A simple test of the “add media” feature in the system.
Don’t get excited about the audio file; it’s tiny and dull.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
WP-o-Matic and cron
When I logged in and started posting this AM I noticed the little popup notice asking me to configure WP-o-Matic. This looks like a great little tool for feeding multiple blogs.
Question: Full functionality requires the ability to set up a cron job, something I didn’t think was possible in the limited admin environment of WPMU. Am I missing something? I can do the pseudo-cron, a browser-based approach, with some apparent compromises. Hmm.
Long time no blog
In recent weeks I have turned my attention inward a bit, focusing on the details of our own eportfolio project and some of the main areas of my summer responsibilities. Work continues in the eportfolio effort, though it’s a bit less visible.
First spam comment
Saw my first spam comment on the blog today. A “you post they host” comment held for moderation because of my settings. I noticed the intall of akismet about a week ago; guess it’s time to get another wordpress.com api key so I can better control spam on this blog.
One spam comment can be swatted like a fly. But perhaps one is a harbinger of things to come. Just another thing to include in the list of stuff to help students deal with in a blog/portfolio platform, if it’s to be open.
RSS Error
Added the RSS feed today. Oops. There’s a parsing error:
XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
Location: https://michaeljcripps.commons.gc.cuny.edu/activity/feed
Line Number 2, Column 1:
^
I don’t have permissions to dig through the source here, so I can’t really do anything to address the issue. I simply clicked the Add RSS button, saved, and got an error. Odd. I don’t get this in my own blog, a WP install.
A quick search for the error in WPMU forums revealed that I’m not alone here. Not sure how easy this will be to address. Perhaps its a bug that emerged in the upgrade from an earlier version of WPMU?
Atahualpa and Customizing the Theme
The people behind Academic Commons, at least the WPMU aspects of it, are very, very responsive. I switched to the Atahualpa theme, and took a few minutes to make a header graphic for the sandbox blog.
Some snags on the upload, mostly because it’s a bit clunky to get a header into the system. For some reason, default header image alignment is centered? Not something I would have chosen, but ok.
And then I had to figure out why the left and right portions of my header weren’t showing in the prepared black. Hint: Opacity is set at about 50% by default on the left and right sides of the header (sidebar stuff, really, it seems).
But not that big a deal. I used the logo from atahualpa, tossed it on a black background, and then used the Stop font in my library for the BG image. 20 minutes from start to finish, including some interruptions. And now that I’ve been through it once, I expect it could be done in under 30 seconds if I had a header ready to roll.
Cool feature, for about 5 minutes: I can make lots of headers and they’ll change on new page views. I can imagine this being interesting if I want to show different little graphics in different headers (duck, nail, pig, bird, shoe, whatever).
If you’re not digging into Academic Commons’ WPMU blog, do it now. I feel like there are 3-4 developers responding to my ruminations on “what would be nice” to have in the system. Thanks!
