edna.edu.au

Social Bookmarking: Final release

Today's release has seen the completion of the final step in our implementation of Social Bookmarking functionality to me.edu.au.

For those that are unfamiliar with Social Bookmarking, me.edu.au's new Social Bookmarking will help you store your favourite websites and share them with your colleagues. It allows you to create your own filing convention by using 'tags' to name your selection of websites. For instance if you found a great website on Australian poetry, you could 'tag' it as English, Poetry, Australian, Australian Poetry etc.

Each me.edu.au user now has their own Bookmarks page called 'My Bookmarks '. The 'My Bookmarks' page allows you to organise your favourite sites. You can edit the bookmark title, description and community tags, as well as delete the bookmark completely. You can also highlight resources of particular interest using the new highlighting functionality.

me.edu.au Social Bookmarking will also recognise the bookmarks from other Social Bookmarking sites such as delicious and diigo and will add these automatically to your 'My Bookmarks' page. You can also control whether any other feeds you have added to your me.edu.au profile will flow directly through to your bookmarks page by going to the feeds tab on your 'edit profile' page. You can add new RSS feeds here from other places you are active, e.g. Twitter or external blogs, and use the tick boxes to decide what gets bookmarked.

Bookmarks added by me.edu.au users can be found through the search functionality and also the 'Bookmarks' filter on the search page. Your own bookmarks will appear higher on the search result list but you will also see what else has been bookmarked by me.edu.au users. You can visit your colleague's profiles and their Bookmark pages, and save any bookmarks of interest you find to your own page using the Bookmark icon.

Building on what has been released so far this year, me.edu.au will now notify you when someone has made a comment on an item you have bookmarked. You can control these notifications by going to 'edit profile' and then clicking on the notifications tab. Once you have made your choices, click save changes.

What other changes have happened in me.edu.au in the lead up to this release?

• Share and Add Bookmark bar - When viewing the 'My View' and 'My Bookmarks' pages, you will now see a box which says 'Add a link or a message'. This is where you can add new bookmarks. Just paste in the URL of the resource you want to bookmark (making sure to include http:// at the start), add any special tags or names of me.edu.au communities you are a member of and that you want to share the resource to, and add a description.

• Made a mistake?  - You can edit the title, description and tags of your bookmarks by editing them on your 'My Bookmarks' page.

• Commenting - As mentioned previously you may have noticed the new commenting functionality for resources shared in me.edu.au. You can now view who else has bookmarked and commented on the same resource, and contribute further to the conversation by going to the 'more details' page for a particular resource.

Tags: bookmarking aboutme about me help
Posted at 05:05PM Sep 29, 2009 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[2]

Approving blog Comments

By default the me.edu.au blogging tool is set so that all comments on a blog are hidden until the author of the blog approves them.

To approve blog comments on your blog, go to your edit blog page and then click on the 'Comments' tab.

To approve the comment, mark it as spam or delete it, click in the check box of the appropriate column next to the comment.Scroll down and save you choice.

The comment should now appear at the bottom of your blog post.

You can change these default comment moderation settings in the Preferences tab of the edit blog page in the comments section.

Tags: help blogging
Posted at 01:45PM Sep 11, 2009 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]

Adding Images to me.edu.au blog

Adding images to your me.edu.au blog isn't as straight forward as you think, but once you know how to do it, it is easy.

Click the Edit Blog link from your me.edu.au profile

Click on File Uploads



You may like to upload all the images you might use in your blog post first or I personally like to keep one window open on my blog post and the other on the file uploads area.

When an image is uploaded you will see the screen below and will need to copy the address of the image

If you miss this screen, you can find all your uploaded images stored in your File Uploads area.

Back in your blog post, place your cursor in the text area where you want your image to display and then click on the Insert Image button in the text editor.

Paste the URL of the image your copied from the File Uploads area into the Insert/Modify Image window, Image URL box. Click on the Preview button to see the image and write a description of the image in the Alternative text area. Click OK.

The image you inserted should now appear in your blog post.

Note: There is no autosave! If you have to navigate away to your File Upload area to get an image address, SAVE A DRAFT!

Tags: help images blogging showme
Posted at 10:44AM Sep 11, 2009 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[1]

ICT ME-ntoring group

If you are a little nervous about ICT, are a newbie or just need some help we have set up an ICT mentoring group on edna Groups. The group welcomes the absolute novice to information technologies. We'll be putting together a range of activities in what will be a very supportive environment for people to work through as a group or at their own pace. Some of the things we'll be covering include general use of the Internet, Office Applications, File sharing, Collaborating online and much more.

So drop on by and have a look at the first set of activities - more will be added soon!

Oh and we are also looking for those who are a little more experienced to become mentors as well! If you are interested or feel you have some knowledge on a particular topic to share give me a hoy!

Tags: help edna ict mentoring
Posted at 04:48PM Feb 17, 2009 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]

Sharing links and messages in communities

When you visit any me.edu.au community you will now notice the new share a message or a link functionality. You can now share a longer description of the link you have added or share a message to the whole community. This new feature does not replace the functionality of the community whiteboard but instead forms the 1st step to the introduction of Social Bookmarking to me.edu.au.

Tags: howto me.edu.au how to sharing help communities showme about me
Posted at 04:17PM Feb 11, 2009 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]

Help - edna Blog

Can't publish your me blog post?  Can't save your me blog post? Your text has gone haywire and and changed the look of your blog? Keep getting an error message and don't know what to do? Well then hopefully this blog post can help you out.

Most issues arising from the edna Blog tool is related to HTML. If you are unable to complete, save, or publish a blog posting there is probably HTML somewhere in the post which the blog tool does not recognise. It is the same if your entire blog suddenly makes every post you've ever done to bold or italics formatting.

It is often caused by copying and pasting in content which contains its own HTML eg. copying something from a Microsoft word document, or straight off a websites, or from another HTML editing program like Dreamweaver. The error can also occur when you are trying to embed content from other websites such as pictures, widgets, videos etc.

I find that the easiest solution is NOT to go through and try to pick/guess which bits of HTML may be causing the issue (trust me you can waste a lot of time doing this), instead I do the following:

1. Copy the entire blog post and paste it into a plain text document such as Notepad
2. back in me.edu.au, delete all of the HTML from the blog post by clicking the TOGGLE HTML SOURCE icon (looks like <>) and delete everything in view. Unclick the Toggle HTML icon when you have got rid of everything.
3. Now highlight and copy the text from the plain text document and paste it back into the post.
   
4. Save it straight away and keep saving as you start to reformat your post.
   

If you feel you need to write out your blog post in full before you get online and post it, why not write it in a plain text document first? This can save a lot of tears later.

Also always, always save your blog posts as you are writing them. There is currently no autosave function in the me.edu.au blog and if you decide to navigate away from your post or take too long to compose it and get logged out, you will lose everything. Many a blogger has had their heart broken by this...

If you continue to have issues with posting to your me.edu.au blog don't hesitate to contact the edna team at groups@edna.edu.au Someone there is sure to be able to get you back on track again.

Happy blogging!

Tags: edna blog about me blogging showme help
Posted at 12:15PM Jan 16, 2009 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[1]