LearnerBlogs.org (where my class blogs are hosted) offers a fairly large number of themes as options for your blog, but their selection is just a small fraction of the total number available for bloggers who host their blogs on their own servers.
The problem with the LearnerBlogs themes, however, is not their number. The problem is that many of them lack features that are essential for blogging with a group of students.
Here’s my first-draft list of essential features:
- Authors’ names attached to each post.
- A login link.
- The number of posts displayed next to each Category.
- A “Recent Comments” display.
- RSS feeds for posts and comments.
It would be good to construct a list of LearnerBlogs themes that meet these requirements. As it is now, you can spend a lot of time trying out pretty designs that don’t function the way they need to.
How about you? What’s on your list of essentials?