To celebrate the impending 1000th blog at edublogs.org I’ve created a Drupal based edublogs.org community.

To participate all you need to do is role on over there, grab yourself a username (synching databases falls, um, into the ‘too hard’ basket ;) and get posting.

This has the added bonus in that now people can support each other… rather than it just being me.. yay :D Useful in the next month or so as well.

I played around with bbPress at first and then figured that I’d use a Drupal installation as I kinda like how very very flat it can be. I’m not envisiging a deluge of activity so I think this might work better than a category based forum system – for now – and I can always add forums if they become necessary.

Oh, and the subscription module is pretty handy too for people wanting to keep track of particular conversations through email.

Will be interesting either way… let’s see if it works and if edublogs does tick over the 1000 blog mark tonight…

We interrupt our scheduled outage to whinge about the England football team, just as the cricket is looking up – bemoan the stupidity behind single sex education (I know… I was in one!), lets just worry about making our chikdren rounded and happy human beings rather than grades-charged sociopaths – and share with you the best broadcast, now available as podcast, program in Australia: Late Night Live… enjoy!

Stolen from Cameron Reilly’s email auto-reply I figured I’d just mention that I, um, am SNOWED UNDER and probably will remain to be for the next week or two…

….and then I’ll be taking a month off to do some reno and go to the UK to help out with my Dad so, if it can wait… it’d be great if it felt like waiting for the next month and a half or so :)

• i d e a n t: Syllabus for graduate course on Social Software
  Fantastic social software syllabus from Ulises, definitely a keeper!

Today I feel mostly like sitting in a field.

[larger image and more]

I floated the idea of running a weblogs inc kinda banner at the top of each edublogs.org blog to promote the service but have so far found no takers (quite the opposite :o)

So I was wondering how, given the multitude of themes available (I’d be wanting to insert this into each theme…) and a kind of goodwill feeling that people wouldn’t delete it once they can edit their own themes, I could best promote edublogs.org through edublogs blogs without pissing people off.

Any ideas?

Interesting stuff… so the measures I put in place seem to have calmed the bandwidth issues but the number of visitors is still ridiculously high (this is just incsub.org btw… not edublogs) although awstats thinks they are individuals… don’t see how I can suddenly have picked up an extra 2000 uniques a day though, wonder what’s up?

(BTW yellow are number of visits, dark blue is pages, light blue is hits, and green is bandwidth.. peak visits are 6177, peak pages 37299 (!), peak hits 43339 and peak bandwidth 1.26 Gig)

Hurrah, Google Talk works using my proxycap so now you might actually be able to contact me (still can’t get Skype or Gizmo going).

ID: jamesnfarmer

Add me to ya list !

Oh, and if you want a gmail invite (you need gmail to use this) just leave a comment.

I’m pretty lucky as tomorrow I’m off to Fed Square to talk to SBS about blogs and broadcast. I figure I’m probably the lucky one as although I know a bit about this technology I know very very little about broadcasting and so the chance to see what they make of what I say about the technology will be very interesting.

Naturally the *only* way to prepare for a presentation / discussion like that is to do it in Flash first so if you’ve got 11:31.40 to spare and wanna hear me rabbiting on about blogs, kodak and the future (much more of an introduction than in depth) then here you go:

(just right click and select play to get it to work… need to upgrade my embedding skills!)

Phew… fingers crossed a combination of bad behaviour and referrer karma has taken the meat out if the extra 10-15k page views incsub was getting every day and bandwidth looks like it’s back to normal.

Big thanks to D’Arcy for suggesting RK, much appreciated!