That’s meant to be blank like _________ like make your own site that operates like the DS106 Daily Create. I’ve been mumbling about it for like months, and sat down to start tinkering about a week ago.

I think most of the parts are in place, I’d say it is several Greek letters prior to “alpha”, and am writing now to check in as a progress to myself post. Much of what is left is cosmetic and structural layout, documentation, and much more testing.

The idea is that like the Assignment Bank Theme you can create a kind of site that generates any kind of Daily task, assignment, challenge. A Daily [fill in the blank]!

cc licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by Corie Howell

Unlike the The Daily Create, you do not have to respond by uploading and tagging to a specific social media site. Whatever you do as a response, you simply tweet to a specific twitter account the site owner creates, and include the link and a hashtag associated with the Daily _______.

This is what I saw as things to figure out, and what I got done last week:

• Set up an admin options page for details specific to your site. This was easy a copy of what I did for thr assignment bank theme.
• Figure Out How to Connect/Query a Twitter Account All new stuff, found a library/plugin for managing the authentication of the account, and a lot of play in using it to request tweets to a specific account. The other challenge is setting up a way for the site to automatically check twitter on a regular basis; it’s sort of working.
• Create a Content type to store the responses I wanted to a site to keep a local copy, not relying on twitter, so a custom content type is needed.
• Add extra features/settings to a normal post to make it into a Daily Blank item.
• Make some modifications to the WordPress dashboard, to better reflect the kind of content in the site.
• Whats Next? when can you use this?

It’s current test site is living now at http://splot.ca/dailyblank and likely will generate PHP error codes as I work on it. I have the current code on github as well.

I modified the home page template to display just the most recent item (like the Daily Create).

What follow is an excruciatingly long, code-filled post. I’m putting it below the fold, so if you are reading this in one of those antique RSS readers, you might have to click through to see it on my blog (which, I must say, is looking gorgeous in its new clothes).