The purpose of this BlogFest is to give participants some practical experience in being part of a blogging community. It will hopefully be a community in which we can learn from each other and bounce ideas off each other.

Twice a week (Mondays and Thursdays) from January 4 - 22 you will be set a task. Each task will be described in a new post on this blog.

Once you have written a post on your blog that complies with the task, then you will tell us where to go to see your blog post.

Part of every task is visit the blogs of other participants and leave a comment.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Task #3: Embedding Content

I hope you are enjoying the challenges of the BlogFest. How are you going at visiting and commenting on the blogs of others?
Try to see blogging as the beginning of a conversation. Write encouraging comments on the blogs of others, and then try responding to comments that others make on your blog.

The task today relates to embedding content.

There is all sorts of content apart from images that you might want to embed in your blog.
In general embedded content pulls in data from another place of the internet into your blog. If the content disappears from the external site then it will not show up on yours.

For example, the map below shows countries that I have visited. It is generated by a really simple piece of code that pulls the data in from an external site called World66.



You might like to try your hand at embedding a YouTube video. Once again it is just a matter of inserting the html code. Make sure though that you copy the code into the html screen of your post.



There are all sorts of things to embed: a Prezi, a Google Doc, the Mr Linky that I use, even a Frappr Guest Map.

Your task is to write a new post that
  • displays at least one bit of embedded content
  • contains a BlogFest logo (either mine or yours)
  • links back to this Task #3 post.
Come back here and add your name (or that of your blog) and the URL of your post to Mr Linky below. Leave a comment about how you are feeling about the level of these tasks. Are they too time-consuming?
  • Visit the posts of others to see what they have done.
Task #4 will appear on Thursday 14 January.

Posted by at
Labels:

9 comments:

  1. Ali HallJanuary 11, 2010 at 12:42 PM

    This widget task has been a little time consuming as I have had to search to find some new widgets which I haven't seen before. I also wanted to find a few example of class or educator blogs where the widgets were being used in a learning context.

    ReplyDelete
  2. NickJanuary 12, 2010 at 9:01 AM

    Kerrie I have spent many houirs yesterday trying to get a widget to open up in me.edu.au blog but to no avail. Have there been similar reports of problems embedding code in the past?
    The code I'm trying to embed is one similar to yours - places visited. Incidentally I've tried to insert the code here, and it does not accept it either; maybe because it's a comment box.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kerrie SmithJanuary 12, 2010 at 9:03 AM

    Ali, can you talk to Nick about embedding content in me.edu.au? What will work?

    ReplyDelete
  4. NickJanuary 13, 2010 at 7:56 AM

    Finally my task 3 is online. You may wish to visit my frustrations at http://me.edu.au/b/myedna/. If you want to you can go straight to my new one on blogger at http://ncblogfest20101.blogpost.com

    ReplyDelete
  5. Kerrie SmithJanuary 13, 2010 at 9:08 AM

    Well done Nick.
    I see you are using your new image too.

    If you want to put active links into comments in Blogger you need to use html. (you know the a href="....." stuff in appropriate <>s
    If you are on a WordPress blog then URLs are automatically "translated". Each blog has its good things and drawbacks.

    Some blog platforms don't allow you to comment unless you can log into that platform - or at least that is the setting people use in the name of "protection". My general philosophy with comments is that I don't moderate them unless I begin to get spam - spam in blog comments is relatively infrequent unless you get targetted.

    ReplyDelete
  6. UnknownJanuary 13, 2010 at 11:54 AM

    I have managed to achieve a good reult for task 3. I knew in advance that embedding content may be difficult so before I started the task in me.edu.au I made use of the search function. I found some very useful results and tips. Thanks especially to Ali who has posted some very useful blog entries.

    ReplyDelete
  7. UnknownJanuary 13, 2010 at 2:54 PM

    I learnt something about Mr Linky and working too fast today! When I came to add my url to task 3, I noticed that it had pre-populated the user and URL fields. Rather than checking the URL was correct I just pressed Enter. What it had done was remember the url I had entered from my previous time which is why it is directing to Task 2. I have added a new link to task 3 (which is why I am in the list twice). Kerrie will very kindly remove the wrong entry when she can.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousJanuary 13, 2010 at 4:26 PM

    Hi Kerrie. I am really enjoying the challenges of the tasks. I certainly wouldn't have made the time to experiment as I have without your expert guidance! Thanks. Caroline

    ReplyDelete
  9. EmmaJanuary 17, 2010 at 12:06 AM

    Hi Kerrie,
    My laptop is as slow as anything so I skipped the playing with images task. I tried to embed your logo but was unable to do it so to see if it was just me I copied the URL from Caroline's (Thanks Caroline-fantastic job!!) and it worked. Any suggestions as to why I couldn't get yours to??

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)