A quick howto… in case anyone else is struggling to work out how to update their blog’s thumbnail image on Technorati.

The thumbnails are served by Snap.com, so you have to get them to update their snapshot of your blog home page.  This can be done by going to question 14 of the Snap.com FAQ and plugging in your blog URL.

Simple, huh!

A couple of you will have noticed that I’m not very quick at moderating comments on this blog.

Why?  Because my spam to comment ratio is very high and I have, up until now, had to moderate all comments manually.

For the record, I’ve finally gotten round to moderating everything to date.  I’ve also added Jeff Barr’s little trick of asking people that are making comments to type in my first name as part of the process.  This should, I hope, weed out most/all of the spam.

We’ll see…  I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Some readers will know that I’m currently chair of governors at my local primary school in the UK - Newbridge Primary School - and that I helped construct the school’s Web site using bits and pieces of Web 2.0 technology. One of the things we do is use Blogger to maintain a set of blogs for the school. These are pulled in dynamically and displayed as though they were locally held content.

Gina, the fairly new ICT coordinator at the school, ran an INSET day session yesterday afternoon, trying to encourage all teachers to write for their class blog. The long term aim is to get the children to do this as well… but we need to take baby steps and nothing is going to happen until the staff feel comfortable writing for their blogs.

I think the session went pretty well. People seemed impressed by how easy it was to add content to their class blog using the Blogger editor. We’ll see how it goes. There’s not going to be a short term miracle… but I’m confident we’ll get there in time.

As part of the session Gina played a couple of videos - Shift Happens and CommonCraft’s Blogs in Plain English. This kind of material is pretty much the norm now in higher education but I was impressed with the background work Gina had done in preparing for the session. Good stuff. She has big plans for the school’s use of ICT, including getting teachers and pupils podcasting.

At some point we’ll need to run other training days looking at the use of Flickr and del.icio.us - both of which are used to hold content for the Web site. But yesterday was a good first step and I’m quite excited about where we can take this stuff.

I’m still playing with the theme for this blog. The current one (which I got from the ’salmon’ section of the Wordpress theme viewer) is by Steffen Becker. It was originally in German so I’ve had to translate a lot of the user-interface language to English. I’ve probably missed stuff - apologies in advance if you suddenly have to switch into German mode…