Whups, sorry about that

A spammer went through the entire server spamming all installs across the entire box. If you need cleanup help, just let us know.

Also, my desktop died about a month ago, and in moving to a new laptop, I completely missed my HSJ mail. :-/

You can always reach me on twitter http://twitter.com/andrea_r
And now Google+.

OPen signup swill be coming back to.

New themes

Some old themes have been cleaned out, and we’ve added shiny new themes to take advantage of WordPress 3.1′s new features. There’s TONS of customizations you can do – including a couple themes for those of you who like posting lots of pictures.

Have fun!

Down Time

Our apologies for the down time this afternnon, from around 12:15 EST to 2pm. Seem our webhost had power issues with their datacenter affecting every server they have. We sat on top of it until it all came back up.

New blog creation

Creating a new blog has finally been sorted out, but currently allowed only for our users who have already signed up. If you’re a member, just head on over to the signup page at homeschooljournal.net/wp-signup.php

Adding videos

I’ve received a couple emails and seen a couple blog posts about embedding videos. The way we allowed it before was a workaround, and now WordPress allows a very simple way to embed a video.

just put the url of the video all on one line all by itself. NOT the embedd code: the URL, the bit up in the address bar if you were going to send it as a link.

See embeds for more info.

Two new themes

I’ve added two new themes to the selection here – one called Coraline and one called Notepad. You can preview them under the Appearance menu in the admin area.

Upgrade delayed, but some cool news

Ron had originally planned to upgrade the site this weekend so we can add even more cool stuff. (I know, you’ve heard that before. ;P )

Unfortunately he has been really busy working with the core developers of WordPress. So much, he is now an official contributor and working on the merge of the codebases between the WordPress MU software that runs this site, and the software you install on your own webhost.

Needless to say, it’s been pretty busy around here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

(Two weeks later – Andrea forgot to include in the Site Related category so it would show on everyone’s dashboard. I will be doing the maintenance mentioned below on Sunday afternoon probably starting at about 1PM EST. You won’t be able to access the site while I’m doing the work. I’m not expecting it to take any more than 15-20 minutes. If this work is successful, then I will be planning another site upgrade between Christmas & New Year’s day. – Ron)

Since the majority of the site members are American, we wanted to take the time to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving!

While you are all spending time with family and enjoying the holidays, we’ll be tackling some site maintenance.

New theme & plugin

There’s a new theme in town called Flexx which is the version we’re using for the homepage and you can choose for your blog too. And in case you don’t want to look like us, or really want to tweak your themes’ colors easily, I added an awesome plugin called Theme Tweaker. It gives you a color picker AND shows you what colors are in your theme already. See?

screenshot-9

Photo Galleries

I know a number of you like to take pretty pictures, and now we have the GREAT new gallery feature built right in! The photo uploader is much improved, and just as a reminder, you have 30 megs of storage. You can resize your pictures before uploading and this will make them smaller.
There’s a button in the media uploader to insert a bunch of uploaded pictures as a gallery, but just in case you want to do it manually, all you have to do is add [ gallery ] to a post (no spaces), and it will display every picture attached to that post in a neat 3 column format by default.

See?

I can tell it to show 2 columns if I want. And link to each picture on a separate page, or to the file.

(The huge gap I’m working on – it’s my theme, not the gallery feature. :) )