Together with our Web Manager, Chris Goddard, I ran a session on the use of WordPress in HE at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010. It was good to see all chairs taken and people seemed to get something out of it. It was useful for me, too, to find out about how WordPress is being used at other universities. A video interview followed.
I attended a day-long workshop yesterday on Google analytics, run by LunaMetrics. For those of you who may not know, Google analytics is one of their free services that let’s web site owners gather website visitor statistics which can be used to provide more effective sites. It was a great workshop, and I’ll be incorporating the ideas into some web-application re-writing I have planned for the summer.
One of his quick tips was for this Firefox add-on, which makes it easy to include some of your site tracking tags into shortened URLs used on services like Twitter and Facebook.
A Firefox sidebar to easily shorten URLs, plus add Google Analytics tracking tags. Great for measuring traffic from Twitter. Snip-n-Tag currently supports five of the most popular URL shortening websites, including tr.im, bit.ly and tinyurl.
These are slides to accompany an eight minute ‘Lightning Talk’ for the dev8D conference in London, 24-27th February 2010. Each slide is a link to a blog post I have written on ways to use WordPress and WordPress Multi User, that are not about blogging.
I am finding the open source NetBeans development tool really great for my PHP programming work. It really saves time by catching the simple typo and syntax mistakes I commonly make. Please to code suggestions and other elements are helpful too. Part of what makes it so great is the connection that the project developers have with the programming community — as an example of that read this post. It is exactly this type of close connection to a user community that makes open source so powerful.
I spent talking about PHP development in NetBeans almost whole session. After the session there was a long discussion (more than 1 hour) and some people complained about formatting…As a result I have decided to look at this and to try to fix as many bugs as possible. Because there is not much time for NetBeans 6.8, I would like to ask you for help.
The WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin scans system files, posts/comments and plug-ins for suspicious stuff. If you have a blog site that you think may have been compromised it can’t hurt to give it a try. I ran it on a couple of blogs I administer and I’m happy to report that everything looks fine. One of the things the plug-in looks for is hidden code in your site, especially hidden style elements. This is a way that spammers can insert code into your site — but there are lots of legitimate reasons for these elements too. So the report can look a little alarming or overwhelming at first, so run it when you have some time to scan over the output report. A good tool to keep handy for when needed.
This plugin searches the files and database of your website for signs of suspicious activity. It will not stop someone hacking into your site, but it may help you find any uploaded or compromised files left by the hacker.
We recommend that all sites are upgraded to this new version of WordPress to ensure that you have the best available protection…If you think your site may have been hit by one of the recent exploits and you would like to make sure that you have cleared out all traces of the exploit then we would recommend that you take a look at the WordPress Exploit Scanner.
What is OpenCalais, and what is this semantic web stuff all about? Sure I watched the video on their site, and read through the documentation. Somehow this all will make web content in general, and these blog posts in particular, easier to find and link with other relevant information. Which all sounds good, but I want to see it in action. So I installed their Tagaroo WordPress plug-in.
The most immediate change is the addtion of the tagaroo tag area, which suggest tags based on the post content. It is pretty cool too, as it dynamically updates and suggest new tags as you add content. It also has a Flickr image suggestion bar, which isn’t working at the moment, but also doesn’t hold any interest for me — I don’t see how random Flickr image additions enhance this content. I went back to a recently published post and added in all of the suggest semantic tags. When looking at the page mark-up I don’t see any indication of tagaroo/opencalais’ presence. Maybe it is posting information back to the OpenCalais servers? I did need to register for an API key. I’ll play with it a little more, but if it helps make this content more semantic, then why not?
We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph – we call our piece of it Calais.
Tagaroo provides automated tag generation and image location for WordPress bloggers. We like Tagaroo so much that we gave him his own website. If you’re a WordPress blogger and would like to integrate Calais functionality directly within your blogging life then hop on over to Tagaroo.
Tagaroo is designed to make your WordPress blog better for you, better for your readers and more accessible to search engines. As you’re writing, Tagaroo analyzes the text in your post and suggests intelligent tags for the things and events you’re writing about.
A great post by Jim Groom at UMW on the use of WordPress multi-user to aggregate content via technologies like RSS. Places like universities are complex places with many affiliates who all have needs for their own web identifies, and control over these identities. These can range from grant-funded projects to various centers to faculty research sites. But there is also a need to be able to pull this content and re-mix it in various ways for various audiences. For instance faculty research sites that feed content to a department site that highlights the latest doings by their faculty. Jim describes this all better than I’m doing here so go read his post. We have something similar running with MU here, although we haven’t really started to employ it in a production way yet (too much beginning of the year stuff to work through!) But the bottom line is what sounds really complex is actually pretty easy to set up from a technical standpoint, and pretty cheap from a hardware/software cost perspective, when you use a tool like WordPress MU.
So you offer a Bluehost like setup for faculty, and if that is too much, allow them to map a domain, take control of their own course work, and encourage an aggregated course management model that pushes students to take control of their digital identity and spaces by extension.
Website Magazine’s listing of top sites for web pro’s has WordPress.com in the top ten — and twitter only number 12. Not sure what it means, if anything, but it is interesting to see what their “proprietary method” thinks is important.
Website Magazine’sTop 50 rankings are a measure of a website’s popularity. Ranks are calculated using a proprietary method that focuses on average daily unique visitors and page views over a specified period of time as reported by multiple data sources. The sites with the highest combination of factors are ranked in the first position.
Making a commitment to a PHP framework is like committing to exercise everyday — you know you should do it, but tomorrow always seems like a good time to start — and of course tomorrow never comes. I’ve been debating between CodeIgniter and Symphony for a couple of months. And not making up your mind is another good way to put off actually doing something. I attended the PHP CodeWorks conference last week and the CodeIgniter session was pretty good. The first point Ed Finkler made was that it really doesn’t matter what you pick — get whatever works for you. CodeIgniter does have a successful commercial company, EllisLab (makers of expression engine CMS) behind it, plus an active developer community. I believe the upcoming new version of ExpressionEngine is also being built on top of CodeIgniter.
To help push me over the edge, Packt Publishing has a CodeIgniter book out. I know I’m old fashioned, but I find the structured presentation contained in a well laid out book very helpful when learning something new. And so far this book is well laid out. It isn’t super code heavy, which I find can slow things down. If the book provides pages of code examples, which you need to re-create in order to really understand the examples, and things don’t work out well due to typos or operator error, you can get lost easily. The book has short, simple examples to illustrate the points — perfect for testing and experimenting. And short enough to find an error when they come up. So I’m working my way through the book. This time I’m really going to start!
So after all this, why use a framework? In the CodeIgniter book, the author keeps making the point that you write less code. But that assumes you don’t do anything to speed development of a web site (like use include files for page headers) which I expect most developers already do. One real advantage is for a team of programmers, as the framework helps structure a standard way of building your web applications. And CodeIgniter is nice in that it has a structure, but isn’t so restrictive as to force a whole new way of working — making it easier to adapt this to existing database structures or web projects. And even as an individual it helps enforce a best practices approach — i.e. escaping user input, using object orientated techniques and keeping presentation, application and database layers separate.
This book explains how to work with CodeIgniter in a clear logical way. It is not a detailed guide to the syntax of CodeIgniter, but makes an ideal complement to the existing online CodeIgniter user guide, helping you grasp the bigger picture and bringing together many ideas to get your application development started as smoothly as possible.
Welcome! CodeWorks 2009 is a series of two-day conferences for PHP developers and IT managers organized and run by the publishers of php|architect Magazine.
I just signed up for a new forum service on building the Herreshoff boat Rozinante. Wouldn’t it be cool if when you signed up for something like this, you could tell it to figure out who you are from all your other social network memberships? Glen Jones has an article on A List Apart, showcasing a new javascript library he’s created that does exactly that? It might feel a little creepy when you see what it can get – try it out here — but it is all available to someone via Google anyhow. And it seems to me that this ability to be recognized as an option, utilizing all your existing social capital would be an attractive option for users — maybe students using a university-based social network system (like buddypress?) Some interesting possibilities here…
Ident Engine discovers and retrieves distributed identities and user-generated content to help you build a little magic into your user interfaces.
Try it out! Enter your profile URLs into the lifestream and combined profile demos.
