WordPress

July 5, 2010

Link wrap-up for #J361

A collection of links and pointers to what I talked about with Suzi Steffen’s Reporting One class last Thursday.

I mentioned a couple of things that may come in handy, including all the support pages for WordPress.com. Those are a great place to find out how specific features work and can help you get going again if you’re stuck on something.

There’s also a handy series of How-To videos at WordPress.tv. These cover everything from the basics to more advanced editing options. There are also a series of videos on the WordPress.tv homepage if you’re interested in watching talks given at WordCamps around the world.

After the Deadline

Great spell, style, and grammar checker that is baked into all WordPress.com blogs. You can also find extensions for Firefox, Google Chrome, and OpenOffice on ATD’s download page.

Podcast recommendations

I mentioned a couple of podcasts and wanted to add some specific recommendations for those interested.

5by5 is a studio run by Dan Benjamin that produces a great series of technology and web-focused podcasts. Many of the guests are not your typical developers as well. Some are in the editing, design, or usability fields as well. The Pipeline is particularly good and the show with Liz Danzico may be interesting to those wanting to improve their writing or find out a bit how professional editors work.

I also highly recommend anything from Merlin Mann. I mentioned his Time & Attention talk in class and that’s really worth watching if you’re wondering the forces that come into play when envisioning how to get people consuming your content.

Danah Boyd is also someone worth following if you’re interested in how information flows around the web. She gave a talk at the Web 2.0 Conference that is about 20 minutes long and well worth listening to.

There was a lot more mentioned too so if you have any questions just shoot me an email. It’s andrewspittle at automattic.com.

June 27, 2010

WordPress as book publishing platform

An interesting project is underway that seeks to create a model for book publishing that can thrive on the web and across devices. More intriguing, though, is that the founders are taking WordPress as their starting point and developing the software through plugins. There’s even been a prototype book release.

March 21, 2010

Archiving Twitter With WordPress

Yesterday I had a spare couple hours and decided to follow Doug Bowman’s example and set up a self-hosted archive of my Twitter stream with WordPress. You can see the finished product of that here.

There was some interest expressed on Twitter of others wanting to do something similar so I thought I’d help out by making what I did available for download. You can grab a copy of the theme and required plugins which will provide pretty close to a turn key solution for getting this running.

I highly suggest following Bowman’s tutorial for downloading and importing the initial archive of previous tweets. Once you have that done and the plugins and theme are installed there’s a couple things you’ll want to do:

Replace the profile_image.jpg file in the theme folder with your own profile image.
Head to your profile page within your WordPress installation. You’ll see two new fields, one for the url of your Twitter profile and the other for your Twitter username. These power the text in the header so just fill them both out and the header text will be linked to your profile.
The tagline below the username in the header is pulled from your blog’s tagline so fill that out in General tab underneath Settings.
Setup Twitter Tools to create a new blog post every time you tweet. You can find more information about doing that at the WordPress plugin directory.
Run two queries using the Search Regex plugin (for more info on these queries read the original source). This will link up all the @usernames and #hashtags from your tweets.
- For @usernames enter /(^|s)@(w+)/ into the Search Pattern field and then enter 1@<a href="http://twitter.com/2">2</a> into the Replace pattern field. Check the Regex box.
- For #hashtags enter /(^|s)#(w+)/ into the Search pattern field and then enter 1#<a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%232">2</a> into the Replace pattern field. Check the Regex box.
- In both cases I suggest running a Replace before running Replace & Save. This will allow you to look everything over before making changes that will affect your database.

That’s it. After doing those steps you should have a searchable, self-hosted archive of everything you’ve posted on Twitter. If you run into questions or problems feel free to fire away in the comments.

Update 3/23: Emily Ingram pointed me to a plugin that will achieve the same auto-linking of @replies and #hashtags that the regex calls do. It’s a super simple solution and can be downloaded from the WordPress directory. Sounds like it works quite well.

March 10, 2010

Redefining political participation

The technological capacity of individuals to publish information online expanded tremendously over the last decade. Free platforms for public expression and publication of ideas proliferated, most recently through services like WordPress and Twitter. There are now an incredible variety of tools available to people that allow any individual writer to potentially have global reach.

Many of these tools for publication have an inherently social aspect. More than simply tools for publication and the broadcasting of information they have conversation at the heart of their technology. Communication online necessitates more than just publication. With modern communication tools there as much emphasis is placed upon what happens with the information once put online.

The last few years have seen the astounding expansion of three key technologies: near real-time communication, relatively easy self-publishing, and powerful data aggregation. The rise of Twitter and related technologies of the real-time web, such as the Tornado Web Server, allow for messages to be sent, received, and replied to in mere seconds. Blogging, and self-publishing in general, has developed remarkably powerful tools as well. What started with tools like Blogger and LiveJournal has now exploded with software such as WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous, and Movable Type. Finally, with all of this information being published at a more rapid rate our tools for aggregation have improved immensely. RSS readers such as Google Reader and Fever present the ability to categorize, filter, and rank information from many sources. Furthermore, software developers have begun to leverage algorithms to analyze, sort, and rank news items in a way that allows the software to filter the important items out of the noise. ¹

The internet and its associated technologies have been around for decades and seen a vast array of literature devoted to their political potential. What is it that makes the current moment different? What about the political potential of these specific technologies lacks precedence? (more…)

Notes:

A definition of noise will be important to keep in mind throughout these essays. In this discussion I am using Matt Pearson’s definition “Irrelevant & unwanted data; anything that is out of context [to an individual] given the intended signal of the medium in question.” It is important to maintain that noise is relevant to individuals and particular contexts. For these essays there is no objective, universal definition of noise. ↩

March 10, 2010

Participation Through Publication

As communication online continues to grow we must ensure that there are solid tools providing all with the ability to publish their voice. The ability to make one’s opinions known in a public forum is a requirement of a democratic political system. This right can be traced all the way back to Athenian democracy. Under this system all citizens came together in the Ekklesia to discuss and vote on issues of political importance.¹ This can be seen in traditional spaces like town hall meetings, political rallies, and in newspaper editorial sections. The expansion of a desire to make one’s opinions known online signals the most recent manifestation of citizens’ desire to make their thoughts known in a public forum.

The current software available to people wanting to publish online allows for remarkably powerful publishing to occur. Numerous professional-level platforms are offered to any user for free. These tools allow for users to publish their thoughts through free and easy to use software in a public-by-default manner. Furthermore, a growing selection of tools allow for people to publish to a global audience from nearly anywhere. A stationary location with a full-featured computer is increasingly no longer a necessity to partake in online publishing. The ability to publish has been extended to anybody with a mobile phone.

The modern tools that have been developed for publishing online give more people a greater ability to make their voice heard from an expanding range of places. WordPress and Twitter take the ability to publish online and make it something that is accessible to a greater portion of the population. The political potential of the millions of people expressing their voice online can have a tremendous expansionary effect on participation in United States politics. (more…)

April 27, 2009

The ideal WordPress CMS

A little less than a week ago some of us sat down together to talk about what features we’d like to see incorporated into WordPress to make it a more powerful CMS for news organizations. The resulting conversation was posted on the Inside CoPress blog and Daniel’s written up a nice summary there too.

After talking with Mo, Daniel, Max, Eric, and Drew I drew up my own list of what I would like to see. Some of these are discussed in the conference call, but I thought I’d give my own reasoning behind them as well.

The Ability to pull more Author metadata:

As part of designing News Evolved I wanted to create Author pages that functioned as personal resumes; however, I came up against a limitation of what types of information WordPress allows to be pulled from the user account.

If you want to display the name, website, email, AIM, description of an author then that’s easy enough, but there’s currently now way (that I’ve found at least) to create customized fields for each author and pull those into The Loop.

This would be great because it would allow for info like an Author’s Publish2 links, their Google Reader shared items, an online chat widget, Twitter stream, and more to be pulled into an archive page.

Furthermore, I think that creating author pages that looked like personal resumes of online activity might inspire more college journalists to start using tools like Twitter and Publish2.

A lot of reporters at the Whitman Pioneer like to point their friends, parents, relatives, etc. to the site so that they can see what their son/daughter/etc is writing. By including personalized information on an Author’s archive page these same people would be able to see more of what that student is producing online.

More roles for users and the ability to only post to a specific category:

Some of this came up during the discussion last Wednesday so I won’t bother to reiterate those ideas.

The one thing that I think would really help WordPress to function as a truly efficient CMS is the ability to limit certain authors to posting in specific categories.

At the Whitman Pioneer we use categories as a way to create topic-specific blogs. They’re all listed as child-categories under a main category of “Blogs.” We’ve recently opened these up to non-staff members to encompass a wider range of topics and opinions; however, there’s one significant downside to all this and that is the amount of time that is needed to maintain it all.

Every time a blog is added I have send out a new email with instructions for how to post and how to categorize things properly. Inevitably people, even people on the staff, post something in the wrong category and suddenly it doesn’t show up under their blog.

By limiting an author to a specific category then this whole problem of making sure bloggers are posting in the proper categories would be resolved in a clean, automated manner.

Anyway, those are my thoughts any ideas? What would make WordPress more useful to your news organization?

Note: There’s a couple forum topics over on the CoPress site that deal with these issues too if you’re interested.

Tag: WordPress