CogBlogged Tagged ‘using wp’

I’m loading up my duffle bag with mosquito repellent, mess kit, multi-tool, flashlight, sleeping bag, laptop, blog…. woah woah… well I am not taking all that stuff but I am going to camp… WordCamp! WordPressCamp! Thanks to a direct message nudge from @lloydbudd as a reminder, I hemmed and hawed and then just spelled out WTF. I’ve got a bunch of miles on United to get there … ouch… speaking of WTF… WTF is a “close-in processing fee”? United charged me, a sort of frequent flier, $75 because I just used my miles for a trip less than 21 days out. How is that costing them money? Next thing it will be the seat-belt usage fee and the ramp extension charge. Oh and the landing gear deployment fee. Geez. Oh well, its still an inexpensive trip, and a chance to spend a day in total geek out WordPress mode. I’m [...]

WordPress 2.5 has been out a few days, what am I waiting for? Actually for my Dreamhost hosted sites, the upgrade is a brainless click with its One Click install/upgrades. I am done. Well not completely, the whole admin interface is different! It has that new car WordPress.com smell, the old blue is gone, we have pastels, and woah, all the stuff is in a different place. Its just an adjustment phase, like wiping the crud from your eyeglasses. Back up th This post is not about the virtues of WP2.5 as they ought to unveil themselves through use (time to get serious about tagging though). I am thinking more about the fleet of 4 or 5 WP sites I have at NMC (#6 is in the oven) and the upgrade path for them. WP2.5 has in place upgrades for plugins and at NorthernVoice, Matt hinted that it might someday [...]

I’ve just swapped the spam “defense” here from SpamKarma2 to Askimet. The word is that Dr Dave is going to top updating it. Sk2 has sure needed regular attention lately, a lot of moderation, and then I found out that friends of mine were being tossed its captcha, and I hate bad captchas. Bad news. And then I recall at Northern Voice 2008 when keynoter Matt Mullenweg said he created Askiment for his Mom top be able to blog w/o worry of spam… well he had me. So now I am running Askimet. No spam fence is w/o problems, so I am holding off any celebration.

photo credit: lovestruck. This is my first play with PhotoDropper a WordPress plugin that provides a search interface and one click insert so you can find creative commons licensed flickr photos in your blog. It is lovely, a lovely, lovely plugin, and is just one more iota of my expression of my flickr love. Or obsession. All of which is infinitely more fun, fulfilling, interesting than drudgery than things like meta data or BlackBored. I am fairly sure this is a linktribution to Tim Lauer via twitter

Let me join the Jim Groom Kum-Ba-Ya I Love WordPress Chorus. In this least year, I’ve rolled out 3 NMC web sites that are published via WordPress, with each one going deeper into the bowels of the templates and just more jazzed how I can bend them to my will, casting CSS, PHP, plugins, MySQL to do my bidding. This is unlike drupal, where after a year I am still trying to figure out just how the heck it works and manages information. Its still a grey murky, opaque blue gumdrop box. I am trying to summon the drupal love, and it aint happening. But WordPress, you make me sing. In this blog post that portends to be a monster one of length, I am going to dissect a new site I worked in gory technical detail. On each of these sites, I have started with a standard template and [...]

A while back I was excited to tinker with CommentPress, a WordPress template geared towards a format for online papers — see CommentPressing NMC Paper on Evolution of Communication. Developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, what CP offers is the feature for site visitors to attach comments at the paragraph level– this is all riding on a blog platform, but produces something rather not blog-like… well, sort of blog like. We did a trial for this at NMC for a white paper we had released in November; the first iteration of the online paper was via drupal on our main web site, where each chapter was done inside a drupal book content, so that each chapter was commentable. It works, but… as a CommentPress version, the comments can be more granular in context of the paper, and we picked up a lot of good comment activity [...]

On my tale of switching media player plugins, D’Arcy’s comment about troubles with the Anarchy Media Player preview got my thinking, why be stuck with the lame graphic the plugin provides? Just make your own, and replace the vid-play.gif file inside /wp-content/plugins/anarachy-media/images — here is a test to see how mone looks- this is the default player if you do not provide a media image: Paddy the Wombat movie Isn’t that nice than:

Note to readers- mostly tedious details on WordPress nuts and bolts to follow- click next for the usual shallow barking and whining) WordPress Plugins are awefully powerful to let you easily add/subtract functionality form your own hosted WP site. But sometimes, they become a marriage that may be difficult to extricate yourself. For the NMC Campus Observer, our WP powered site for our Second Life antics, since its inception on March 2006, I had used PodPress, a rather full featured plugin to handle the embedding of audio, sometimes video. It has a huge list of features, and if you have ever looked, adds a lot os “stuff” to your pages. It has a lot of updates, and each replacement is a not so moderate upload of scads of files. Adding the audio/video content is not done via editing your content, but via a separate editing pane. But more problematic, I’ve [...]

I’ve barely had time to breathe much less update all of my WordPress powered sites, but noticed today one small feature I’ve been waiting for… I was actually, for no logical reason, setting up one more new WP powered web site for NMC, not quite ready for prime time. But what is cool is the plugins page now informs you when a plugin has a newer version available: Until now you would have to check each plug-in home page to check. Nice. Other goodies lurk under the hood- tags for posts built in — and it looks like it will import tags from old plugins (like Bunny’s technorati tags I have used a bit) and some other enhancements for dealing with blog post URLs. For CogDogBlog, the changeover is easy, as the Dreamhost one click upgrades make it a no brainer; my corral of NMC blogs will take the old [...]

Over the years, angry blog posts about spam is my most frequent blog post activity (well, until Twitter came out). I’ve been long resigned to scripted onslaughts of attempts to insert unwanted content into the comment space as a SFOL (Sad Fact of Life). For the most part, I’ve had excellent luck with Spam karma 2 catching most spam and keeping it from my pages. 27,000 spams eaten in maybe 3 years, oi! But each one results in an email that at first excites me (wow, a real person had something really to say!) which today turned to sour grape juice 10 times with a series of comments like “pjtxgw qbvxdmac fkzv zdmltnav ouiszlfmj qfidsozar oapzfsdb” or “”. What’s weird is that the URLs inserted are gibberish too. My only guess is they attempt to foist an approved comment past a sleepy blog writer, and once the gate is open, [...]