.  This is easily done by subscribing to a news feed, either for the Research Office’s entire collection of bookmarks or subscribing to one or more combination of tags.  For example, here’s the feed for bookmarks that are tagged with both ‘funding’ and ‘Europe’.

Depending on your web browser, there are different ways that you can view a feed.  Most browsers have their own ‘feed reader‘ built in. However, they suffer the same limitation mentioned above in that they are saved to a single browser and so your feeds are not available from another computer.  To overcome this, you can use an online feed reader such as Google Reader, where you can easily manage hundred of different feeds.  By doing this, your feeds are accessible from any web browser and are updated every few minutes so that you no longer need to visit the originating web sites because the content is fed to you.

I subscribe to over 100 individual website feeds, far more than I would have the time or inclination to visit otherwise.  I can quickly scan the updated feeds in my feed reader and if anything of significant interest appears, I can read either a summary or the full content.  Most websites now provide one or more feeds for their content. For example, the BBC offer feeds for each of their website sections as do the Independent newspaper.  Generally, if you click on a website’s feed icon, you’ll be taken directly to the news feed.

The use of feeds is a powerful way of aggregating information from the web. To learn more about feeds and how to use them, read this overview by Google. You can monitor the use of your own Learning Lab blog feed (who is reading it, how many times, etc.) by setting up a free account with Feed Burner and activating the Feed Burner plugin.

The university blogs support the use of Avatars.  You can upload your own avatar by editing your profile page, under ‘My Account’. You can also set up how your blog displays avatars by going to the Settings menu, click on Discussion and at the bottom of the page, select Show Avatar and then select your Default Avatar.  You’ll notice that you have a choice of using Gravatars, Wavatars, Identicons or MonsterIDs.

Gravatars are Globally Recognised Avatars. It’s a service which allows you to upload an image and any site you use that supports Gravatars, can use that image. This saves you from having to manage your avatar separately on each site.  If you don’t want to use a Gravatar, you can select the Wavatar, Identicon or MonsterID options.  These are cool ways to convert an email or Internet address into a unique image.

See the comments on this page for an example of a Gravatar and a MonsterID. Using avatars is a simple way of building a sense of community around your blog, bringing discussions to life.

RSS in Plain English

Wikis in Plain English

Twitter in Plain English

Podcasting in Plain English

Social Media in Plain English

Social Networking in Plain English

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

Prologue is a good example of how a theme can fundamentally affect the way your WordPress site looks and operates. Once you’re logged in, you only rarely need to visit the Dashboard again as you can post updates from the top of the front page of your site.  Your tags are displayed in the sidebar and the default set up implies that you think of tags more like formal categories and limit them to project components or individual areas of responsibility. If you prefer though, you can use the tag cloud widget instead and tag away to your heart’s content. For even greater flexibility, each tags has a web feed, so that you can ‘follow’ specific parts of a project and segment updates to the blog in your news reader. In addition, you can adjust the privacy of your microblog to suit you. If you’re not sure what all this means but think it sounds interesting, contact CERD and in 30 minutes you’ll know all there is to know!

You might also be interested to know that the theme is tweaked for the iPhone so that when you visit the site on your iPhone or iPod Touch, it’s reformatted to display perfectly with the post box at the top. I’ve been using Prologue for a while now and it’s a real pleasure to use as it allows you to focus entirely on your message.

1. Subscribe to the RSS news feeds for each blog. Every blog has an RSS news feed for both posts and comments. Subscribing to these will conveniently deliver the content to your news reader or web browser for you to read and evaluate. If you want advice on setting up a news reader, please contact us. It’s a fantastic way of keeping up with multiple blogs at once.
2. Examine and compare the revisions for each post or page. If your students have created blogs to use in one of your courses, you can be made an administrator for the blog and then view the revision history for each post or page. In WordPress, as soon as a post or page is saved once, a record of each revision is then made. You and your students can look at the complete revision history, examining the time and date of each revision, as well as compare two different revisions. If the blog is being created by a group of students, you can see who is contributing most to the project and compare the quality of contributions. You can find the revision history at the bottom of each post or page. Alternatively, the revisions can be displayed at the bottom of each blog post by activating the ‘Post Revision Display’ plugin. This makes the revisions visible to anyone who reads the blog.
3. Designing a good looking and fully featured blog is something to be rewarded. Are you aware of how a blog is designed and of the different ways that content can be presented to readers? Do you understand how themes are chosen and modified, how multimedia is embedded in a page, how widgets are used and how pages and categories can structure content? If you haven’t already, create a blog for yourself and learn about the different ways of presenting content on a blog. You can also contact CERD who will be happy to suggest how you might spot a particularly creative and thoughtful designer.
4. Are the students contextualising their work by linking to external resources? Websites rarely stand alone and a blog is crying out to be linked to other websites. There are a number of ways this can be done. For example, simply linking words on the page to external sites where good quality resources can be found demonstrates your students’ research skills; using widgets to display external content via RSS feeds onto the blog; and displaying content published elsewhere such as their videos on YouTube, images on Flickr and bookmarks on Delicious, are all skills to be rewarded. Again, if you’re not sure yourself about this and want to learn more, contact us or search this site for more information.

There are no doubt other ways that you could use a Learning Lab blog to assess your students’ work. Let us know by leaving a comment below and we’ll add it to the list above. Thank you.

CommentPress is a great tool for inviting discussion and critique around one or more texts with obvious pedagogic uses. Here’s a demonstration site with a single text open for comment and discussion. It took less than 30 minutes to set up and add the text, ready for review and comment. Existing blogs can use CommentPress or new blogs can be set up, specifically for a course where a number of texts are discussed.

To set up CommentPress, just activate the theme and click on CommentPress Options, to choose document or blog mode.

Similarly, you can also monitor the use of your blog news feed (who is reading it, how many times, etc.) by setting up a free account with Feed Burner and activating the Feed Burner plugin.

• User registration and role management: You can register any number of people to use your blog, giving them the role of Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor or Subscriber.
• Private posts: You can make any blog post or page private by clicking ‘Make this page/post private’. Only logged in users will be able to see the post or page.
• Password protect posts: You can protect any post or page by requiring non-logged in users to enter a password to read it.
• Private blogs: Any blog can be entirely closed to the public or even to other members of the university.
• Work on drafts before publishing: You don’t have to publish a post immediately. It could be written, reviewed, re-edited as a draft any number of times before you publish it.
• Version control: Every edit anyone makes is tracked and you can easily compare different versions of the same post or page.
• A different theme: Choose a theme which helps layout your work in the way that suits you. Many websites are run on WordPress but they don’t all look like blogs.
• Commenting: Invite comments on posts, creating a discussion around your work. You can require people to register before they comment.
• Plugins: If you find that WordPress doesn’t allow you to work in a particular way, there may be a plugin which can extend the current functionality.
• Multiple blogs: You can have more than one blog. If you want a personal blog, a team blog, a blog for a specific project and a blog for another project, that’s OK.
• Collaborate beyond the university: You can add new collaborators at any time, so if someone finds your work and is interested in working with you, they can easily be registered and assigned a role, even without a university account.

If you’re interested in learning more about the collaborative features of WordPress, contact Joss in CERD, who will be happy to meet and discuss this with you.

Here’s a few things you should know about the blogs:

• This is a ‘beta’ service provided by CERD. We’ll do our best to support you but you should try to support yourself, as you would with many other services on the Internet.
• The blogs are provided to support research, teaching and learning. We have some Community Guidelines, which you must abide by.
• The blogs use the popular and cutting-edge WordPress software. Using WordPress competently is increasingly a skill required by employers.
• The University of Lincoln blogs also use BuddyPress. This creates a private social network, only accessible and visible to university students and staff.
• Blogs are publicly visible by default but can be made private if you wish.
• Anyone with a university email address can join and participate in our social network and have their own blog.
• Blogs can be set up for departmental, team, project, group or individual use.
• You can connect your university blog to other services such as Blackboard, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• The blogs can be used to support a variety of tasks, such as textual analysis, or an on-going project or reflective journal.
• They are an excellent method of communicating with colleagues and peers both inside and outside the university and are designed to help get your message across.

Together with LLR and the Research Office, CERD offer staff training on the use of blogs and other web services. Training is announced via the Portal on a montly basis and available on all campuses. In addition, we’re also keen to work with teaching staff who wish to incorporate the blogs into their courses and can visit classes to discuss the blogs with students, too.

For more information, contact Joss Winn in CERD.