No offense meant to baristas

I’ve added some content, links and a made-up indented quote to my WordPress Notes page, after noticing one-too-many student sites made with WordPress that show signs of “this was just done for class and I left it hanging around.”

Often, they literally show a sign: The “about page” text or header “tagline” that WordPress includes on every startup installation. It’s like having a column full of “lorem ipsum” in your newspaper.

Other times, the problem is just that the student or professor set up a blog “for class” and hasn’t used it in months, or years. OK, I have a bunch of “demo” pages of my own, but I call them that and link them back to a home page that eventually leads to someplace where there’s up-to-date content.

I’m especially concerned about students looking for work in a blog-savvy, social-networked, online world. Demos, “for class” and “tried this” sites better not be all the prospective employers can find.

So… after going back into the page a dozen times adding a link here and fixing a typo there, I added this. (Quoting yourself can be tricky when you’re as wishy-washy as I am.)

“Unless something else about your site makes it clear the line is postmodern/ironic or expressing extreme gratitude to Matt and the other folks at WordPress, having ‘just another WordPress weblog‘ on your page might as well be saying ‘just another unemployed barista.’ Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” — Dr. Bob

New WordPress Has More ‘not a blog’ Layout Features

Mashable discusses the addition of new customizable content types in the next release of WordPress, the software holding this blog.

Right now, there are two basic writing layouts: dated blog posts like this one, and “pages,” which appear as tabs on some WordPress themes, or menu items on others.

My Video and Whim tabs demonstrate that you can already vary the layout of WordPress pages, but it sounds like WP 3.0 offers a lot more opportunities.

RSS widgets for republishing

For my intro to Web Production students to ponder over spring break, here’s a demo site that uses RSS plug-ins, content management software widgets, and related aggregation services to consolidate blog postings, social bookmarks and even a Twitter account…

bobwebs & cobwebs

I do similar things on my stepno.com home page and this WordPress blog. (The former uses a free service called RSS include.)

At the end of the semester, I’ll have students use Drupal, WordPress and the hosting services of their choice to make “mirror” (sometimes funhouse mirror) images of the sites they develop for class, so that they aren’t just learning how to use our university server.

More blog platform transition notes

In response to another WordPress blogger trying to get an old flat-file HTML copy of an archved blog online, I suggested this:

Not exactly the solution you want, but you could try this, if you own your own domain:

• Pay $10 to have wordpress.org redirect your new blog to “blog.mydomain.com” (How-to: http://support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/)
• Put all your old postings on “mydomain.com” as “oldblog.mydomain.com” or “mydomain.com/oldblog”

This assumes you have your own domain (mydomain.com) and server, but you could do it on any server that gives you ftp access.

1. On your computer, make sure all the links within your old blog pages are “relative” (to pathnames within the blog, not explicit URLs like http://boblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/workaround-for-archiving-my-other.html
2. Zip up the folder containing all those static pages. (I put mine in a folder called “oldblog”)
3. FTP the zip file to your mydomain.com server
4. unzip as http://www.mydomain.com/oldblog
5. Fix all the public access privileges for those nested folders, pages, images, etc.

Here are my notes on doing that to recover from the demise of my Radio Userland weblogs.com hosting:

http://boblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/workaround-for-archiving-my-other.html

And here’s the result: http://stepno.com/oldblog

This blog is currently aliased as http://stepno.com/wp — but I may install a copy of WordPress there eventually.

If I do, the process will be relatively easy, judging by these forum posts:

• Blog migration
• Migrating a wordpress blog to a new domain

Drupal –> WordPress

Just starting to collect notes…

http://socialcmsbuzz.com/convert-import-a-drupal-6-based-website-to-wordpress-v27-20052009/

http://macmegasite.com/node/5075

http://www.darcynorman.net/2007/05/15/how-to-migrate-from-drupal-5-to-wordpress-2/

http://vrypan.net/log/2005/03/10/migrating-from-drupal-to-wordpress/

http://blog.urbanmainframe.com/2008/07/mysql-search-replace/

Getting to know WordPress again

My school site may be making a transition from Drupal to WordPress, so I’d better get some practice here.

And maybe I’d better go back and see what I did at Harvard: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/stepno

For now, the Radford University School of Communication is http://www.radford.edu/comm