The edubuzz blog system has now moved home, and the service is back. Basic tests have been successful, but if you notice anything wrong, please get in touch or leave a comment.
The changeover meant taking the system down from last thing yesterday until earlier today. Apologies if that caused you any inconvenience.
The new place has much more storage capacity, and more memory. The move was necessary for two reasons. First, performance: the server was becoming overloaded during morning and afternoon peak periods. That was down to lack of memory. Secondly, free storage capacity for uploaded files was becoming low. Continue reading ‘Edubuzz blogs move home’
Things are getting a bit crowded in the edubuzz house, so it’s time to move to a bigger place.
Currently we’ve around 1000 blogs, 1500 user accounts and up to about 10,000 visitors a day. WordPress Multi-User has a healthy appetite for memory, and we’re finding out the hard way what happens when it can’t get enough.
This weekend the blog system will be moving to a larger capacity server. The plan is to make the changeover late Friday evening, so there will be a bit of downtime then. If all goes well, it should be back in service on Saturday.
During the school Easter break, Edubuzz blogs have been upgraded to a new version of WordPress Multi-User, so there are a few new features to explore.
What’s changed? Main changes you’ll notice are:
- An new Advanced Editor toolbar button lets you easily use colour text, format headings, insert custom characters (e.g. £, √, ≠) and undo changes.
- The upload area now displays the size of uploaded files, making this key information easily available for the first time.
- You can now add tags to posts, and a tag cloud to your sidebar. This provides the foundation for site-wide tagging, tools for which will appear in later versions.
- The amount of upload space you’re using is displayed, so you can see when you’re getting near the limit. We can now also manage available space on a blog-by-blog basis. so individual blogs can be provided with more storage space.
eduBuzz blogs now have a “Paste from Word” editor button.
Up till now, if you pasted content from Word then you’d often end up with odd-looking results. That happened because pasting brought over not just the content you wanted, and structural information like tables, but also formatting information, such as fonts and font sizes. Ideally, we want the blog’s theme to control presentation to keep posts looking consistent.
The WordPress Plain Text plugin, suggested by Ollie Bray, provides an alternative solution. Because this is such a common problem, we’ve installed it as a site-wide plugin.
The key benefit it brings is the ability to include tables in blog posts and pages in a way that avoids any need to use HTML.
Here’s an example of pasting from a Word document using the tool.
Continue reading ‘eduBuzz blogs now feature “Paste from Word”’
