You know how my last update consisted of me moaning about how our CAPTCHA didn't work after I spent hours painstakingly integrating a rather tedious hack into cutenews?

Well, I just tried ReCAPTCHA and it worked after no less than 30 minutes of fiddling! I'm an idiot! As a result, comments have been turned back on for everyone. Wondrous!

Edit: Bad news, everyone! The server that hosts our site has been down for the last week :(
Unfortunately there's nothing we can do in this situation, if the school ever gives me a proper budget I promise I will buy more expensive web hosting.

Edit #2: New background. I didn't think such an event would warrant a new news post, but it pleases me.

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Following from Rob's observations, we have sadly had to temporarily suspend the comments section due to large amounts of Spam. We will resume as soon as we can.

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P.E. Stories:

- The Parent and Pupil Camping Trip at Rough Close.
- Level 1 Bike-ability course
- Special Schools Football League
- Indoor Rowing Tournament
- Playground to Podium Talent I.D. Day

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I figured I would let you folks know what I am planning to add to the site in the coming months. These will be two rather big updates, mind!

 - CAPTCHA on the comments. Spambots just found the first article, so it's probably not long before they find the rest. Adding CAPTCHA will require me to modify every page on the site, so it may take awhile.

 - Similarly, adding a login box to the side of the site will take a while as well, for similar reasons. However, don't forget you can still register and login at http://www.exhallgrange.org.uk/cutenews.

 - I might put in iframe on the left hand side. It wasn't in my original plan because I wanted to keep things really simple, but thinking about it, if I want to add anything on the right in future it would make it really easy. Currently the site does have one invisible iFrame which contains the Google analytics code.

Until then, keep having tons of fun with the site.

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I have written previously about how the internet is being used to bully and spread false accusations.  It is enormously difficult to get the owners of social networking sites to intervene to remove offensive and libellous material.  Following a series of malicious allegations against a member of staff in another school (for which the student was excluded) the headteacher pursued Facebook and has found out how to register a complaint, get material removed and block the (ab)user from the site.

If your child experiences any bullying or is the victim of malicious comments on Facebook please complain by using the link privacy+06mcxup@support.facebook.com.

You will need all the following information:
- Web address (URL) to the page containing the offensive content
- Exact name and networks of the person responsible
- Web address (URL) to their profile page or search listing
- Brief description of the abusive content's context and nature
- Location of the abusive content eg status update, About Me section, comments under photo
- Time and date at which the abusive action occurred

I would hope that the prospect of being banned from Facebook would be enough of a deterrent but please speak to your child again about the appropriate use of social networking sites.

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- December 2009 & January 2010
- New Addition To P.E. Kit
- Success Stories
- Events:
- Special Schools Events to follow

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- ‘Home Access’ On-Line at Home
- Taxis
- Contacting School
- Revised Arrangements to GCSE Summer Results Days in 2010
- Diphtheria & Polio Vaccination
- Dinner Money
- AFEGS Meeting - 18th March
- Wanted:  Plants
- Raffle in aid of Haiti
- French Afternoon
- Family Training Event Warwickshire
- Year 12 Leisure and Tourism visit to Twycross Zoo
- Mr. Burton & Mrs. Schofield Class 4 and 5 Visit to Nuneaton Gudwara
- Partnership Link News
- Play Rangers

Click 'read more' for the full newsletter.

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Before you get posting there are a few ground rules to go over, so I may as well go over them now and save the trouble they will inevitably cause later on.

Firstly, take note of all the different categories. Make sure you put your post in the right one, and use multiple categories if necessary. Don't clutter up the categories, try to keep your posts clear and concise.

Secondly, if you're really, truly concerned about making quality content, get Mozilla Firefox and the British English Dictionary add-on. It gives you little red lines when you spell a word wrong. I can't live without it.

The entire old site contents are available from here, but it's not exactly a goldmine of knowledge. There's also all the images together in a file called images.zip, as well as on our Flickr channel thingy.

When uploading an image, you should not upload one that will break the layout (too wide or aligned wrongly) and the same goes for text and non-ascii characters. You can use the free image editing tool Paint.NET. Image -> resize will resize your image, and you can also use adjustments -> auto-level to make your pictures look really pretty. At some point, we will also a Youtube channel. At least, that's the plan.

In the meantime, you can sign up for an account right here and start contributing right away! You can also email me if you would like your account upgraded to editor/admin status.

Public todo list:

· Make archive template(s)
· Fix sidebar separator disappearing when an image is added
· Configure image upload directory correctly (WYSIWYG editor is currently linking the wrong image)
· Start uploading content from the old site
· Transfer domain ownership
· Cutenews seems to be generating shorttags that get warnings from the W3C markup validator (partially fixed)
· Fix font inconsistency in comments
· Fix broken full-story link in multiple cat items
· Fix broken cat iconarchive view in multiple cat items
· Integrate a login box to the main site (?)
· Implement captcha for the comments

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