CogBlogged Tagged ‘using wp’

I’ve tried for months to get the WordPress PodPress plugin to behave- on multiple sites it just plum refuses to embed the player in the page. Every option is set to display the player, I can see it in the source, and it fails. And it seems like it gets upgraded once a week, each a complete download and replace of a gizillion files. The only advantage it appeared to offer was ability to generate iTunes formatted feeds, something we’ve not really desperately needed. On a new podcast focused site I am working on, I am switching to the Anarchy Media Player- and it Just Works.

I just got self distracted, not in twittter, but twiddling here with the blog. For quite some time, I have rigged together a ‘Page’ in WordPress that uses a RSS feed with info on all the presentations I’ve done going back to 2003. This was generated by sending the feed to the Feed2JS site to dynamically make the page. I’m writing up notes here how it was done- the new thang is up at http://cogdogblog.com/best.php What I did not like was that it grew rather long, so I decided to make it be a PHP script that would dynamically do the right thing per year. The first step was breaking up a long single XML file into smaller files, one per year, e.g. 2003, 2004, … 2007. Just cut n’ paste. The idea is to have a web form in the page that presents a menu one can choose from- [...]

I sat down to the computer tonight to take care of some quick tasks. What a cool surprise in that one of by blog run projects, the NMC Virtual Worlds site got included in a list of “Truly Unique and Outstanding Blogs” (Ouch, sounds a bit like a 5% Point thang). Taking a peek at the site to make sure it was okay, I was surprised to see the public one was running WP 2.0.6 as I thought I had done a 2.1 upgrade… well I had done it on my local test machine, but never got to updating the main site. And a good thing I dawdled since my local copy was the dangerous 2.1.1 version. And than I got fuzzy on the template changes I had to wrangle due to a few database changes in the new code. And I forgot my custom function I bury in the [...]

While I was not blogging here last week did not mean I was not spitting posts elsewhere ;-) For my planned trip next October to Australia, I took Nancy’s Chocolate laced advice to blog the trip by setting up on WordPress.com yet another blog outlet, CogDogRoo. My plan is to not only blog the trip, but all the advanced prep I will do (putting this in public may hold me accountable). And this was my first flavor inside hosted WordPress, and it sure is familiar, yet not quite the wide open lab you get with your own version of WP… on the other hand, for a site you can set up for free, blog, and use a lot of built-in tools without touching code, MySQL, plugins, etc, its pretty sweet. And curse anyone who finds my old blog post about not blogging elsewhere. Despite those intentions, I have more WordPress [...]

Here is a cheap but useful trick for you WordPress bloggers- don’t sap your readers with 10 mile long URLs. If you use the Permalink option to publish your posts based on the date, time, generally it turns a long title blog post like above into something horrible like: http://cogdogblog.com/2007/02/14/pimp-up-your-wordpress-guru -status-trimming-those-long-title-posts-with-slugs That is butt ugly and pretty much says to anyone with some slightly advanced WP skills… “I am a n00b”. All it takes is to create a shorter link portion is an edit in the Post Slug box, one or two words that capture the essence of the post and voila! A tidier URL, in this case, http://cogdogblog.com/2007/02/14/slugs There, you can now help reduce the amount of bandwidth consumed by the web, by reducing the transmission of extraneous text characters. Make your URLs shorter today!

It was time to make the run to upping this WordPress site to the current version, 2.1, nicknamed “Ella”. Hey, it is jazzy! There are promises of better code under the hood and some new features I’ve yet to really look much into. I’m pretty religious about following the upgrade instructions, backing up the static files, making a database dump, shutting off the plugins, downloading newer versions of the plugins, etc. But I also took the opportunity to do what I should have done when I move my site to Dreamhost, which is to use their “one-click” installs as it makes future updates, also one-click. But I was able to jump my previous install on board without too much sweat or cussing. First, I moved the entire directory, which includes not only wordpress but a few other piles of content, to a temp directory on my server– this gets pretty [...]

The CogDogBlog has been un-snapped. Back in December I experimented with adding the capability offered by Snap.com that with some additional calls to a remote JavaScript library in your blog templates, it adds a small web site preview when you mouse-over a link external from your site. I found it interesting, sometimes in the way when I was trying to right/control click to copy a URL, but never quite convinced myself why it was important. And since it was yet one more thing loading something else from an external site, I’m opting to take it out for now. Though is this interesting concept, a blog full of poems by [[mez]] (what language??) that uses links to some external preset sites to add some visual oomph to words, as jill noted: As you can see, the code-snippet only shows previews to linked pages on other domains. So Mez created a quick-and-easy [...]

Hang on to your full content news feeds, this post might be a long one. I hope to try and document the under the hood as well as some of the exterior chrome work on a new site NMC just unveiled this week. This is as much for my records as anything. But first, start with the demo, the final piece. The new site is for NMC Virtual Worlds, our new arm that provides consulting and buolding expertise in Virtual Worlds, right now focused n (but not forever) Second Life. Take a peek first at http://virtualworlds.nmc.org/ which looks almost like: if you reload the front page, the banners as well as the case study in the lower right will change. The banner rotation is easy, something I’ve already put into the other WP power site, the NMC Campus Observer. The needs for the site were provided rather simply as a [...]

After reading, Quentins nicely shared post of the WordPress plugins used on his site (and more shared in the comments), I thought, “Great idea! Let’s go into borrow mode!”. And it made sense to build one of those, um, colo– colofuns, coloph…. oh what the heck, Blog Bits, that describes some info about what’s under the hood here at CogDogBlog. To re-iterate, my plug-in pile: Dunstan’s Time Since Displays in human language how much time has passed since a post was published, “This entry was posted 6 days, 8 hours ago” Jerome’s Keywords Allows keywords to be associated with each post. Not very optimal, Bunny’s Technorati tag stopped working for me; need to look into Ultimate Tag Warrior. Optimal Title Allows <title>…</title> content to put the title first and blog name last, not as “good” if you are after search engine points, but of more use to web site taggers. [...]

Updated WordPress. Time on task, about 4 minutes. Easy-Peasy. Now I need to tend to a few other WP sites I have laying around elsewhere,