Very sorry for the inconvenience! While Edublogs will be looking into why this happened, they will be removing the Edu Campus theme, which will cause all “broken” sites to revert back to the Twenty Eleven default theme.

If you’re having this problem, here’s how to fix it: Visit the Dashboard and click Settings > Media and scroll to the Embeds section of the page as shown here:

Change the width attribute to a dimension that fits the width of the main content area on your site, which might require a little experimentation to determine, and leave the height attribute blank (this will cause the height of the video player to scale appropriately).

Likewise, you can do the same for images and thumbnails at the top of the page by changing the default sizes for those. This can be very helpful when you’re using WordPress galleries and need the thumbnails to be something other than 150px by 150 px. If you would like to change the thumbnail sizes in your galleries, however, make sure to do that in the Settings > Media before you create the gallery.

Adding geolocation information to your posts is easy. The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that geotagging has been turned on for the blogs you’ve set up in iOS:

(If you’re not sure how to do this for a blog you’ve already set up, go back to your lists of blogs and click the Edit button and then tap the title of the blog you want to edit–when you do this, you’ll get the screen shown above. This is where you turn Geotagging on or off.) When you write a post, you’ll see a blue icon in the title field of the edit post screen as shown here:

Tap that blue icon, and then you can see the location information for that post:

This is the map that will be shown in the post when you publish it. If you wish to configure how that information appears in the published post, you can visit the full dashboard and click Settings > Geolocation to change how the geolocation information appears. By default, it will appear as a link at the bottom of the post, which will display a Google map of your location when you hover over it:

Finally, if you need to fine tune your location information after the fact, you may do so in the full version of the dashboard, where you will see all the custom field information for your location and the Geolocation module showing the map in your post.

A seasoned WordPress vet will know exactly what this error means, but for you newbies: There’s an obscure check box in Settings > Writing that you must enable prior to blogging via iOS called Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols:

… check that box, and you’ll be able to sync up your blogs with the WordPress for iOS app, error-free.

To make create a sticky post, visit the Dashboard and either create a new post or edit an existing one. Go to the Publish box to the right and find the Visibility section and click Edit. After you click Edit, the following menu appears:

Check the Stick this post to the front page option and publish or update the post. All done! Your post will now be the first post everyone sees when they visit your blog until you uncheck this option, but you may also have more than one sticky post. Finally, an alternate way to quickly make a post sticky is to use the Quick Edit menu (shown below) for pre-existing posts.

This particular error often means that the blog you are attempting to syndicate has privacy settings enabled. Unfortunately, the breed of motherblog that relies on remote syndication of content will not work if the sites it is attempting to syndicate are not fully open to the web. In any case, if you experience this error–or others like it–visit with your students to 1). ask whether they have privacy controls enabled or 2). whether they’ve just categorized something incorrectly (in order for category feed URLs to sync properly, the remote bloggers must be categorizing their posts properly).

If your students are electing to blog privately, please see our recommendations for managing privacy in courseblogs. There are ways to have a fully open courseblog and still let individual students contribute private posts that are only visible to the blog admin.

The main problem is that blogs that are restricted from public view will not have usable feed URLs, which means private blog feeds can’t be aggregated into a courseblog. However, there is an easy solution for maintaining a courseblog with a mixture of private and public posts that allows the instructor to see all the content on one site. In addition, this alternative approach to courseblogging gives students full control over their content once the course is over–once added to a courseblog as an author, a student can write public or private posts and then, at the end of the course, remove those posts or export them elsewhere.

Here’s how it works: All students who want private blog posts should be added to the courseblog as Authors (learn more about roles in WordPress). To add these users to the site, click Users > Add New and fill out the Add Existing User field with the username/email of your choice, making sure to give that user the correct role.

In this case, the Author role is a good choice since it will allow that student to control the visibility of their posts on the courseblog.

Once the students have been added to the blog, they’ll have to visit the courseblog’s dashboard and write posts on that site. Getting to another site’s dashboard is easy if you’ve been given privileges to access it. Simply click Dashboard > My Sites to see the links to all the sites you have access to. From there, the students can write their own posts and set their posts’ visibility to Private in the Publish box on the edit post screen:

Once these posts are marked private, only the administrators of the courseblog (presumably, this is only going to be the instructor of the course) will be able to see those posts. The only other requirement is that the blog admin must be logged into Edublogs to see the private posts.

http://blogs.baylor.edu/feed

That’s all well and good, but if you want to drill down and only syndicate certain content from a site–not the whole blog–you can actually use a feed URL for a category or tag (all categories and tags in WordPress have their own feed URLs, too). For more information about WordPress feeds, visit http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds.

If you’re setting up a courseblog or “motherblog” as an instructor and need to aggregate multiple feeds from other WordPress sites using the FeedWordPress plugin, the first thing you’ll want to do is have your student bloggers create a category or tag specifically for their class posts. If your students are blogging about things other than their class, you don’t want their other content being fed into the motherblog.

Before you begin, however, it helps to know what the site-naming convention is in Edublogs, and that is: http://blogs.baylor.edu/sitename, where “sitename” is the first and last name of the student as it appears in the student’s email address, minus any underscores or hyphens. So if a student has the email address of john_smith-hines2@baylor.edu, the sitename would be http://blogs.baylor.edu/johnsmithhines2. Also, you will need the feed URLs (web addresses) of that category or tag for each site you’re aggregating.

1. First, choose a category or tag name, doesn’t matter which. Let’s say you decide to use the category name “history1305″ for your course. Have the students visit the Dashboard, click “Posts” and select “Categories” in the sub menu:

   Type in the name of the appropriate category in the “Name” field and and click “Add New Category” at the b0ttom. Once the category is created, the students will have to remember to assign the relevant posts to that category in order for the aggregation to work properly:

   

   (Alternatively, choose “Posts > Post Tags” instead of “Categories” if you prefer to use tags instead–the process pretty much works the same).

2. Now it’s time to get the right feed URLs for your student’s blogs. You will use the feed URL for the particular category or tag you had your students set up in step #1. In a nutshell, you’ll need to know the standard structure of WordPress category or tag feed URLs:Category feed URL structure:
   http://[YOUR_SITE_NAME]/category/categoryname/feed

   Tag feed URL structure:
   http://[YOUR_SITE_NAME]/tag/tagname/feedSo if the category is “history1305″ and you need to know the category feed URL for the “johnsmithhines2″ site above, it would be:

   http://blogs.baylor.edu/johnsmithhines2/category/history1305/feed

   …and if you’re using the tag “history1305″ instead, the feed URL would be:

   http://blogs.baylor.edu/johnsmithhines2/tag/history1305/feed

   NOTE: As they appear in URLs, categories and tags are not case-sensitive; in addition, if the category or tag you’re contains two separate words, it will be hyphenated in the URL. Thus the category “history 1305″ would appear as “history-1305″ in the feed URL.
   

When you know what a feed URL looks like, you can start adding those to your motherblog using the FeedWordPress plugin for automatic syndication and aggregation. If you haven’t activated the plugin yet, visit the Dashboard and click “Plugins.” Find “FeedWordPress” and click “Activate.” Once the plugin is active, you will see a new link called “Syndication” at the bottom of the left navigation bar in the Dashboard. Click that link, and then on the following screen, you will see a field where you can add all of your feed URLs:

That should be it. If it’s easier to have your students email their feed URLs to you, I would request that. But at the very least, knowing how feed URLs should be constructed will help you troubleshoot feed problems later on.

STEP 1: If you already have a Google account (for instance, your gmail log in information is your Google account) you can go directly into the Google Analytics site and create your account (STEP 2). If you don’t have that account, your first step will be to create one. Click here to do so.

Creating your google account

STEP 2: Create a Google Analytics account by going to the Google Analytics site and signing in with your Google username and password.

STEP 3: After creating your account, Google Analytics will provide you with a code. Select that code and copy (Ctrl+C) it (highlighted area).

STEP 4: Log into your blog account and under the tab settings in your dashboard click on Google Analytics.

STEP 5:  Paste (Ctrl+V) the code in the highlighted area and save your changes.

Paste code in the highlighted area

STEP 6: Go back to your Google Analytics account page and click on Dashboards to see the status of the visits in your blog.

Your Google Analytics dashboard