These posts document experiments in hacking and tweaking Wordpress; I hardly call myself expert, but I do like to tinker under the hood. If there is something I can do for you, bark my way or visit me at http://cogdog.it
I was not happy with the way my site was working out to present the new collection of True Stories of Open Sharing. I found my categories were forcing me into artificial classification. And the nifty gizmo I had used previously, CoolIris, for the “wall of media”, works, but is annoyingly tedious to update (manually […]
Ir’s been fun to do some redesign and alignment of the ds106 web sites. I’ve long had an interest in trying to make the ds106 Assignments site into more of a template that could be used to create similar sites, and that just got a little bit closer to possibility.
The entire 106 fleet is a WordPress multisite, the main site and the Daily Create site both use the Parallelus Salutation theme, so they were easier to coordinate; the one change was using incorporating the stressed 106 logo as part of the TDC. They both use menus at the top, and I’ve set up the rightmost ones to be “ds106” navigation ones.
The ds106 Assignments site was a different beast. It is built on a 960c theme, one of the generic 960 grid system themes. I gave brief thought to trying to render it in Salutation, but it’s a hugely customized theme, and I was not even sure how to do taxonomy archives in Salutation. As is the design is a close-enough match.
The front page used a lot of graphics, and they were all hard code into place (to add a new assignment group meant a new graphics and the template edited):
The “Mission ds106” title was another graphic with its tagline “An anthology of new media projects” that really was not too explanatory. Not only that, I was unable to find the original graphics or even fonts used to modify those graphics.
Likewise, the interior page template used some hard coded icons, which looked nice, for the top navigation. Not easy to update or make more generalized:
My plan was then to implement the built in WordPress menus for the top navigation, so it would be common on all pages (and be flexible to edit) and maybe to make those front page main icons also be menu driven.
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by epc
In my last post, I quickly overviewed the wordpress customizations I did to set up the ETMOOC Blog Hub. Using the Feedwordpress plugin for a few feeds is easy to do, and it does a rather slick job of finding feeds from a blog URL.
The messy part is dealing with a lot of blog feeds. Getting this part right is more than just tossing URLs into a magic box, you have to have a good grasp of how RSS feeds work in different blogs.
It’s messy.
Because of those pesky humans.
Over at ds106 we have a rather elegant blog registration system that Martha Burtis designed, that actually does a web registration and automatically enters someone’s new blog into Feedwordpress.
The thing is there is a bit of variability to deal with when allowing people to bring in any blog platform (that is what we want), because it can eb confusing to the individual, especially if they are new to blogging, what we ask of them.
The thing is, it’s most easy if someone says, “I am going to do this ETMOOC thing, so I am going to make a new blog just for that stuff” – all we need is the blog URL and Feedwordpress can figure out the right TSS feed to use.
It gets more complicated when someone has an existing blog they want to use to do ETMOOC writing. There is nothing wrong with this approach (especially since it is mine!) but we don’t want to subscribe to everything the blog publishes- we just want posts that are related to ETMOOC. So the person with the blog has to decide (and understand how) to use tags/categories in their posts to mark things they want to syndicate.
This is quite a powerful concept that is easy to overlook – it means I can do things like use a single blog to selectively push content to different places through an understanding of the flow.
This is compounded by the different ways blog platforms are st up for this kind of syndication.
Messy.
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by agiledogs
I’m really getting the hang of setting up these FeedWordPress powered syndication sites- I wrote a few days ago about using this approach to create a twitter archive site for the ETMOOC site. At the same time, and more over the last few days, I have been tweaking the edges and putting into motion what should be a core of the site, the aggregation site for participants in the MOOC which starts next week.
Alec Couros has that draw power! I heard well over 1000 people signed up; the ETMOOC Google+ Community is brimming with intros of educators from all levels and corners of the world.
As a little bit of architecture, the main ETMOOC site (http://etmooc.org/) is running WordPress multisite, using URLs for subsites, and I have rolled out the two extra sites, the Twitter Archive (http://etmooc.org/tweets/) and the Blog Hub (http://etmooc.org/hub).
As of tonight, we are syndicating in 65 blogs and everything is humming nicely with 165 posts brought in:
Check it out now at http://etmooc.org/hub. This post is more a run down of the WordPress mods to organize the site; in a next post I will go over the process for getting blogs into the mix.
cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk The “syndication bus” is the Groomian term for the use of RSS aggregation technology that allows a class/community to run as both a hub and a decentralized network of blogs- individuals publish in their own space. The class or central site exists to […]
UPDATE June 19, 2013 Since twitter has killed their version 1 API, there is no longer a public RSS feed provided for twitter activity. Expect new solutions to emerge, one that is usable now is this method from labnol to convert the new JSON feeds to RSS using a Google Script. This method works in FeedWordpress.
I’m growing more and more and more and more (more?) interested in building out more syndication architectures like we have done in ds106, at a range of scales from te 600 feeds we crunch for ds106 to the 40 or so we did for the Project Community Class down to the 2 I do for my own self syndication.
Leaning towards the bigger end, I have been working to set this up for the ETMOOC thing Alec Couros (and about 90 other people it seems) are launching soon. It’s been a great chance to stretch some WordPress chops with FeedWordPress in place for the syndication engine.
Below I outline how I created the site that is archiving the #etmooc tweets – http://etmooc.org/tweets
cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk We are big on hubs here at the hub of CogDogBlog. In fact, well, let’s say I am writing something profound about networks and syndication, mainly because I am setting up and testing some blog syndication for Alec Couros’s ETMOOC due to blast […]
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by The Rocketeer This may be a niche case but I am just making note for myself. If you ever feel the urge to change the Permalinks setting on your WordPress site, keep in mind you will break any old external links that point to […]
I got a chance to spread the ds106 mojo at Wordcamp Vancouver today, with my session on Building an Open Course/Community with WordPress, Syndication, and Duct Tape:
ds106 is an open course in Digital Storytelling that leverages platforms of open source tools, syndication, and social media in a way that makes it more community than course. At ds106.us is a wordpress powered hub that aggregates and recombines input from 500+ external blogs plus a user contributed assignment bank, daily creative challenges, even a radio station. Built by a team of educator tinkerers, not coders, ds106 is as a model of a community network that is not limited to just courses.
This was on the heels of a cross-Canada flight with a 1:30am arrival to our quarters in Vancouver, a little bit more late night slide fiddling of slides, a trailing cold, and lot of coffee. Hence, GNA’s description feels apt:
@cogdog Guess what? You are nice. You sounded both knowledgeable and like a tweaker. So good.
— GNA Garcia (@DrGarcia) October 13, 2012
First up the slides, exported from Keynote as a pDF and upped to slideshare
I also broadcast the talk to #ds106 radio, and had planned to record the audio on my ipad… but forgot to click the Big Red Button. Oh well. I also had my keynote presentation doing some auto tweeting (curious? here’s how) (yes, I have to update those instructions a bit).
Ah, but who needs an audio recording when Giulia is doing her amazing visual notes?
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe
I really meant to do a nice web site for the presentation with links and stuff, but alas, this is a WordPress conference and why not just blog it? eh?
A few thoughts- as I guessed most people do not know nor really care about massive open courses. But they do all have the common experience of school, sitting in rows, listening to lectures, whule at the same time being part of the creative aspects of the open web.
People do not really even get or understand syndication. It feels like magic. Maybe it is.
RSS is sure lively and useful for something that is dead.
People were really interested in the Daily Create and the concept of the Assignment Bank. I spoke to people in areas outside of education who quickly saw the application potential.
Maybe I did convince them how much fun this is and I do it for reasons that ahve nithing to do with being a business success or maximizing my SEO.
Now, the links:
Confused? Don’t know where to put a comment on a #ds106 student blog as part of the Magnificent Seven Blog Comment Challenge? I have the link for you. With some rubbing together of magic dust and a dab of elbow grease, I have a new feature for the various “sections” of ds106- these are classes […]
