by jon on
Jul 14, 2008 at 10:54 am
I’ve never been happy with the way comments look on our blogs, so I finally got around to reworking them a bit. Instead of replacing the old style out-right, I made it an option: if you look in “Design -> Contexts Blogs Options” you’ll see a new option for “Comment Style.” The default, “Original,” is the same ol’ look we’ve had all along, but if you select “Thought Bubbles” instead, your comments will now look like this:
The icons for each author are called Gravatars. You (and your readers/commenters) can sign up for free and any blog that displays gravatars will now show your personalized gravatar.
Also, the little arrow button after each commenters name allows easy replies between comments: if you replied to my comment, for example, it’d start your comment with a link titled “@jon:” pointing to my comment. Can be very handy when you get several comment threads going at once. To get this, I’m using the @ Reply plugin, so go to the “Plugins” tab and hit “Activate” on the line for “@ Reply.”
by jon on
Jul 03, 2008 at 2:01 pm
I’ve added a new option to our contexts blogs theme: a “quick post” box that lets you quickly post right from the front page of the blog (assuming you’re an author and are logged in, of course). Here’s what it looks like:
Depending on your blogging style, this may or may not be very useful for you.
The big advantage is that it makes posting very quick and easy: go to your blog, type away and post! It’s great for those times where you have something you want to say but futzing around with the WordPress admin interface turns you off to blogging.
Obviously, it’s not as fully-featured as the regular editor; that would defeat the purpose! For example:
- There’s no image uploader, so if you’re Sociological Images, you probably won’t get much use out of this.
- There’s no rich text editor. You do, however, get some HTML quicktag buttons and I even included a little code cheat sheet to help you along:
- There’s an option to tag entries, but not to use categories. Tags seem to be more popular around here, and are a bit more flexible, so tags it is.
This is just an option: it’s off by default. To enable it, click on the “site admin” link in the right sidebar of your blog, then go “Design –> Contexts Blogs Options” and change the “Show Quick Post” dropdown to “Yes.” If you change your mind, just switch it back to “No”!
Feedback welcome, of course!
(Idea & code stolen from the excellent Prologue theme.)
by jon on
Jun 26, 2008 at 2:12 pm
If you’re finding you dislike writing all your posts in a web browser using the WordPress interface, it may be worth your time to try out a separate blogging client.
Basically, a blogging client is to your blog as your email client (like Outlook or Apple’s Mail) is to your email: a separate application installed on your local computer that provides a nicer environment for writing & managing your blog posts.
I don’t personally use such a client, but I’ve had brief, but good, experiences with w.bloggar for Windows and MarsEdit for Macs.
If you like the idea of blogging within your browser, but just don’t like the WordPress interface, you can also check out the ScribeFire plugin for Firefox or even the Flock web browser.
You can see an extensive list of blogging clients and learn more on the WordPress Codex.
by jon on
Jun 16, 2008 at 9:35 am
We read things on a computer screen differently than we do on paper. It’s that simple. So when we write for the web, we should be aware of that and write accordingly. This is easier said than done for academics accustomed to writing books and journal articles.
Michael Agger has an interesting article on “usability expert” Jakob Nielsen’s thoughts on writing for the web. Using techniques like eye tracking, researchers have learned a lot about how people read on a computer screen versus paper and what writers need to do about it. In short, people don’t read: they scan. How to make scannable text?
- highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
- meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
- bulleted lists
- one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
- the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
- half the word count (or less) than conventional writing
by jon on
Jun 16, 2008 at 8:01 am
Note: only blog administrators can do this.
Here’s how to add a new author to your blog:
1. Have them sign up for a contexts.org account.
2. Find out what email address they signed up under and then go to the “Users” tab in the WordPress admin panel. At the bottom of the page is an “Add user from community” box:
Enter their email address and select an option from the “Role” dropdown box. Here’s a breakdown of what the roles mean:
- Administrator - Somebody who has access to all the administration features. This person can do anything you can, including deleting the blog, so make sure you know what you’re doing if you make someone an administrator.
- Editor - Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
- Author - Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts. If you just want someone to be able to publish their own posts on your blog, choose this status.
- Contributor - Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts. Just like Author, only you’ll have to approve each of their posts before they show up.
- Subscriber - Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive news letters, etc. Only matters if you require registration for comments.
by jon on
Jun 15, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Adding images to a blog post is easy enough, though it can be confusing the first time you do it. Additionally, if you want to have greater control over how your images are displayed, things get more complicated as well. This post will walk you through the basics first and then explain some of the more advanced things you might want to do.
Adding a single image
Getting started is easy: when you’re on the “Write” page, click on the “Add media” button in the right corner above your toolbar. You’ll see this:
Just click “Choose files to upload,” navigate to your file on your hard drive and select it to upload the file. You’ll see a progress bar during the upload and then see this:
Here you can modify a few things about your image. Notice here that I gave it a Title and chose to center align it. After that, just click “Insert into Post” and it’ll insert the image wherever your cursor is inside the post box. That’s it!
Read More »
by jon on
May 06, 2008 at 11:59 am
Note: this post is not for people writing for contexts.org. It’s about installing and maintaining WordPress — something I’m doing here so you don’t have to. If you’re interested in doing this yourself, read on. If not, ignore this.
Read More »
by jon on
May 01, 2008 at 3:11 pm
When writing your entries in WordPress you have two options: use the “Visual Editor”, the default, or use the code view. Here’s the Visual Editor:
Most people like this because it reminds them of using their word processor and they don’t actually have to learn any HTML to put together their blog posts. They call this “WYSIWYG” for “What You See Is What You Get.” Nice idea in principle.
The problem is What You See if rarely What You Get. I hate the visual editor. I mean, really. With a passion. And don’t even get me started on the atrocious HTML Microsoft Word creates. So I’m constantly advising people to use the code view. And virtually every time people look at me like I’m an alien for suggesting this. You want me to do what? Yet they will then spend hours over the course of a blogging career letting their WYSIWG editor trap them inside numbered lists they can’t escape from, refusing to add a paragraph break even when you hit return!, nesting their blockquotes for no apparent reason, and hitting backspace-delete-return-space-delete repeatedly just to leave italics mode. If you’ve used word processors and WYSIWYG editors over the years, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And in WordPress, you can avoid this. But you need to learn a little HTML.
Here’s an analogy I like: writing for the web with a WYSIWYG editor is a bit like cutting a steak with a butter knife. Yes, it may seem safer and more approachable than using the big, sharp knife the adults use—but the results won’t be very pretty. Learning the code is like switching to a sharp steak knife. Yes, you need to take some precautions and learn a bit, but it’s ultimately faster, more accurate and less messy. If you’re going to be writing for the web with any sort of regularity, you owe it to yourself to take the 15 minutes to learn HTML.
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by jon on
Apr 11, 2008 at 11:17 am
I wrote this for my personal blog, but thought it might be of interest here, seeing as this blog is partially about introducing new technology to people. Twitter, if you haven’t heard is a new “microblogging” service: you’re limited to 140 characters and the interface is designed to make posting and replying to others’ posts as simple as possible. I decided to try it out and here’s my response:
I’ve been using Twitter for a little over a week now. For a long time I was hesitant to sign up. While Twitter had lots of hype, the hype was all within a pretty narrow circle: sure, all the internet celebs on TWiT each week love Twitter, but they’re in the crowd using Twitter. Nobody I knew used Twitter and it seemed like the kind of thing that’s only useful if you know lots of people using it. But both the geek and the sociologist in me were interested in it, so when one friend signed up, I decided to give it a go.
My first response to Twitter, and I think the first response of many people, is “Why would anyone care what I’m doing minute to minute?” There’s definitely some vanity involved in Twittering, but not really that much more vanity than is involved in the human experience generally: Twitter is basically an extension of our capacity for gossip and our curiosity about others. We all gossip to some degree (some people think it’s even the key to our evolution as linguistic creatures), even if it’s the simple “So what’s new?” kind of catching up we do everyday with virtually everybody we see regularly.
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by jon on
Apr 04, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Eric Alterman’s article in the current New Yorker, Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper, describes the Huffington Post’s editorial process:
The Huffington Post’s editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the “mullet strategy.” (“Business up front, party in the back” is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) “User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,” Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to “argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.”
I’m posting this for two reasons: 1) it’s hilarious, 2) we’re actually having conversations about this right now about contexts.org. (Not that we’ve called it the “mullet strategy” — though we will now!) With the magazine, we have to be really careful and selective about what makes the cut, so it’s so tempting to go in the complete opposite direction for the web and just throw every idea imaginable up on the web. As web editor, I’m pushing strongly for our website to not become the trash can of Contexts: where ideas not good enough for the magazine go to die. On the other hand, this is a pretty interesting way to think about managing community websites, funny imagery and all.
