Lafayette College has just launched a redesigned web site. From a technical perspective you technically-minded folks will find it interesting that it is built on WordPress. But the careful process that they followed to arrive at the design is what really counts, and shows in the quality of the finished project. It takes a lot of work to bring about a site redesign – good to see it all come together so nicely.
The always innovative George Mason University Center for History and New Media has released a new plug-in: Anthologize. Which is a platform/plug-in that allows the use of a WordPress 3.0 site as a book publishing tool. The plug-in is still in a 0.4, alpha stage release, but I figured “what the heck” it is worth a try. After installing and activating the plug-in you start by creating a Project – this is the book. The Project has parts – sort of like chapters. And in each part the interface makes it easy to filter your listing of posts by tag or category to quickly narrow down your listing of posts (if you’ve been organized in your tagging and categorization!). You can even import content from external sources via an RSS import. After you have everything organized the export functions creates a nicely formatted PDF or other format – it even includes a table of contents.
Recently the social networking service Ning discontinued its free account service. They had offered a basic free version, with upgraded features for paid service. Now it is moving to pay only (except for teachers). These types of services are easy for groups of employees, teachers or student to sneak in the back door. Which is a good thing, allowing rapid innovation and experimentation. The problem comes when these become valuable parts of the infrastructure that have never been officially recognized — and then something like this happens.
Living Stories is an interesting new tool from Google. Coupled with the WordPress plugin it will allow the creation of a site centered around a particular news story. You can run the code without WordPress, but as with most things WordPress it makes setup much easier. The tool provides a running stream of news articles on the story. It also provides summaries and provides nice features such as auto-collapsing stories you’ve already seen.
Casey Bisson’s work showcases what a flexible tool WordPress can be. Last year he spoke on his work on the WordPress powered library catalog system Scriblio. This year he spoke on some of his other WordPress plug-in projects including a 100% widget powered WordPress theme that is transforming the Plymouth State University web site. Learn more in this talk and follow Casey’s work on his blog – maisonbisson.com/blog/
Jane Wells from Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, and a primary contributor to WordPress’ ongoing development plans, talks about the latest happenings and directions in WordPress-land.
Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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