CogBlogged Tagged ‘wordpress’

I had this idea to explore and honestly could not find a relevant use to even flesh it out, so am putting it out there in case others do. There are several tools you can use to have your blogs, when they publish posts, to automatically send a tweet out with the link. On this WordPress blog (and several NMC ones) I use the Twitter Tools Plugin. On some other sites I use twitterfeed which does the same thing, but from any RSS feed you want (so I have some drupal feeds that are auto tweeted this way). But what if you wanted some way to “tag” or track such content? Well, with the more recent version of Twitter Tools (and as a feature on twitter feed) you can edit your own lead in text to published tweets… so mine come out as “CogDogBlogged:” and then the tweet: Previously, you [...]

I’ve done a handful of web projects this year where it made sense to store data in Google Spreadsheets, and then use a bit of PHP code to make them be dynamically displayed on a web site. In many cases, these are tables of data that are parsed and presented nicely in the web site, but for a few NMC projects, it made sense as a way for a staff person to update data on our web pages w/o having to touch the pages. As a first example, I am cleaning up an older WordPress site I use for logging my running/training; in the past, I kept a spreadsheet on my desktop for keeping a run log and then manually transferred the totals/averages/graphs to my web site by pasting into some text files (they are embedded with a PHP include). It worked, but it did have that tedious manual smell [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Slightlynorth My not so accurate radar is being tickled by some recent emerging technologies that some Big Shot may place as the next incremental digit following “Web”. Submitted for your approval, Mr Serling: A lot of talk of “real time search” The whole crazy growth of Twitter, Facebook, etc — built on answering the deep philosophical question– what are you doing NOW? Waiting for the Google Wave to land on shore — more promise of the web being not a pile of linked documents but a networked of linked flowing communications. One more today- I caught Joss Winn’s tweet about WordPress.com’s new experiment in Real Time Blogs: At im.wordpress.com we have been experimenting with instant delivery of blog posts and comments. Now you can subscribe to WordPress.com blogs in your Jabber IM client and receive posts and comments the instant they are published. It [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by ElDave The main navigation of most WordPress sites is driven by cycling through all of the content that are WordPress pages– which is nice, but sometimes you have content that you don;t want cluttering the navbar. Or maybe you want to insert something that is not a Page into the navbar. I’ve been amazed that so few people seem to know how to subvert it, and below is a little trick I use when I want to wedge some other kind of WordPress content into the navbar by Pages process. Mostly this is in your HEAD… I mean the header.php file of your templates that generates it as an Unordered List: <div id="nav"> <ul>   <li class="<?php if (is_home()) {echo 'page_item current_page_item'; } ?>">     <a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/">Home</a></li>   <?php wp_list_pages('title_li' ); ?> </ul> </div> The first li item creates the Home link, and in [...]

Here’s a big twitterbution to robin2go (who was so cool to meet in person at Penn State) for sharing a really cool WordPress Plugin — Tagnetic Poetry. It displays your WordPress tags as something that looks like the magnets you make into poems for your fridge– and just as they do, in your blog you can re-arrange them (below is a screen shot; link to go to the real deal): I have this running on a page at http://cogdogblog.com/tag-poetry/. Now I am inspired to do more tagging of my posts, cause this is fun.

My colleague Rachel Smith presented a nice little WordPress challenge to re-create what she had done previously as old skool manual HTML page updating into her WordPress blog (see Postcards back through time). In the spirit of previous documentation of WordPress Theme hacking, here is the under the hood things I did, some variations on ones I have written previously WordPressing Dissected: Pachyderm Services and Making of a New Site: NMC Virtual Worlds. This current write up includes a custom category template, direct database querying, custom fields, and maybe a little elbow grease. Firstly, the original site of Rachel’s postcards features her original artwork, with the most recent one at the top, and icon links to previous works below. I would guess creating a new one is making a new HTML page, copying some source code to the top of the index, and updating the icons below. Maybe it’s not [...]

Do you use the TwitterTools plugin on your own WordPress site to send your blog posts to your tweet stream? Wanna feel like a real WordPress hack jockey? Here is a little code editing you can do without needing to know diddly squat about PHP. Here’s the thing, when TwitterTools published your new sexy blog post to Twitter, it always prefixes it with the same intro text that everyone else gets: New blog post: Video of My Big Blah Blah Blah Got Stuck in the Blah… http://tinyurl.com/xxxxx Do you really want to post like everyone else? That is so lemming like. Sheep. Conformist. Not for me. Long ago, I dug into the code and found a line to edit to change it, so my blog posts to twitter are always uniquely mine as Just CogDogBlogged: This is so easy, all you need to be able to do is to edit [...]

Just toying around with the new QuickPress feature on the WordPress 2.7 dashboard. Sweet! Am just getting used to all my links on the left. I love the new dashboard features, being able to move ‘em around, hide ‘em Nice to see a few changes to the media uploader (looks like defaults match the way I work for images). I would still like to be able to admin comments right from the dashboard. One minor minor oddity- why does the top link to “visit site” not open in new tab/window? I hate blasting out my editing interface. And I am already eager for the first built on 2.7.1 upgrade to see how the updater works. Update: Interface quirk IMHO for QuickPress is that the feedback on clicking the “Publish” button is way to subtle. I saw no browser spin, and thought I mis-clicked, so I clicked the button again, and [...]

Many will regret (or will lie and say they were there) missing last night’s presentation performance by Jim Groom and Tom Woodard as the norm-blowing closing act for the 2008 NMC Rock the Academy Symposium. You have to wade through this blog post to get to the video recording ;-) Donning their gas masks, flame throwers, and edupunk t-shirts, Jim and Tom laid out the warnings of zombies and where they lurk in educational technology. The audience was warned before hand that this was going to be an intense, almost radioactive presentation, so we provided them safety glasses ahead of time. They started asking the audience what their fears were. [16:33]  Redbaiters Stanwell: What are scared of? [16:33]  CDB Barkley: getting sued [16:33]  Elli Pinion: lack of money [16:33]  Oggie Ballinger: Budget cuts [16:33]  Corwin Carillon: accountability [16:33]  CDB Barkley: losing students [16:33]  Mae Mathilde: lack of control [16:33]  Rane Mistwallow: security [16:33]  Hyperion Sands: privacy [16:33]  Ginger Questi: change [...]

I just whipped up the puniest of WordPress hacks for the ultimate reasons, to serve myself. If I knew what I was doing, it would be a plugin, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Here’s the thing. Whenever I write something, i like to reference by link a previous post. So I have to load my own site to find it, and man, I am tired of waiting. So my hack generates page that just in simple layout lists your latest 100 (or whatever number you wish) posts, so you can either copy the URL or edit it. It makes something like this: The code consists of 2 PHP files and a GIF image that go into your theme directory: http://cogdogblog.com/code/lastposts.zip headless.php is just a simplifed version of header.php with just some CSS in it last.php is a simple template that does all the work images/edit.gif [...]