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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Just got word via the tweetvine from Dave Lester that the first ever WordCamp Ed (WordCamp Education) is happening in Washington, DC, on November 22 at George Mason University. WordCamp Ed is a WordCamp focused entirely on educational uses WordPress “” in schools and universities. The inaugural WordCamp Ed will be held at George Mason […]
photo credit: lordog Continuing the gastronomic theme for my WordCamp experience, here are a few quick things I took away from the experience (for complete coverage, see Andrew Mager’s live blogging) WordCamp’s t-shirt colors (brown this year) seem to follow directly the lead of Northern Voice 😉 Almost everyone I met was with some company, […]
To say I had a great time this past weekend at WordCamp would be an understatement. Beyond the gathering of 400 other WP junkies, there was getting to meet all the Automatticians (and fascinating to learn they work as a completely decentralized organization; 30 some employees strung across the US, Canada, Bulgaria, Australia, Japan…). And […]
While I tinker with them, I’ve yet to code my own WordPress plugin. There are so many to choose from!
A few weeks ago I got an email from a guy named Joe who I had met at Northern Voice. He was developing a plugin that would connect blog posts automatically to related content in a site called DonorsChoose.org— I had never heard of it, but what a great concept. Teachers (and/or students) submit ideas for learning materials or activities they don’t have, and the site connects them with people willing to help them get what they need. Donors can choose which project to contribute directly to.
DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to addressing the scarcity and inequitable distribution of learning materials and experiences in our public schools. We believe this inequity is rooted in the following factors:
1. Shortages of learning materials prevent thorough, engaging instruction;
2. Top-down distribution of materials stifles our best teachers and discourages them from developing targeted solutions for their students; and
3. Small, directed contributions have gone un-tapped as a source of funding.DonorsChoose.org will improve public education by engaging citizens in an online marketplace where teachers describe and individuals can fund specific student projects. We envision a nation where students in every community have the resources they need to learn.
According to Joe, the site has over 14,000 developed lesson ideas, and his concept was to create a system where blog posts would automatically by linked to relevant content at DonrsChoose.
I was a little curious since I really doubted the rants and whinges I post would have some correlation in a school project database, like when I use words like “cat piss”, but he said apost I made about the Learning 2.008 conference had a great amount of correlation.
Besides manually updating six separate instances WordPress (to version 2.6) in the NMC fleet of sites, I also finally paid some over due attention to the version of WordPressMultiUser I have had up since November 2007. This tool some rustling to get it to the right version and also what had not been done in a while- making the front door.
I am hardly a WPmu guru, certainly no bavatuesday… maybe a bavalatethursdaymorning. Most places running WPmu are doing it to provide a blog hosting service, like edublogs or the crazy stuff the Rev does at Mary Washington.
My need was to have a series of separate sites hosted in WordPress w/o having to have an even bigger fleet of separate installs (Heck, maybe one day I can rope them all in under the WPmu hood). No these are all a series of online publications we have done at NMC in the lasy 8 months, all using the slick CommentPress template. Developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, CommentPress provides a way to post a series of publication chapters as “blog” posts, but the special feature is that comments can be attached to individual chapters.
So we have things like the 2008 Horizon Report in this format as well as the text of a keynote given by Howard Rheingold on Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action.
Until just a few minutes ago, these were separate little sites, but now I have at least a crude launch page for the entire WPmu site at http://wp.nmc.org.
