We had to make a minor upgrade to the blog server this weekend. All looks good to me so far but if you have any problems with your blog please email the webmasters (webmaster@cofc.edu) and let them know. Hope everyone had a great weekend.
I just added some new tutorials that may be helpful to you and your students. Check them out at http://benignim.pbworks.com/Tutorials
Have you ever wished that you could have a threaded conversation within your blog instead of using WebCT? Well now you can. Thanks to John and Jared (CofC Webmasters) and the new blog server upgrade you can have threaded comments. It’s easy to do.
The second thing of note is that only a few blog templates allow the discussions to display as threaded even though you’ve turned threaded on in your settings. To have the threading display properly you will need to use Twodder, Gear, Simplish or P2. Remember, these are the only themes that will actually display the threaded comments.
Now with your threaded comments you can actually track “conversation” in your blog posting making it much more useful for your class.
Thanks to Jim Duran for sharing the link to “10 YouTube URL Tricks You Should Know About.” This article contains tips for getting more control over the videos you embed in your blogs, wikis, webpages, etc. I tried them all in my blog and the first thing I noticed, for all you CofC bloggers, is that you can’t use these controls if you embed your video the normal way (using the 
icon). The only way these controls will work is if you choose the HTML tab in your editor and actually paste the YouTube embed URL into your post.
Here’s an example:
<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Uo3VwTBGrY8&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Uo3VwTBGrY8&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>
Everything above is included in the Embed URL in YouTube. If you want to add the commands from the article your link will look like this:
<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Uo3VwTBGrY8&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Uo3VwTBGrY8&hl=en&fs=1&start=150&autoplay=1&showsearch=0&rel=0” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>
&start=150 tells the player to begin the video 150 seconds in. &autoplay=1 tells the video to automatically start when the page loads. &showsearch=0 tells the video not to display the search window when the video finishes playing and &rel=0 tells the video not to display related videos when the video finishes playing. These are just a few of the tricks. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t get the time command to work and didn’t try to bypass the regional filtering so I don’t know if that works. Everything else seems to work really well.
The video below is the direct result of the embed text above, with the start, autoplay, search and related video commands added.
By the way if you haven’t checked out Zee Avi, the singer in the video, you really should. She rocks!
I have created three basic tutorials on how to create a new blog post and how to add images and videos to your posts. These tutorials are for posting to the CofC Blog Server (WordPress MU).
Check them out on VoiceThread:
I currently have commenting turned off on the VoiceThreads themselves but if you have any comments, please post them to this blog.
