At the Northern Voice Tiki party, Scott Leslie wowed us (well I was wowed) with his rendition of a poem only geeks could grok, called “Trackback Love”. I grabbed some video with my little Canon Powershot- the lighting is awful but the audio is not bad. Trackback Love (3.4 Mb Quicktime 1:42)
Twitter Works! by cogdogblog posted 22 Feb ’08, 3.38pm MST PST on flickr Bill Fitzgerald exclaimed this after asking attendees at nrothern voice who had aspirin and Chris Lott tweete back, "me" People keep asking for how to use flickr or what its practical applications are. Bill Fitzgerald can now vouch that he was able […]
How does one blog a blogging conference? However you feel like doing it! It’s Friday, time for Moose Camp at Northern Voice 2008 and I am convinced every conference should launch with a tiki bar party. So the Waldorf Hotel was packed with bloggers of all varieties. Got to hang out with Jim Groom, Chris […]
Hurry up and submit your session proposals for the Apr 1-3 NMC Symposium on Mashups! This online conference will take place in both Second Life and on the web at LearningTimes. Creative Commons licensed flickr image from lantzilla Data mashups were featured on the mid-term slot for the 2008 NMC Horizon Report. And we now […]
Serious Gulls They Have Here in Vancouver by cogdogblog posted 21 Feb ’08, 12.17am MST PST on flickr Gonna give the gulls something to worry about, I landed today in Vancouver, in an early landing move of Operation Northern Voice. My role is to represent the blogging interests of the Great Unknown Canadian Southern Province […]
Even with spam fighting plugins, on a daily basis, I am spending time I’d rather be doing sometime constructive, and deleting, moderating, click through the relentless barrage of blog comment spam. I am feeling like the dutch boy and I am getting weary of trying to hold back the dam. The killer was one that […]
Do you want to have fewer blog readers? Are you tired of pesky commenters who disagree with your posts? Is there something to be gained by frustrating users? Here’s how… Just set up your blog so users have to create accounts and log in to post a comment. Heck, they already have 50 gazillion accounts, […]
Yesterday I wrote of the power of using twitter as a “CallOut” to get help or participation or just say, “Hey, we’re hanging out over at this cool web place.” And late last night, another example twittered my way- getting a tweet from both Sue Waters and Al Upton. Al does these fantastic web blogging […]
My oft repeated line this year is something about most enjoying the net based things that happen totally without provocation, plan, just spontaneous connectedness. I am sure that its maybe 3% of the general population that can really experience this with wide eyed excited wonder, and I am fortunate to know some of the best among that percentage.
I was setting down to shoot down some emals, perhaps edit those audios I need to publish soon, like yesterday, and as the habit goes, I said, “I’ll just check twitter quickly, just a minute to scroll.” And there, in the 5 seconds ago, I saw Jen was linking to a ustream.tv channel she was broadcasting on. I’d not done hardly any ustreaming since my trip to Australia, and said, hey, I wonder how it works if you have multiple people broadcasting?
So I flipped on my channel and we could pretty much talk back and forth, and she was relaying chats from ?? Alec Couros and/or Rob Wall?? So without knowing what else to do on camera, I reached for my prop, and brought Fresa on screen:
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 slowly ripped the guts apart. So far, in the stable, is the NMC Campus Observer which began as the Blix template. Then there is NMC Virtual Worlds a child of the Orange 2.0 Theme, and one where I learned to create multiple page templates, use custom fields to spawn content specific sidebars, and rolling my own database queries to get posts I really wanted. Our podcast site, NMC Conversations is probably the least modded, a few tweaks of the redoable theme.
Now the thing I also love about WordPress is there are many levels of creativity you can operate at. You can simply blog, never tinker with the templates, and easily switch out themes like a new pair of socks. That’s great; it means you are focused on the content. Or you can get way down into the guts of the engine. Now I don’t do much with widgets- I think the concept is great for many bloggers as it offers a nice amount of flexibility on what you slap on your sidebar… but in my case, I find them horribly limited and boxed in.. cause I know I can easily script my way to something better. Or you can somewhere in between- add your own graphics header, toss some specific text or web javascript code in the sidebar.
So as I get closer to the details, I remind you the stuff I am talking about is what you can do with your own code on a hosted server; while the WordPress.com service is fabulous (I used it myself this year), its simplicity comes at a price of severe lack of template tinkering. You really cannot do much there.
BEFORE:
The site I am going to talk about is the NMC Pachyderm Services web site, which replaces a static HTML tabled encrusted, hand code the navigation links” Pachyderm.org web site, which was not all that bad, but once you go to database driven template sites, it just hurts to hand code an HTML site.
AFTER:
So I am going to talk alot about the mangling I did in the templates along with some plugins I deploy (and tweak too). I should say I go about waist deep into the CSS and full body dive into the PHP code of the templates. And for some of these sites, I make a bend away from the standard format of blog as reverse chronological series of “posts”. I make web sites, not blogs.
Some of this stuff may get nitty gritty in detail, but I am intrigued to see if I can document all the little pieces that came together for this site. To be honest, these really develop organically, and sometimes change/evolve with more content dumped in.
