In reading about the history of commonplace books, I figured it’d be nice to have a full listing of all the categories and tags on my website for public reference. So I’ve now added an Index page.
I must admit that with a tiny amount of research and set up, I’ve now got something that even John Locke could be jealous of.
For my future self or others interested, I’m using Multi-column Tag Map which has a variety of short codes for implementing various forms of output. Sadly it wasn’t tagged with the word index, so it took some time to find it.
I’ve always had my own administrative interface for this data as well as search and even programmatic tag completion which makes writing and posting easier. However since a lot of what I do is in the public, perhaps it will be useful for readers to have access to the same full list instead of the abbreviated ones that appear as tag clouds or in various sidebars on the site?
Currently I’ve got over 9,000 different tags on the site. Perhaps displaying them publicly will help motivate me to curate and manage them a bit better. I already see a handful of repeated versions based on spelling, spacing, or typos that could be cleaned up. Let’s go crazy!
New and just wading in here I work at Fleming College in our Learning Design and Support team/department
Our medium sized college has always offered our students and faculty a choice in terms of the platform they choose to use: Wordpress, tumblr, weebly, medium, etc., mostly because we didn’t have anything else to offer them other than the LMS that was supported by the institution.
This past September our communication courses for first year have been using wordpress.com (mostly) as they were encouraged by the teaching faculty who were also using wordpress.com sites for their own writing. The redesigned communication courses have the students learning to write, give and receive feedback, and loop through this cycle several times for an authentic audience. First semester focuses on personal writing, the second focuses on professional writing.
(just wanted to provide some context for my reply - they had to go with wordpress.com as there was no plan or budget to do a local install or have it hosted for the college)
Feedback from the faculty teaching team after teaching for almost 8 weeks is how to template and simplify space for students to use, here is a direct quote: “could we create dedicated blog page for students that would be a pre-made, fool-proof template? When a student’s WordPress blog does not work and we can’t fix the problem, it is very frustrating to be helpless beside an exasperated student.”
I am inclined to suggest freeing up the expectation that the student’s use wordpress and that they instead use a platform that they may already be familiar with (like tumblr etc.,) and create a space AND use categories/titles that are consistent so that the faculty can go in and review, comment, provide feedback etc., easily.
Many students may choose to use wordpress either way but…
One thing that we do here that may help the conversation is that our library holds workshops to assist students in creating their online presence, creative commons, attribution etc.,
I’m interested in any thoughts or feedback on how to approach the our communication faculty request… am I heading in the right direction??
Thanks!!
Alana
There may be a bit of a path forward here that some might consider using that has some fantastic flexibility.
There is a WordPress plugin called Micropub (which needs to be used in conjunction with the IndieAuth plugin for authentication to their CMS account) that will allow students to log into various writing/posting applications.
These are usually slimmed down interfaces that don’t provide the panoply of editing options that the Gutenberg interface or Classic editor metabox interfaces do. Quill is a good example of this and has a Medium.com like interface. iA Writer is a solid markdown editor that has this functionality as well (though I think it only works on iOS presently).
Students can write and then post from these, but still have the option to revisit within the built in editors to add any additional bells and whistles they might like if they’re so inclined.
This system is a bit like SPLOTs, but has a broader surface area and flexibility. I’ll also mention that many of the Micropub clients are open source, so if one were inclined they could build their own custom posting interface specific to their exact needs. Even further, other CMSes like Known, Drupal, etc. either support this web specification out of the box or with plugins, so if you built a custom interface it could work just as well with other platforms that aren’t just WordPress. This means that in a class where different students have chosen a variety of ways to set up their Domains, they can be exposed to a broader variety of editing tools or if the teacher chooses, they could be given a single editing interface that is exactly the same for everyone despite using different platforms.
Come join me to see how we can extend our domains to use social readers and enable website-to-website communication to improve our online experience.
[Note: I’d previously been scheduled for a much longer workshop session, but due to changing conference time constraints, my talk will be a 20 minute demonstration. I’ll schedule some time early next month to do the longer hands-on portion of the original workshop to help people add the technology to their own websites.]
My slides for the talk, including a number of links to helpful resources, will be available later today.
This discussion focuses around the ways in which various campuses experienced the impact of pandemic on the various tools and platforms they supported on campus with a specific focus on WordPress Mutlisite, although it proves to be a broader conversation around the challenges of shifting not only online, but from synchronous to asynchronous ways of imagining teaching and learning.
It’s the day before OERxDomains21 and I am blogging, that’s a good sign, I think….regardless, it’s happening! And, given I still have a blog, I have the distinct pleasure to share with you my favorite part of the conference thus far—the TV Guide -inspired program.
to re-phrase a famous line from Zach Davis, “Behind every EDUPUNK is a frazzled web developer.” ❧
Wix is taking direct aim at WordPress in a new cryptic marketing campaign that began over the weekend with shipments of Bose noise-canceling headphones landing in the mailboxes of prominent WordPre…
Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can’t even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried ...
I’ve never been able to recommend people to use Wix simply for the export issue. This should have been one of their first features. Matt does a good job of indicating other reasons not to support them.
I was also a bit surprised to see him actively recommending other projects and platforms. 🙂
Online event March 27, 2021 at 01:00PM - March 27, 2021 at 02:30PM
This month, we'll look at how Elementor quickly incorporates Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) to add dynamic content to your WordPress sites. Want more control over what your clients can change in your Elementor build?
During this meetup, we'll learn about a long-time WordPress staple, ACF basic features, and explore how Elementor was used as part of a current project solution.
We welcome your wins, stories, and solutions ACF for WordPress with Elementor.
We'll start the meeting with the latest Elementor news, announcements, and introductions. Time permitting, we'll answer questions or look at what you're working on.
Online event March 27, 2021 at 10:30AM - March 27, 2021 at 12:00PM
During this Meetup, we'll share a case study of a current project site build in a project that leveraged ACF. We'll look at the current site setup and its challenges and an approach to creating a 'lifeboat' WordPress to save a non-WordPress legacy site. We'd also love to hear your ACF stories and best practices.
It was 2003. I was just getting my first taste of blogging and similar experiments on the world wide web. Seemingly every blog I toured showcased a long list of the owner’s friends. These wer…
But let’s be honest, they’re a sort of discovery method that is also built into other social platforms: Twitter lists,Twitter follow lists, Facebook lists, etc. Most now have AI using these lists to suggest who you ought to follow next. When will WordPress get that plugin?
My issue is that in a bigger social space, we need full pages for these sorts of data rather than the small sidebar widgets of yore.
This was the last serious conversation I remember seeing about the old Link Manager:
@photomatt I recall the jokes made about crusty blogrolls when we deprecated the links manager. Now, folks are exhuming it for use as their canonical OPML source to feed OPML subscriptions. https://t.co/Lt6cpWwkuj
— PressED Conf - A tweeting WordPress conference (@pressedconf) March 6, 2021
I’ve PressED on about Webmention before, but all the credit for this talk goes to @jgmac1106. This is a good reminder to prep for this year’s #PressEDConf21 though.
Come with me as I briefly explore Blogrolls and re-introducing them in 2021 and creating a WordPress Block for their display.
I have so many ideas about this. The first one being that it’s awesome.
While WordPress is about websites, it’s also got a lot of pieces of social media sites hiding under the hood and blogrolls are generally precursors of the following/followed piece.
Blogrolls were traditionally stuck on a small widget, but I think they now deserve their own full pages. I’d love to have one with a list of all the people I follow (subscribe to) as well as a similar one with those who follow me (and this could be implemented with webmention receipts of others who have me on their blogroll). I’ve got versions/mock ups of these pages on my own site already as examples.
Next up is something to make these easier to use and import. I’d love a bookmarklet or a browser extension that I could use one click with to have the person’s page imported into my collection of links that parses the page (perhaps the h-card or meta data) and pulls all the data into the link database.
I always loved the fact that the original generated OPML files (even by category) so that I could dump the list of data from my own site into a feed reader and just go. Keeping this would be awesome, but the original hasn’t been updated in so long it doesn’t use the updated OPML spec
If such a curated list is able to be maintained on my site it would also be cool if I could export it in such a way (similar to OPML) as to dovetail it with social readers like Aperture, Yarns, or other Microsub servers to easily transport or mirror the data there.
I work at Fleming College in our Learning Design and Support team/department
Jim Groom