WordPress Stuff

WordPress Upgrade

/ Cole Camplese / 6 Comments

I finally did something about my WP install. I went ahead and moved to the latest release — I was trapped at 1.5 because of all the hacks I had done to get it looking how I wanted. I just decided it was a godd idea to start clean. For some reason everything feels so much snappier — from creating new posts, to doing admin stuff, to load times, and more. I dumped Kubrick for K2 … So far I really like it. I also couldn’t fall too far behind D’Arcy … Lots to get working again … you know, I was all about the rotating banner images (someone want to create a plugin to do that?). If there’s anyone out there who knows how to get that rolling again with K2, let me know — I’ll buy beers. I miss that. There are other things, but since I am making all sorts of changes in my life, I thought my blog should follow.

More posts in the coming days … lots to discuss.

WordPress Admin Look & Feel

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I just changed the entire look and feel of the admin side of my WordPress install by adding the very cool, WP Tiger Admin style. It makes the entire admin side look and feel like Apple’s Tiger Mac OSX. Really has me thinking about how easy it would be to create a custom WP for all sorts of stuff on the educational side of things. Sort of back to the future for me … I was really working towards building a new educational version of WP for content authoring and course collabortation a while back … just sort of fell off my radar screen as life got in the way, but the ease of changing this thing has me thinking again. At any rate, go get the look and feel here and see what a difference it makes!

One Click Assessment

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That is a concept I have been working on for almost two years … something I think would make a huge difference scoring online discussion activities, blog posts, and comments … the idea is a rubric tool on the instructor side that allows you to set the total number of points, criteria, etc and a little Netflix style rating system on the front end. It would allow me (or my TA) to quickly go through and rate posts on a 1-5 star scale. The tool would calculate the score based on the rubric it was associated to. We’ve prototyped it, but hust never created it.

I saw the Votio Again post and was reminded of it. I’m going to try and install this today. I’ll let you all know.

IST 110 Fall 2004 Posts!

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After days of trying to get it to work … moving my blogger posts AND comments into this WordPress blog … it is complete! What a pain in the ass however. I followed some great directions on how to get posts and comments out of blogger and into a Moveable Type format and then tried to use the WP import MT feature, but couldn’t get that working perfectly. I found that if I did individual imports of the posts with the comments it all worked well.

So … a little grep searching in BBEdit, some manual labor, and a dose of patience and I am done! You can take a look at all the blogging that went on in my 110 class last semester by following the 110 Fall 2004 category link. The posts are just posts, but some of the comments are great … I just had to keep them. Now, I may actually be able to get back to writing here.

WordPress Import … Argh!

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

Sorry I haven’t posted much in the last couple of days … work has been busy, life has gotten in the way, and I have been driving myself crazy trying to get my IST 110 blog into this WordPress space … its easy to pull a blogger blog into WordPress — if you don’t want to keep your comments. I found this great pointer to the Moveable Type support area on the WP Support site to take the posts out of blogger and into a Moveable Type format and then finally into WP — comments and all.

Problem is that it hasn’t worked through two frustrating days. The first time I did it, all the posts came in as separate posts as they are supposed to, but each one only had one comment that contained all the original comments for that post. Looking back, I’d prefer that now. In subsequent attempts all I get is a single post with all the comments and posts in the WP comment field. Driving me crazy. Anyone willing to help me with this?

One other quick note … read today that the Elgg system is going to go open source very soon. This is a very cool thing as I have been anxious to get a community blog site that incorporates social networking for a potential client. The idea is to give all the members of this community blog spaces and allow them to create their “friends” network. We’ll be keeping our eye on that one!

Random Headers: Followup

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

I noticed that D’Arcy Norman posted a little thing about how he setup some rotating banners based on my site … thanks! It isn’t like I invented the stuff but hey, I appreciate the nod! Since then, I’ve had a couple of people ask how its done. Here’s the simple way … first, install the Random Files plugin and put a bunch of headers into a directory and point to it. Then drop this code into your index.php file (if you are using the kubrick style) for WordPress by finding the #header style directive and changing it to:

#header {
background: url(“< ?php echo random_file('/images/random', 'jpg gif png jpeg'); ?>“) no-repeat bottom center;

That assumes you have a directory called “random” in your images directory … that’s really it … oh, you might want to take a bunch of good pictures to make it worth while … not sure I’ve done that, but I’m doing what I’m doing. Thanks to Elliot Black for helping me get it rolling!

After its all said and done, watch your traffic explode as you sit there and reload your own blog 20 times to see it work!