Tag Archives: wordpress

Read feeds, when you see something you want to share, hit blog

A few Wireframes for Wordprss

Projects, wordpress, , , , ,

I had an idea a while back that WordPress is missing  a good built in feed reader.  Seems to me that Blog+Microblog+Image Gallery + feedreader + email – Freedom = Facebook.  WordPress has built up the ability to do a blog, a microblog, and post your pictures.  Everybody already has email, Facebook just has your contact list more than everything else does.  What you need is a good feed reader where your write – for inspiration, and because the web is a conversation, natch.

Here’s a quick mockup, mainly coming from my experiences with TT-RSS and Google Reader. Now, I’d really appreciate some help here – the idea is that this would something for more than just me. So, if you want, you can download Pencil Sketching – the wireframe app that I’ve used to make these wireframes. It is free and open source! You can then open up this file with all the sketch information – or clone it on github!

Read feeds, when you see something you want to share, hit blog

Tags? Folders? All at once?

Project Idea: Context Free or Processing Header Plugin for WordPress

Art, Dev, Hacks, morelight, Software, wordpress, , , , ,

An iteration or so of the website ago I hacked in a random art generator into the background of the title of my website using ContextFree.js by Aza Raskin.  It was a cool little hack, but what would be really nice is to make it shareable.

I’d like a WordPress Plugin that finds the heading of your website and inserts a little Canvas element, includes either processing.js or contextfree.js and picks a sketch, then plops it in the background of your website’s title.  How cool would that be?

How to show WordPress page hierarchies

Dev, PHP, Software, wordpress, , , , , ,

Got a request for help from some the Eyebeam list. 1 The folks organizing the Urban Wilderness Action Center for the international Electrosmog festival 2 wanted some usability help.  Navigating between subpages of their projects was too confusing.

If you like the way the sub pages are listed out on, say, the Berlin Micro-Turf Expedition – here you go.

<?php
// Does this even have a parent?
if($post->post_parent) {
$parent_title = get_the_title($post->post_parent);
?>
<a href="<?php echo get_permalink($post->post_parent) ?>"><?php echo $parent_title;?></a>:
<?php } ?>
<?php
//ok let's find our sibling pages, but we don't need to list the current page
if ( ($post->post_parent) && (get_post($post->post_parent)->post_parent) )
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->post_parent."&exclude=".$post->ID."&echo=0");
else
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ID."&echo=0");
if ($children) { ?>
<ul style="display:inline">
<?php echo $children; ?>
</ul>
<?php } ?>
  1. The Eyebeam folks are doing a cool skillshare on how “Tools and Models for Online Collaboration”  (back)
  2. It starts March 20th!  It’s completely free!  Go!   (back)

Project Idea: AutoThemer

Design, Dev, wordpress, , , , , , ,

Blame Carly for bringing this up. 1

I’m terrible at color schemes.   I have a coder’s idea of color.  Sure, people have written careful articles explaining how to pick a color scheme.  Sure there’s even a website that helps you pick color schemes.

But why not make it easier, and have a wordpress plugin that does it for me? Continue reading Project Idea: AutoThemer →

  1. Not on identi.ca?  You should be.   (back)

Automattic Writing

Software, wordpress, , , ,

The company behind WordPress has written a pretty amazing online grammar and style checker.

It integrates with WordPress and other platforms, providing really good suggestions.  Each mark also comes with an “Explain” option.  That’s nice because it gives you the reasoning for the suggestion.  I’ve installed the WordPress plugin – expect less passive voice from me.

If you’ve got a blog where you’ve got any control over it at all, I’d suggest you try the demos, then integrate it into your site.

How to Migrate from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

Pals, wordpress, , , ,

W

ordpress.com is great. They’ve got a great freemium model that allows anyone to get hooked up with a blog with the swiftness. I’m a huge fan, but of course there are limits in what you can do when you don’t have your own hosting.  They have limitations on plugins and themes and so on.
I recently helped my friend Tove Hermanson migrate her thoughtful fashion blog to her own hosting. I recommended she choose Dreamhost, as I’ve had a great experience with them.
We had a few setbacks when we did things out of order, so I’m writing up a short guide to doing this so it will be easier for other folks. If you still are unhappy after following this guide, you may need a different hat.
First things first, you will want to export information out of your old blog. Log into your blog and do the following:

  1. Note your theme so you can install it at your new hosting 1
  2. Note what plugins you are using, and any widgets or whatnot you’ve got on your blog.
  3. Note your link structure. How are your posts organized? You definitely want this so you don’t break any old links to your content.
  4. Log into your blog at wordpress.com and export your blog contents to a file.
  5. Get your images. WordPress.com says that you can import your images and such at your new blog, but we didn’t see the full sized images getting downloaded. Hence, I’ve written a script to get all of your full sized images from your wordpress.com blog.
    1. Download and install Python and BeautifulSoup.
    2. Use my python image spider to collect all of your images from your blog and put them into a neat little bundle for you.
  6. Do a find and replace on your export file to change all your img tags from “yourdomain.files.wordpress.com” to “yourdomain.com/oldimages”
  7. Buy your domain and hosting.  As before, I really like dreamhost, as they are cheap, cheerful and easy to use.  For a personal site, those are the factors that matter.   Clicking those links will give me a 10% kickback, but I’d recommend them even if I didn’t get a taste.  2
  8. Switch your domain nameservers to point to your new hosting.  When you are buying your hosting, they will have instructions on how to do that.  The place where you bought your domain name will also have a way for you to switch where your nameservers point to.  If you are using dreamhost, you’ll be using NS1.dreamhost.com, NS2.dreamhost.com and NS3.dreamhost.com.
  9. Install wordpress at your new hosting. If you’ve chosen dreamhost, they will do it for you.
    1. From your control panel choose “Goodies”
    2. Click “One-Click Installs”
    3. Advanced Mode (It isn’t all that advanced>) and follow the instructions.
  10. Log in to your new wordpress installation and import your blog export file
  11. Configure your themes, widgets, url structure and so forth through the wordpress settings.
  12. Use an FTP client like Filezilla or FireFTP to upload your “oldimages” images folder to your server, right under your new domain’s root directory.
  13. Take a look at the new blog and test! You should be good to go.

That seems like a lot, but you can probably accomplish all of this in an hour or two. You’ll spend some time waiting for DNS changes to propagate, but it should be fairly seamless. The key is to extract all of the information you need from your old website domain before you change your domain url to point to your new hosting. We made a few mistakes doing that and it just takes forever to switch back and forth.

Good luck, hope these instructions help!

  1. Tove had Chaotic Soul which seems to have major problems and differences between the official version and the one wordpress.com uses.  (back)
  2. You could always register with dreamhost without my referral as well.   (back)