CogBlogged Tagged ‘using wp’

Despite my best intentions, I find myself with a small herd of WordPress blogs- this one, my running blog, and two more over at NMC (one is our Second Life site, the other is still under wraps, sorry). So today was upgrade day, making sure they were all brought up to the latest 2.04 version (and sadly enough, this very blog was the most behind). Running WordPress upgrades is not too challenging, and they certainly have the steps outlined in grand detail. And I do it to the letter; disable plug-ins, make a dump of the database (well first optimize some of the bloated tables), and then start moving up the new files, run the upgrade script, and re-activate the plugins. I did 3 of my WP blogs in about 25 minutes. Things I wished for: * It would be great to have an upgrade distribution of WP files that [...]

Remember the “S” in RSS standing for Simple? I’ve gone through several gyrations [1] [2] [3] in trying to leverage RSS-ified calendar data to push content to a blog. Calendar information is just not as neatly boxed like Title, Link, & Description. What I wanted is a web-based calendar tool (lots of them), that I could give others editing rights, went beyond the fill-out-forms-click-repeat process, and it would not only generate a normal calendar view, but also an events listing suitable for a blog side bar. What I really sought as something that would list both upcoming events and past events. Google calendar certainly fills out the needs for the front end. The closest for the sidebar publishing was the iCal-events plug-in for WordPress, which could use the iCal data format published by gCalendar. What’s nice is it bad built in caching scheme, so it was not hitting gCalendar for [...]

I’m working on integrating a Google Calendar into a WP blog (not this one, an NMC project in development). The master plan is to allow a number of groups ti enter potential shared events into a common calendar, and syndicate to our blog site. I have a few events dumped into a Google Calendar for testing. What I’ve tried include: * wooglecal plugin – it’s easy to set up and use, but there is no control over the formatting/display of content- and it automatically skips past events. It would need some moderate tinkering to set up options for which calendar items are displayed (e.g. a reduced list for a side bar). Temporary demo is here. * gCal plugin – has a nicer WP interface, but I could not get it do see more than one past events * AJAX Google Calendar Events – works well for a sidebar display (tweaking [...]

I thought it was longer, but it was only a bit over a year ago I switched from my MovableTyle CogDogBlog over to its incarnation in WordPress. Having rolled out perhaps 5 or 6 other WP blogs I was thinking of blogging out my strategy for dealing with some of the coolest aspects of Wp, the flexibility of its templates. Like many people, I stayed for a whole with the familiar default Kubrick template, the blue banner with curved corners that you still find all over the web. There are many similar variations, toss a different color in the banner, or a custom graphic. I began my tinkering by slowly customizing the sidebar before doing my own overhaul in November 2005. There are likely a few different camps on how bloggers deal with the templates. Most folks likely just want to pluck something that looks nice in a preview off [...]

My commenters Joe and D’Arcy were right- PodPress is dah thing for generating iTunes ready feeds from WordPress. I should have looked no farther than my own blog here which is where I had installed it! It does not require a custom replacement file for the WP standard distribution, has better configuration, and built in players. I happily stand corrected to a 6 hour old assertion.

Just found the WordPress plug-in WP-iPodCatter which creates iTunes ready RSS feeds from a WordPress blog. This became necessary as I dabbled with posting my first enhanced podcast file, and noticed that WordPress never put the *.m4a file in as an enclosure. It turns out, WP is pretty limited on what it seeks for enclosures (mp3 only). But iPodCatter does more as it enables all the other iTunes specific fields that make your feeds ready for the Big Store. There was one needed trick, as our webserver was not configured for the proper MIME type. Failing to get the command write via WebMin, I was able just to add it directly to the .htaccess file in my WP directory (some hosted sites will not take new MIME types this way) by adding: AddType audio/x-m4a .m4a This is part of a new piece of NMC where we will be using a [...]

The conversion is complete. With one line of text, I have preserved every old link, every RSS feed, under the former URL/host for this blog from the old cogdogblog.com/…. to the exact same links here at the new home at cogdogblog.com/…/. Oi, that also means the spam will come here too. And the poker folks have been ratcheting up the intensity lately. This also includes all RSS feed URLs. As already noted, some smart software applications like NetNewsWire automatically change the URLs on a refresh. It is not magic at all, and web server redirection is so easy you think it is not real. I am utterly barefaced amazed at how many “professional” sites do not bother to leave a path when they arbitrarily decide to redo the web server directory structure, or migrate to some new content management system that obfuscates URLs with database gibberish. And all you need [...]

Finally- something with a “2.0″ on the end that has substance! My first tech task of 2006 has been the upgrade of CDB to WordPress 2.0 the “Duke” release. There should not be any noticable difference from your view, dear reader, as apparently most of the enhancements are under the hood. I avoided the excitement and followed the upgrade instructions to the letter, including making a proper database backup (actually I have scripts that do this nightly, but also did a mySQL dump via PHPmyAdmin as well as made a copy of the database there too); made a backup directory copy of the blog, de-activated all plugins. So far so good, time will tell. Supposedly there may be some performance enhancements as database queries were optimized in the new version, and I am getting used to the new admin interface. The new HTML editor is ok, I usually compose in [...]

We announced to Maricopa today the availability of our MCLI iForum at http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/iforum/ This is the first online version of the print publication we’ve run for many years. This is all built in WordPress. Our hope for upcoming issues is to have people submit drafts remotely, but with a time press, we had folks send drafts as email and word docs. However, internally, we used WP to do the cleanup editing, and that worked out well. As much as possible, we tried to get away from the tone of third person dry reporting, and aimed for some more reflective type articles. We are encouraging with some leading questions (ahem, outsiders welcome too) comments/feedback via the comment box. I’ve used the subscribe to comments plugin to make sure all authors get notification. Features include: Student Success and the Building of Involving Educational Communities by Dr. Vincent Tinto – this was a [...]

Hmmmm, something is different around here…. what is it? Oh yes, more than a year since I jumped ship to WordPress as my blog tool, I got around to customizing the look. Until now, I pretty much had gone with the stock default Kubrick template (which is more than okay) with my own banner image. But a cool dog must stand out on its own. So I shopped around a bit at the WordPress Theme Browser and landed on the Headspace Theme. Lucy for me it is based on Kubrick, so the amount of updates were not too significant, though if you change anything in WP, the style sheets, the sidebars, it becomes more than a download and drop change. There will likely be continued adjustments, refinements, and picking up a bit of poop. So in the Go Dog Go! spirit, I ask, do you like my new blog hat? [...]