Posts from the ‘techie stuff’ Category
I ran the updates for the website this morning, for both the WordPress engine itself (3.8.1), and also the plugins.
The CDH site is being backed-up automatically with the Backup Buddy plugin to the iThemes cloud, and also locally.
I made some edits to the Events page, and I added a post for the upcoming Professionalization in the Digital Humanities event with Professor Wernimont.
There’s a nice Calendar plugin I’ve come across recently, and it might be easier to use than the code for the current Events page (it’s free):
The Events Calendar from Modern Tribe: http://tri.be/shop/wordpress-events-calendar/
— this plugin is in beta mode with The Center for Ideas and Society at UCR: http://ideasandsociety.ucr.edu/events/
— the “List” mode might be good for CDH uses too: http://ideasandsociety.ucr.edu/events/upcoming/ (Month or List mode can be chosen at the top right of the calendar)
I’ve added some CDH archival material to the Events page.
Rather than creating new posts in the WordPress structure for archival materials, I created these “media archive” web pages from scratch.
It can be difficult to deal with audio files within WordPress — plugins are needed, and sometimes files must be hosted on third-party servers. Also, these audio files are much too large to be housed within the WordPress library.
By creating these external web pages, which are still hosted on our UCR/CDH webspace, we’re able to playback the audio recordings of past events using HTML5 technologies that are built into modern web browsers.
I also uploaded the event photographs to the WordPress library, and I made links to them on these media archive pages.
On the Events page, posts about past events are listed in red — and posts containing archival materials are listed in gray.
Here are the links to the posts I created, and more material is forthcoming:
http://cdh.ucr.edu/a/cdh-kang.html
http://cdh.ucr.edu/a/cdh-raley.html
http://cdh.ucr.edu/a/cdh-anderson-willis.html
http://cdh.ucr.edu/a/cdh-clement.html
http://cdh.ucr.edu/a/cdh-juhasz-bookchin.html
I made some changes to the website recently, and most of the changes are based on the new features of the WordPress Jetpack plugin.
1. I removed the Disqus commenting system.
– Disqus has been moving toward becoming a social network of its own, and there was just too much complexity being added to the commenting procedure.
– Comments are now handled solely within WordPress with the Jetpack plugin, and commenters can sign-in to make a comment with their Twitter, Facebook, or WordPress credentials.
– All of the old comments are still there too.
2. The Photon feature of the Jetpack plugin is now active.
– Using the Photon feature allows for integration of our WordPress.org installation with WordPress.com’s CDN (Content Delivery Network).
– This means that images and other information will load faster across the web.
3. We’re now using the Publicize feature of the Jetpack plugin for auto-posting to social networks.
– Previously we were using the “WP to Twitter” plugin which had some hiccups, but only because of Twitter changing their API. Hopefully there will be fewer missteps with the Jetpack plugin.
– Also, we were using Hootsuite to post to Facebook, but I didn’t like this setup. Hootsuite is okay for managing multiple social networking accounts (for a fee), but rather than using a direct-post to Facebook, Hootsuite relies on RSS. There would often be a delay of hours for the WordPress RSS to be read by Hootsuite, and then hopefully Hootsuite would send that info to Facebook. With the Jetpack Publicize feature, things are working much more quickly, and reliably.
– Sadly, Google+ still doesn’t have a public API available for auto-posting.
4. Backups of the site have been made – both a full FTP download, as well as an export of the site’s posts and info.
5. Lastly, I changed the social networking or sharing buttons so they show at the bottom of posts, but they do not show on the front page.
If anyone would like other changes or tweaks, please let me know.
I went through the CDH website here, and I made quite a few revisions. The website was getting a little cluttered, which is a good thing since it’s being used a lot, but it did need some spring-cleaning.
Here’s a quick overview of changes:
→ the main navigation was cleaned up
– the About page is now incorporated into the Members page
→ the News navigation dropdown has been revised
– now the only dropdowns are “events” and “resources”
– all the other categories are still available as a dropdown in the sidebar
→ the Twitter sidebar widgets have been removed
– the CDH Twitter feed was mostly just posts from CDH itself (@UCRCDH)
– and #digitalhumanites can be reached in other ways
→ Links (mostly UCR related) have been moved from the sidebar to the footer
→ a new Calendar page has been added to the site (this is for CDH events)
→ the ability to post from iPhone and iPad WordPress apps has been turned on
Also, I added a new category called “techie stuff” where I’ll post info about updates to this site, as well as other things of interest regarding hardware, software, coding, and the digital engineering culture.
If anything looks weird, or if you can’t find something, or something isn’t working right, please send me an email.
