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20 01 2006

The blog based school website - a good first start

Posted by: Rob Wall in WordPress, Geeking out, small pieces, technology in education, web

Earlier this week I wrote about building a school website one blog at a time, and some thoughts on the merits of not building a monolithic site, but as a series of small inter-related pieces. I’m happy to report that things have already started to move in that direction. You can see the main school page for North Battleford Comprehensive High School, and right in the middle of it is a set of links with the title NBCHS Happenings. (See screenshot below) NBCHS Main Page (Dang - the screenshot got automagically reduced when I uploaded it. Someone must know how to get the full size image up there - D’Arcy, any ideas? Yay - D’Arcy knew what to do! See comments for details.)

The NBCHS Happenings links are actually all harvested, using feed2js, from the NBCHS Happenings blog. We had done something like this before using a Blogger powered blog to generate the feed. The improvement in this system is that the entire system resides on our own server. Its also going to be very easy to put new dynamic content via RSS feeds from our blogs on the main web page, or any other page that we’d like. Of course, this doesn’t preclude anyone from choosing to use a different tool - wordpress.com, for example - as long as it generates an RSS feed from its content.

The next step - some really good discussions with the teacher librarian (Hi Donna!) and others to start defining what information belongs on the front page of the website and what information can be enfolded elsewhere in the website. Then we figure out how that information gets entered, sorted and displayed where we want it. But at least we have step one taken care of! Not bad for one week worth of effort, which included other distractions such as teaching! ;^D

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 13:20 and is filed under WordPress, Geeking out, small pieces, technology in education, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “The blog based school website - a good first start”

  1. D'Arcy Norman says:
    January 20th, 2006 at 14:03

    it’s a bit quirky - in the image selector bar, click the image. A “menu” will appear over the image. Click “Thumbnail”, which will cause it to not use thumbnail. Also, there’s a minor bug in WP 2’s image placement - even though it does place an image using the full image if told, and not a thumbnail - it will set the width and height of the img to the thumbnail dimensions. You have to manually set them to the actual dimensions for the full image to show up. Quirky. I’m assuming that will be fixed in the upcoming 2.x update…

  2. Rob Wall says:
    January 20th, 2006 at 14:56

    That does sound kind of quirky - I’ll try to fix it up.

    Somehow, I knew you’d have the answer. :^D

  3. D'Arcy Norman says:
    January 20th, 2006 at 15:10

    thaaaat’s better :-)

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