It’s bad enough when you get blocked by an over zealous filter, but Edublogs.org is currently blocked by the widely used Barracuda email spam system and it’s not doing us any good!

Thousands, or even tens of thousands, of teachers and students are now unable to receive new blog activation emails, comment notifications, password resetting emails and we’ve contacted them at least 5 times over the last week with, you guessed it, no response :(

So… we’re calling on assistance from users and the community… can you email intent@barracuda.com and request that they remove Edublogs.org from Barracuda’s Intent List.

We’ve tried… but have heard absolutely nothing, and we hope they will listen more to their customers / potential clients.

Here are some other email possibilities too:

It just seems ridiculous that your whole business can be jeopardized by an automated, and incorrect, spam filtering service :/

And that your requests to have it fixed up are then met with a stony silence.

Perhaps people ought to think twice before choosing Barracuda for their school or institution?

We’ve given WPMU DEV Premium, our WordPress MU Plugins site a makeover and added an absolute stack of extra plugins to boot!

Oh, and there are also WPMU themes, Videos and other goodies there too :)

As with everything in though, it’s a work in progress, so let us know any ways you think we could improve it in the comments below… What’s missing? What would make you sign up? How could we improve the design?

There may well be a free membership in it for the best constructive feedback!

A few months back, Cristoph Merrill purchased Blogsavvy off me… and now, one hefty redesign later, it’s up and running and all shiny and new.

Best of luck with the site Christoph :) It’s great to see new life back in the old girl.

If you don’t allow people to simply unsubscribe from opt-out newsletters without having to log in, then that’s spam.

I’m looking at you Yelp and spreadshirt! Don’t be surprised when you start getting filtered by gmail etc.

Grrrr :(

Update: Spreadshirt are currently fixing their newsletter system up so they’re cool… plus an email from one of their staff and their CEO, nice work guys!

Over $1000 of prizes now available…. and a great audience for your work!

Sigh, Edublogs is still blocked in China.

And we really don’t know why… or what we can do to fix it.

Have whacked up a post on the topic at WPMU.org - hopefully we can get some advice from the community. If you have any ideas, please let us know.

I just signed up for a 6 month SEOMoz Pro license basically because they rock the house.

I’ve been reading the blog for, probably, 4 months or so now and when you;re giving this kinda stuff away for free, what you get when you pay has got to be unreal :)

Anyway, am looking forward to playing with their tools, lots, over the next few weeks and getting stuck into some serious forum action.

And, just cost it makes me happy, here’s their Trifecta rundown of Edublogs as a domain (click on it for all the glorious detail):

What’s on your WPMU plugin wishlist?

We’ve started a WPMU plugin competition over at WPMU.org.

There’s already $750 worth of prizes available and we’re looking for more peopel to donate $ and good stuff for prizes (contact here to add to the prize pool and get yourself bigged up!)

As well as people to submit plugins :)

I agree with D’Arcy entirely when he says:

I don’t know what the future of education is, or will be, but I do know that it’s not “web 2.0″

But I’m sorry ol’ boy, but you’re being as naive as the people who claim it is web 2.0 when you suggest that its in fact it’s:

storytelling…  valuing and respecting the work of all participants (students, teachers, and others)… working together to teach our children, and ourselves… extending the activity outside of some industrialized classroom and into the community

Because, like it or not, the conceptual model of education that 98% of us (myself included) subscribe to and happily plod along with in the developed world is about learning stuff to achieve an aim - whether that’s to please your parents, to not struggle in elementary school, become a whole and rounded person, to go to a good uni, get a good job or have some nice letters around your name. And heaps more other stuff besides.

And how we get there reflects the society that we live in - you don’t get community without ‘community’, respect without ‘respect’, storytelling without ’storytelling’, a non-industrialized classroom in a completely industrialized context.

So, what can we, as educators (or, ahem, sometime educators, turned business people ;) do to achieve our lofty, but entirely desirable, pedagogical aims in a classroom, online or mixed up context?

We sure as hell can’t change what’s around us alongside what drives pretty much everything, change the ‘World’ if you will.

But we can change the way in which we experience the World in that classroom context, by the way we teach, the outlook we take, the tools we use and the environment in which we work.

And hang it all, when you’re in an online context, that means you get to choose between transmissive and constructive tools an environments - and let’s not worry too much about the future, ‘cos that impacts what we live with today… more than most people realise.

Here’s a fun project undertaken by Andrew and myself under good banner Incsub….. WPMU.org

Just take a feed from Summize or your foums of choice - grab SharpReader and set it to check the feed every minute - and you’ll be replying to forums queries and fixing up issues that have been tweeted about or posted on your forums in minutes rather than hours… and never have to hit refresh once :)

At the risk of turning this into JF’s tech issues blog I’m utterly stuck on this one and, in desperation, hand myself over to you - dear reader - for assistance for I is seriously stuck with the oddest keyboard issue you ever did come across.

Basically *something* has gotten into my keyboard operation that is playing havoc with my typing by not allowing me, in the middle of certain words, to enter double letters if I type them quickly. Or, more generally, just removing letters that have been typed in particularly quick succession, in certain contexts.

For example, green, comes out ‘gren’.

The reason, I have deduced, is that my tapping speed for the ‘e’ (and also for the ‘p’ in tapping) is much quicker than for othe letters (same happens for ‘letters’, becoming ‘leters’) - but here’s the odd thing, it’s only inside a word - I can just hit, for example, e at speed ‘eeeeeeeeeeee’ and then type ‘green’ and it works just fine… for a few times but then goes back to the same old behavior… for example: ‘green green gren  etc.’

It just ‘happened’ this week… very bizzare.

And it feels like something trying to make my life easier, perhaps by removing ‘bounce’ but OMG… I can tell you it isn’t.

Windows Vista Home Premium, A new Vaio CR laptop and this happens across all applications from firefox to editplus to safari.

Have used avast and Spybot-SD to clean absolutely everything (so it’s nothing malicious) have also checked keyboard accessibility settings in Vista and all keyboard settings in the Vaio control center.

Have googled my arse off on keyboard sensitivity, debouncing, double letters, typing speed and more and followed the weakest possibilities with no joy :(

I tried a system restore back to when this wasn’t a problem I’ve been so desperate, but that did no good at all.

And I can’t determine anything that might have caused it - and boy, have I had a lot of practice at testing to see what causes bugs.

So, after literally 4 days of trying to fix this on my own… I’m stuck as a stuck thing, and throw myself unto your helpful hands… pretty (or should I say prety) please!!!

Update 1: As far as I know it’s nothing to do with Texter - as it continues when it’s disabled… but it certainly feels like something that might be related to that.

Update 2: Thanks to Dave and Oscar but I’m afraid it doesn’t seem to be to do with “Filter Keys’ or any other Accessibility (or ‘ease’ for vista) feature :(

Update 3: Unbelievable - I just got home (have been away) and I do believe that it’s the Telstra 3G (Next G) wireless internet client that has been doing it!!!

I can’t find anything on the whirlpool forums but switching it of and going back to the home wireless connection has fixed everything… how annoying! Have to figure out a fix before my next trip anywhere!

Anyone else experiencing horrific gmail errors today - 502s, 100s, 728s and more… all day.

Makes me realise how much I rely on it! Possibly a touch *too* much (although surely their imperative to fix it up and keep it qworking great is greater than my imperative to go and try to recreate a gmail experience somewhere else… if that’s even possible!)

A combination of that and Optus cable internet being absolutely terribe (as usual) has been bugging the heck out of me today… roll on tomorrow, new telstra connection and iinet!

My one grumble with Firefox 3 is that I’ve lost my GCAL notifier that used to sit so sweetly next to my gmail one.

So I was kinda excited upon finding a few neat greasemonkey hacks to get round that… all of which were out of date, however, with the exception of Gmail Add Ons.

Which, while current, just isn’t working with FF3 :( At least as far as I can tell… and I’ve already spent a good 60 minutes trying to save myself time in future so I think it’s time to give up.

Anyone else have gcal working in their gmail sidebar (or even, sob, in a notifier)- by fair means or foul, in Firefox 3?

Me, almost starting the edupunk thing, in 2004, but just not quite getting it right :) I is old skool.

I’m an absolute loser, I can hardly get through a single email without writing ‘the’ as ‘teh’.

I reckon if you add it up, over a month or so I probably spend hours correcting myself after the fact.

So… I did a bit of searching and came up with this brilliant application called Texter.

It instantly (if so set) changes every typo back to its correct form, across all applications. Windows only though at the moment :)

Congratulations to Stephen on the release of gRSShopper (ace name BTW :)

“a personal web environment that combines resource aggregation, a personal dataspace, and personal publishing. “

Here’s a demo and here’s the project page.

Great shame that the .com is a domain squatting page :(

Have been toying with getting a MacBook Pro to replace an increasingly clunky Vaio.

But being a M$ user since, well, forever… I’ve gotta weigh up a heap of stuff.

First up, as this is basically my business and livelihood (in a very literal sense) what will the cost to me in figuring everything out all over again.

I mean, I can fix pretty much anything on XP… am I gonna be wasting hours/days/more on a Mac?

And will the change in OS be inspiring or just a pain in the arse.

And what of my beloved EditPlus :(

Bizarrely it’s the ipod touch that got me thinking of making the switch, it’s just so much fun to use.

Also, what are the chances of something new coming out that’s, well, better in the next 6 months?

Anyway, just weighing this up myself as much as anything, but if anyone has any thoughts I’d love to hear them!

The biggest release of WPMU since 1.0 is upon us, let there be merriment and many painless upgrades.

I released a new WordPress / WPMU theme pack yesterday with 100 themes, lots of them new and some old favorites (like Mandigo) reworked to allow for custom uploaded headers.

What’s really really cool about these themes though is that because they’re all set up to work on Edublogs, they require absolutely no code editing at all.

Every sidebar is widgetized, every big header can be replaced through the backend of WP and (hopefully almost) every bug has been squashed.

So with any luck it’ll be of a lot of use to regular WP folk as well as WPMU-ers.

Incidentally, did you know that ‘Farms’ theme packs have been downloaded over 20 thousand times!

Go check out our new makeover at Edublogs.

You can let us know what you think of it here.

I’m pretty happy we’ve been able to finally get it out, it’s been a while!

But if you really can’t be bothered to click above, then here’s a grab of it:

Although I reckon it looks much nicer in person!

Nice post from new Edublogs user Suzie :)