PRblogs.org

PRblogs.org has been growing a great deal over the past few years. Thousands upon thousands of blogs are happily churning along.

So, with the increased usage and traffic, James Farmer of edublogs.org has kindly upgraded us to the full blown Edublogs Campus edition.

What does this mean for users? Several things, and I’d like to share those with you now.

The good news is, this platform offers us all a lot more stability, security and also some excellent new features in Site Admin.

We can still do podcasting using the Anarchy Media Player function. I’ve embedded a podcast below using the two different approaches. (1) Just use the upload function in your editor. (2) Just use a plain old href URL link pasted in using the yellow “A” button on your editor. Either way it will put an “Audio MP3″ image in the post that, when you click it, reveals a player.

Also, the themes have been upgraded. You have a wider variety (and “Widget” enabled) group of themes to choose from now.

Sample PRblogs podcast - audio mp3 | Download

By the way, in that podcast, when I say “PRblogs has moved to edublogs” what I really mean is - we’ve been upgraded to their Campus edition. We haven’t actually ‘moved’ anywhere. :o) You’re URL will still be PRblogs.org, too.

Finally, below all this, just to show you how video works now … I’ve placed an example of a video embed from a recent conference we attended.

Something We’re Considering

Always wishing to be upfront with you about our hosting and blog offerings, please consider this new idea for our blogs.

One new idea we’re considering is the inclusion of Adsense in the blogs. But, let me explain how it works. We are not going to just place ads on all the sites. The cookies used at PRblogs.org will keep you, your regular users and visitors from ever seeing the ads. The people that see the ads tend to be first time visitors that may land on your site from a Google (or other) search engine link. I just want you to know how infrequent ads might show up. Also, (repeating here, I know) you should know that you, your students, and regular readers may never actually see any ads yourself.

Also, this has not started yet. It is just being considered. So, here are the details for your consideration.

For clarification, please check out this post in the edublogs forums to see what it is all about - On ads « The Edublogs Forums. The basics (most important info) for you is as follows:

We’re considering trying out some adsense, in the same way that the folks at wp.com do it.

What this would mean would be that:

- You would never see any ads
- Your students would never see any ads
- Your regular readers would never see any ads
- There wouldn’t be any ads in feed readers
- Noone who has bookmarked you or types in your URL would see any ads
- No logged in Edublogs users would ever see any ads

In fact, very few people would see ads at all, but enough search engine visitors might in order to help us cover the bills and continue to grow and (help) develop Edublogs. (Our nice hosts.)

So, please comment below with your feelings about this. The rationale for starting to use Adsense is to help the good people that support our hosting of PRblogs.org. Hey, they are giving us a great free service. I’d like to help them. Also, so you’ll know, I will not be receiving any of the funds. They all go to the hosting and maintenance of all the edublogs.org sites, of which - PRblogs.org is one.

So, let me hear from you. Thanks.

Good news and many thanks to James Farmer of Edublogs.org.

In our most recent upgrade, there was a quirk causing some random characters to appear in some blogs. I believe this has now been fixed. Check your blogs. Please report back here with a comment if you find anything to the contrary.

Thanks.

Many thanks to James Farmer of edublogs.org for his tireless work over the past few weeks.

A complete revamp of the PRblogs.org software platform is essentially finished. I’m still looking around to find any possible quirks that may have arisen. Please feel free to comment with any problems you may encounter.  The Flickr plugin is a little goofy right now, for instance.  We’ll get it.

Also, we have our own PRblogs Forums coming up.  Thanks, James.  That will allow us to better communicate our FAQs and report any bugs. I’ll alert you when that comes on-line.

Frequent users have likely experienced sluggish service and downtime at various times over the past few days, especially. I apologize for the interruptions in service. We are growing and experiencing those unfortunate growing pains. I believe this upgrade solves those problems.

Also, we can’t forget that PRblogs.org is a free service.  Still, we want to bring you the best service.  Your patience is appreciated.

PRblogs.org is hosted, along with almost 65,000 other blogs, at edublogs.org.  James has been our benefactor all this time.  We are very lucky and grateful to have his assistance.  I hope to have further news in the coming days about other positive movement for PRblogs.org, too.

Our blogging platform, WordPress Multi User (WPMU), is now upgraded to WPMU 1.0. This is the same platform being used by The New York Times, Yahoo!, Harvard and Le Monde magazine. Also, edublogs.org is the prime example of WPMU implementation highlighted by WordPress.com / Automattic as a WPMU blog hosting provider.

PRblogs.org, like edublogs.org, is free to all. No ads. James has recently launched Edublogs Premium, an even more robust and affordable enterprise option for edublogging.  Check that out if you are interested in something for your school or enterprise, for example.

There are new tools for posting videos, audio, photos and more. Podcasting is now possible at PRblogs.org.

Here is one example of how video may be posted to your PRblogs.org site. This is the Singapore version of the Dove Real Beauty Self-Esteem Fund video. I use it because it is also using the new divShare Wordpress Plugin. It is the new plugin that enables PRblogs.org to accomplish complete podcasting (video and audio) capabilities.

DivShare is “a free file hosting service for everyone. No registration required!”

They claim - and I have no reason to doubt them :) - the following:

It’s easy:
1. Upload a file
2. Get your download link
3. Spread the word!
Features:

* Upload unlimited files
* Serve unlimited downloads
* Files stay online forever!
* No pop-up ads or spam
* Incredibly fast, reliable servers

So, please go check out your blog - or get a new one. We welcome all public relations and marketing communications students, faculty and practitioners to our community. Check the RSS Feed for PRblogs.org community posts, too.

PRblogs.org is dedicated to providing blogs to all public relations students, educators and practitioners that wish to explore blogging. To that end, we also always try to provide the most appropriate tools to use within those blogs. Today marks a new addition to PRblogs.org.

To further the use of PRblogs.org for the purpose of learning, sharing and incorporating PR practices into blogging, we now offer the SimpleSMPR plugin from Shannon Whitley of PRX Builder. I have modified / edited the template release provided with SimpleSMPR to create this post.

So, today anyone may create a blog at PRblogs.org and use the SimpleSMPR plugin by activating in the Admin area. In addition, you may use the Viper007Bond.com Viper’s Video Quicktags to further enhance posts and releases with video from YouTube, Google Video and iFilm. Beyond these tools, PRblogs.org also offers the use of Sidebar Widgets to make creation of a unique sidebar and custom blog. Finally, regarding the SimpleSMPR releases, you may also download the Media Tools to easily access and use the elements of releases created with the SimpleSMPR plugin.

The release announcing SimpleSMPR on PRblogs.org is below. Read the rest of this entry »

Personalizing your sidebar has long been a request by users at PRblogs.org. Well, we’ve finally made that possible. This will add significant functionality and likely please existing and new users.

Fiddling with plugins, I’ve been able to get Widgets to work on PRblogs.org.

Pretty cool. Visit the example blog at widgets.prblogs.org to see how they look. In the sidebar, you will see - from the top:

• a text widget pointing to an image file,
• a text widget holding Constantin’s code to search for all PR blogs,
• the Google search widget,
• an RSS feed widget, and
• a del.icio.us feed widget.

Pretty nice, huh. Currently widgets only work on some themes. See below for those that work now. We’ll fix more up for you over the coming week.

I’ll be going through and identifying themes that will work with widgets. All don’t, by the way, and it will likely take awhile for “all” to be made widget friendly. But, I’ll come back and identify the ones I find that work both with widgets and WordPress MU, the versions of WordPress we are running at PRblogs.org.

I’ll consider adding other widgets, if you wish to suggest them. I’m thinking that I’ll not put the PHP execute widget in as that is a security issue. But, there are others out there and I’m open to considering them, if you wish.

Update: Themes that work with widgets on PRblogs.org are now these…

• WordPress Classic
• WordPress Default
• White as Milk
• Impact
• Clasikue_v1.1
• Clean Look
• Gespaa_v2
• Letterhead
• Equix
• Hiperminimalist
• Minim8
• Radmod
• ZigZag
• and more to come…

Many thanks to Jason Bainbridge and James Farmer for their help in restoring the rich text edit buttons to our blogs.

As with any developing platform, there will be lil’ bumps along the way. This one is thankfully resolved.

You should find your blogs restored to their previous functional glory. And there is a plus to this - the upgrade provides a new “drag-n-drop” photo upload function.  And the post preview function is especially sweet.  A ‘real’ depiction of what your posts will look like.  Any time you write any post, just click the “Save and Continue Editing” button.  Then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see the preview of your post.

Please report any bugs to me here. I will do my best to get them resolved ASAP. Sorry this one took a few weeks to fix.

On another note, if you are having trouble with your blog’s RSS feed, here is the default RSS feed for each blog:

http://blogname.prblogs.org/feed/ Just replace blogname with your blog’s name.

The blogs seem to not play well with XHTML validation tools. We will work on that in the coming days.