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Tags and Categories: learning the difference May 19, 2008

Posted by Gilmour David in : Skills, WordPress, social software , add a comment

Understanding content tagging is an essential skill for effective use of a wide range of internet tools. WordPress blogs now, in addition to Categories, offer a powerful set of tagging tools. But what exactly is the difference?

I’ve now mentioned the addition of the new tagging functionality, briefly in passing, to a few edubuzz bloggers. I haven’t felt, though, that I’ve succeeded in explaining the difference very well. Today I decided to have a look for different approaches, and found this really good explanation of the difference, from Stephanie Booth, who - successfully - argued the case for adding tags to WordPress.

Here are, in my opinion, the main differences between tags and categories, from the “tagger” point of view.

  • categories exist before the item I’m categorizing, whereas tags are created in reaction to the item, often in an ad hoc manner: I need to fit the item in a category, but I adapt tags to the item;
  • categories should be few, tags many;
  • categories are expected to have a pretty constant granularity, whereas tags can be very general like “switzerland” or very particular like “bloggyfriday“;
  • categories are planned, tags are spontanous, they have a brainstorm-like nature, as Kevin explains very well: You look at the picture and type in the few words it makes you think of, move on to the next, and you’re done.
  • relations between categories are tree-like, but those between tags are network-like;
  • categories are something you choose, tags are generally something you gush out;
  • categories help me classify what I’m talking about, and tags help me share or spread it;
  • …

 Link

A new look for edubuzz.org November 29, 2007

Posted by David Gilmour in : WordPress, eduBuzz , 2comments

The edubuzz.org home page has been given a new look to make it easier for people to explore the site.

There are still some loose ends to tidy up, but in keeping with the “release early, release often” philosophy, it’s time to give it a try and start listening to the feedback.

This version builds on the feedback from the last prototype. That showed that providing some pointers to help visitors start exploring was well received. That version, though, was built during the summer break but proved too complex to be sustainable under the pressures of term-time workloads.

The new version is simpler, but provides more information. It’s completely blog-based, with no bespoke code other than a customised WordPress theme, modified using standard template tags. That means maintenance can be shared, so volunteers are welcome to contribute.

Current features include:

There’s still more work to do, such as:

Feedback welcome.

eduBuzz Open Meeting October 29, 2007

Posted by David Gilmour in : WordPress, eduBuzz, internet safety , 2comments

Today’s eduBuzz Open Meeting provided as usual a rich source of ideas for next steps and feedback from a range of activities over the past month.

We were pleased to welcome Alison Hunton, a parent whose two daughters Alice and Ellie are already amongst our youngest bloggers.

Topics covered included:

As use of the internet becomes more embedded in school activities this is highlighting an ongoing need for training in some fairly basic web skills for staff. A useful resource for WordPress training is the Stuck With ICT site developed by Andrew Brown of LTS.

Ollie Bray reported on the internet safety session recently run for Musselburgh parents. This training, based on CEOP standards, is planned for roll-out to clusters.

There were a couple of reports of nuisance comment spam, and the possibility of adding a Captcha check was discussed.

A few points of feedback from the recent software upgrade arose, including the loss of the coloured text facility.

New features on eduBuzz blogs October 17, 2007

Posted by David Gilmour in : WPMU, WordPress, WordPress tips, eduBuzz , 3comments

The WordPress Multi-User software behind the eduBuzz blogs has been upgraded to the current version, 1.2.5a.

If you’ve got an eduBuzz blog, what will you notice?

Here’s an example of an embedded YouTube video, the wonderful “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Using Us” by Michael Wesch.

First blog recovered from backup September 13, 2007

Posted by David Gilmour in : WPMU, WordPress, eduBuzz , add a comment

One of our most popular school web sites, the Pencaitland Blog, has had to be recovered from backup.

What seems to have caused the problem was deleting a user record via the Site Admin / Users menu, when that user was the author of a large number of posts on the blog. Perhaps in an attempt to remove all trace of the user, those posts were also removed. Examination of the wp_<blog no.>_posts table in the WordPress database showed they had gone, and weren’t hanging around in some authorless limbo land.

I don’t know if a warning was issued. Maybe that’s something to try out one day when I’ve some time to spare…

This is the first time that we’ve needed to recover a blog from backup in a year of operation, and is the first time we’ve had occasion to think hard about whether or not it makes sense to entrust sufficiently experienced school staff with Site Admin rights. (more…)

eduBuzz sign-up back to normal August 16, 2007

Posted by Gilmour David in : Exc-el, WPMU, WordPress , 1 comment so far

The fault with eduBuzz sign-up has now been fixed and tested.

For the curious: the fault was being caused by an incorrectly configured plugin, danalog’s site-wide tagging solution, which we’ve been experimenting with. This plugin doesn’t read the domain name automatically, but requires it to be coded into the plugin. And until you do that, it has a placeholder in there of - you guessed it - “domain.tld”.

Creating blogs via sign-up isn’t working August 15, 2007

Posted by Gilmour David in : Exc-el, WPMU, WordPress , 1 comment so far

There’s currently a fault with this, which is leading to attempts to create blogs in the domain “domain.tld” instead of edubuzz.org. If you need a new blog meantime, please email me. Hopefully we’ll get this sorted tomorrow.

eduBuzz server trouble July 2, 2007

Posted by Gilmour David in : WordPress, eduBuzz , add a comment

Now that school term is over, at least in East Lothian, this afternoon we hit the first technical problems in a long time. Apologies if you’ve been affected by that. Anyone trying to access the site would have seen a WordPress “can’t connect to database” error.

The eduBuzz web server ground almost completely to a halt, and a call had to be raised with the ISP  All now seems back to normal, so hopefully the fault has been identified and fixed: I haven’t heard back yet. Fingers crossed…

Publishing data via WordPress blogs June 23, 2007

Posted by David Gilmour in : Exc-el, Google, WordPress , add a comment

How can we easily publish not just text, audio and video, but also supporting data? One possibility is to store the data in a public Google Spreadsheet, and embed a view of that in the blog.

Here’s an example of how this might work for sharing a database (spreadsheet) of skills, a project that I was exploring with Kathy McGrane and Pauling Inglis yesterday: http://edubuzz.org/blogs/leadersoflearni…. This is part of the ACfE Principal Teachers as Leaders of Learning work.
Pros?

Cons?

eduBuzz Server Back in Action May 28, 2007

Posted by Gilmour David in : WordPress, eduBuzz , add a comment

The edubuzz server had to be rebooted this morning, and is now working normally. This was the first reboot since October 2006.

First thing today, before 7, we still had a very heavily loaded server, but it was still working. Plan A was to try and find out today what was causing that, but we’re on to Plan B now as the server was rebooted at about 10.40am. This followed failure of the name (DNS) server. If you’d tried to access the site before the reboot, your browser wouldn’t have been able to find it.
I’ve had a couple of emails asking if it’s sensible to plan for classroom use. As far as we know, the service is back to normal, and performing much better than last week, so there’s no reason to change plans.

The good news is that the server load is back to sensible low levels, although it has only been back up for an hour. Unfortunately, because of the reboot, we still don’t know exactly why the server load became so high. It could have been visitor workload, or it could have been some kind of fault. Hopefully server log files will offer some clues, but we don’t know yet.

Please contact me, or leave a comment below, if you notice any further problems.

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