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 :)

Congrats Sue… one year in and you’re already a serious vet!

If you’re looking for one book on making money by blogging, this is - seriously - the real deal.

Darren’s the pro-est of the pros so pre-order now!

Well, this is a pain in the butt… Terraminds and Tweetscan searches for Edublogs (on Twitter of course) are both down :/

Any suggestions for a more reliable way to get (very) regularly updated search RSS feeds from Twitter?

I’ve gotta say, first looks at the new admin design made me freak out a bit but in actual use WordPress 2.5 is so very very nice it makes me smile. It’s like the iTouch of blogging aps, so full of beautiful detail that I’m, yet again, counting my blessings that I’ve build my entire professional life at the moment entirely around this gorgeous thing.

I mean yeh there are all the big new elements which rock (galleries etc.) but these other things really show some love …

• I love the extra links next to log out
• The extra level of tabs where Dashboard is (not to mention the new dashboard, how much are we gonna enjoy dashboard widgets!)
• Splitting Manage / Options into Manage / Settings and putting settings over on the right is just plain sensible
• Comments-in waiting (and the calendar icons) are just lovely
• Making the uploader an optional click is about the best thing I could think of for so many many reasons
• Tag suggestion is a nice touch

Cannae wait to implement this on Edublogs - people are gonna freak out!

Well, Richard’s fix got over the ridiculous Optus cable internet issues we’ve been having accessing international sites… until this morning when, oops, it got turned off.

So, back to direct connections I went, and sure enough, come 12:30PM (for 30-40 minutes) pretty much every international site I’ve tried to access is unaccessible (including gmail - gah) and now the workaround isn’t getting me there either.

I’ve also now contacted them 3 times, and heard absolutely nothing through either their support or actual complaints lines (for which they guarantee a response!!!)

Each time I provided ping details, information and a cry for help… from a customer that uses them for 2 mobile, a landline and their most expensive residential net connection… but nothing seems to have come of it.

Anyway, I give up, iinet here I come and so should anyone else who actually wants to have a stable international net connection.

Update: If you’re having the same issue try switching your auto proxy config to http://webproxy.syd.optusnet.com.au/ (instead of http://webproxy02.syd.optusnet.com.au/) which might have fixed it for me. Still absolutely rubbish… let’s see if they bother to respond to my 3rd (or is it 4th?) support ticket.

Oh, do come on, I thought I’d really reached the pinnacle of contrition on occasions over the last few years but this is just too funny :)

“We have learnt many valuable lessons during this process and would like to apologise for the way the transition period was handled.”

You’re not wrong - come on guys, a smiley wouldn’t have gone amiss :D

So, is it Easter holiday time now in the US… just this week or two weeks or does it vary all round?

Well, we’ve just added another feature to Edublogs that allows you to add up to 15 users at one time to your blog (and you can give them each a different roles too).

Neato huh :)

If you’re an Edublogs user go to Users > Add Users to have a play!

How many of the following UK startups (as listed by TC) would you say have pretty silly names?

• Groupspaces - Can forgive this one, just
• Tioti - Surely there must be better 5 letter .coms around
• Exabre - Erm
• Coull - Sounds painful
• Zogix - Yay, a Z
• Byteplay - Hmmm.. not bad
• Trampoline Systems - LOL, at least it’s funny
• Hubdub - So Rubadub was taken,m right?
• WAYN - And Waynetta ;)
• TrustedPlaces - Not bad!
• Slicethepie - Not to trashy either
• Mydeo - Hmmmm
• Skimbit - Iffy
• Huddle - Finally a good ‘un
• Rummble - Didn’t misspelling names go out a bit back?
• Zebtab - Another Z :D
• Silobreaker - Makes me feel a little queasy
• Kwiqq - Um…
• edocr - …
• ShortFuze - Don’t get ‘em angry!
Made me chortle, and yes, I know, Incsub isn’t exactly clear and simple but Edublogs is… isn’t it ;)

Heh, I worked with MT for a whole year at theage.com.au and basically the only thing they have going for themselves is static html… which of course Super Cache does for WP very nicely (so I really wishthey’d shut up about that bit - it makes our clients nervous and means we have t say bad things about MT ;)

So that aside, everyone needs plugins (we’re all different, right), stats in your dashboard are like, so, who cares (hardly a challenge with WP too)… and as for design and support… hmmm well that’s a bit subjective.

Seriously though, competition is good so I do with MT the best of success (and others), it’ll help WP improve, but as for being a competitive alternative, not by a long shot just yet guys.

Update: Hear hear… I forgot to mention that it’d be virtually impossible to build anything like Edublogs with MT. 

This is a big one, now teachers can easily create and manage student blogs, straight from their dashboard. Like, w00t!

Huge props to Andrew on this feature, in case you didn’t know, Andrew’s our new CTO and he rocks da house.

Am getting annoyed with all this shit flying around about Jimmy Wales.

I met him, allbeit briefly, at an education.au event last year - heard him speak and had the chance to chat to him really briefly.

To be honest, I was all prepared to not like him… to find him arrogant (especially as Education is concerned - having got teh gist of a few things he’d said before) or to have not much interesting to say, or to just be on an aloof junket. So I went into it with a pretty bad attitude.

I know this isn’t very cool of me, but that’s honestly how I felt going into it.

However, I came out of it no less that utterly impressed.

He’s an incredibly smart,  interesting and genuine individual. He talked openly and with a great deal of time and respect for his audience and impressed me more than - and this is no small thing - any conference presenter ever has. He rocks out.

Now, everyone has their share of personal strife and difficulties - I’m no exception by a long shot on that one - and anyone with his profile or dealings is going to be without enemies or the occasional thing that might seem questionable about what they do professionally.

He deserves a lot more respect and lot less crap (especially the highly likely utterly incorrect crap) thrown at him.

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with criticism, but a lot of publications are taking the piss, and that’s not on.

w00t :)

Check out Mr Bishop using it in some stylee.

Am extremely chuffed that one of my buddies from school is now digging Edublogs!

Reminds me of what happened to WPMU roundabout 3 years ago. Hopefully it’ll be just as significant.

Means we might have to look again at a couple of things ;) But all for the better I reckon.

Or, happier people blog :)

Nice to see some local Melbourne research too!

As I mentioned yesterday Twitter is possibly the best human powered monitoring / feedback service a big blogging website could ever want.

And sometimes that’s pretty frustrating because you see Tweets that are just plain wrong, and you can’t ‘add a comment’ or feedback to them without all sort of pain (if at all).

But other tweets make up for that :)

OK, so in addition to SharpReader (thanks Sue) here’s another heap of ways you can keep an eye on / facilitate other people keeping and eye on your servers & sites.

Pingdom - Rocks the house… incredibly reliable (unless you’re using caching :/) so point it at something dynamic and give it your server tech’s mobile phone number :) - or just email if you’re feeling slightly less evil. Highly recommended!

Tweetscan and/or Terraminds - If Pingdom does’t tell you about it then your users certainly will. Real human testing! Put the feeds from these in SharpReader and get it to check them every 15 minutes (or whenever you compulsively click it)

Gmail - When your servers are down, so is your email :/ Don’t look so professional there then do you…. don’t, whatever you do put your server based email account into Pingdom for example (duh :)

Forums - More after the fact issues as they usually get hit by the initial issues, but still to be watched darn close, although preferably with a manual feedreader (like SR) as finding out about stuff 2-6 hours after it’s happening SUCKS.

After the fact:

Get your server techs to configure a WHM load review on each server to be emailed to you every day - so you can look back on spikes and alike and pull up patterns between days. Very useful also in the it doesn’t let you forget the issues you had that afternoon!

Google blog search updates, talk to people once in a while and remember, it’s never ever going to be just fine so don’t just back up your HDs but also yourself - at all times!

Maybe I’m just old fashioned - or slack - but I’ve never got the ‘private beta’ model.

It’s just that IMPO you should be able to release something with a level of simplicity that means you can just roll it out in public from day 1.

So usually I just ignore ‘em… but how could I with Edmodo (via TechCrunch - new goal for year, get Edublogs on TC :)

Not only because I like the ‘Twitter for Education’ idea - but also because from Jeff’s blog:

“Edmodo is the brain child of Nic Borg (my partner) and I and we envision this company to be the premier provider of free web 2.0 tools (boy I hate that name) for Teachers, Students, Parents, and Schools.”

Hang on, that’s our plan too!

Anyway, if you’re reading this Jeff and want to let me in to have a look / play that’d be ace… I promise not to break anything ;)

… yet inspiration is hard to find.

So, I’m gonna go all old skool and tell you what books are currently beside me as I tap this out in bed on a Saturday morning.

There’s a biography of Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin called ‘Thomas Hardy [duh] The time torn man’ which is unusual as it’s taken a pretty standard slant in the title (stuck between the ages etc.) but then doesn’t actually mention that much.

There’s also ‘A Suitable Boy’ by Vikram Seth which is just getting to it’s exciting part (200 pages to go) which has, bizarrely, stopped me from reading it to help me get to sleep ;)

And there’s… ‘My Booky Wook’ by Russell ’shagger of the year’ Brand courtesy of my Uncle and Aunty which is actually quite a good read if you’re into utter, startling, honesty.

One of these days I’ll actually finish them!

Anyone know a decent desktop (XP) feed reader that you can set to actually go out and check feeds minute by minute?

Am thinking of those tweets / forums posts that you really need to know about a couple of minutes after they’re made.

As opposed to 4 hours later (grr..)