e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: WordPress

  • Open Data: A case study using IPEDS for online education

    At e-Literate we’re planning to do more data journalism posts. Think of this along the lines of Harper Reed’s keynote last year as described in the Chronicle.

    Harper Reed, who served as chief technology officer in President Obama’s 2012 campaign, offered those people what he jokingly called “an intervention.”

    “Big Data is bullshit,” Mr. Reed said in a keynote speech on Tuesday.

    His point is not that there is no value in the large amounts of data available to the community, but that data analysis is getting democratized and doesn’t require huge investments.

    “The exciting thing is you can get a lot of this stuff done just in Excel,” he said. “You don’t need these big platforms. You don’t need all this big fancy stuff. If anyone says ‘big’ in front of it, you should look at them very skeptically … You can tell charlatans when they say ‘big’ in front of everything.”

    I would add one other aspect along with the democratization of data analysis – open data. Inspired by Audrey Watters and even her recent tweet, we are looking for ways to not only explore the open data available to the education community but also to share the data we use in our analyses.

    https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/426541112527192064

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  • Back In Business

    Sorry?!
    photo credit: iluvcocacola

    e-Literate is back in business and ready to go. Which is good, because I have a backlog of posts I want to get to.

    Before I do, though, I want to acknowledge two great additions to my blogging arsenal. First of all, the WordPress theme I’m using is called “Thematic,” and it’s by Ian Stewart of ThemeShaper. I think it’s very easy to read and navigate, which is the top characteristic I was looking for. Ian was also terrific in providing technical support. Second, I have discovered a great plug-in called Photo Dropper that lets me search for Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos and drop them into my post, all right from my WordPress “Write a Post” page. Expect to see more images in my posts in the future.

  • Turning Your Blog Into a Social Network Node

    I haven’t forgotten that I still owe you the last installment on the D2L competencies series, but that’s going to take more mental bandwidth than I have at the moment. My goal is to get to it this weekend.

    In the meantime, I note this article on GigaOm about the DiSo Project, which aims to turn WordPress blogs into social network nodes using technologies such as OpenID and microformats. While I don’t think this is necessarily the Nirvana of social networking (if there even is such a thing), I would personally welcome it as a step in the right direction. First, it’s focusing on using open standards and a platform that isn’t owned by one giant vendor. Those are good things. Second, as a blogger, I would prefer to own my primary identity node rather than going out and copying personal information into 50 different social networking sites, none of which I feel any special affinity for. As one blogger quoted in the article puts it,

    For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating ‘user-generated’ content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.

    The article does go on to talk about how some people will prefer “ephemeral” identities that they can use for specific purposes and throw them away, rather than the strong anchor that a blog-based node would provide. For me, it’s not an either/or thing. Both would be useful.

  • Comprehensive Information About Extending WordPress

    If you use WordPress, or if you are just interested in learning more about what is possible to accomplish with good blog software, then you should spend some time reading Lorelle on WordPress. She is in the middle of a month-long commitment to write one post every day about WordPress plugins. These aren’t just short posts about one plugin each; they are long, detailed articles about entire categories of plugins. For example, her post “Video, Music, Podcasts, Audio, and Multimedia WordPress Plugins” covers no fewer than 45 plugins in various levels of detail and also includes links to documentation and technical support resources. In some cases, she’s simply compiling and categorizing lists of plugins from the several WordPress plugin catalog sites (which is a worthwhile service in itself), but for about 20% of them, she provides more detailed overviews of their functionality in the context of other plugins in the category.

  • Welcome to e-Literate 2.0

    At long last, I have managed to move my blog over to WordPress. Many thanks to Sarah Lewis at Blogging Expertise for helping me get my content out of ExpressionEngine, style the site the way I wanted, and make sure that old URLs didn’t break. She was able to head some problems off at the pass that probably would have taken somebody with less WordPress-specific experience days to figure out.

    There are a number of little issues I’m still working out (mostly small post formatting problems that I’m correcting by hand), but everything should work here. Please let me know if you spot any problems. All major URLs, including the RSS feed, should auto-forward, but just in case, you might want to update your RSS reader to the new feed URL, which is http://feeds.feedburner.com/mfeldstein/yyMY.

    In the meantime, I thought I would take the opportunity to point out a few features of the new blog that you might find useful:

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  • Not Dead Yet (and Other News)

    I know I’ve been rather quiet lately. I’m working on a couple of new projects that I can’t talk about yet but that I should be able to talk about soon (one within a couple of weeks and another within a couple of months). Between these extra-curriculars, some articles I’m writing, and an impending move to a beautiful house in the Berkshires, I’ve been falling behind on the blog posting thing. I will probably continue to be sporadic through the end of August.

    In the meantime, the one thing I can talk about now is my research into moving to WordPress. I’ve wanted to make the move for quite some time. ExressionEngine is a fine platform, but if you’re just looking for blogging and not so much for a CMS, then you just can’t beat WordPress for its maturity and pace of continuing development. The trouble has been that it would have cost me too much money to migrate, since I don’t have the skills to do my own programming and page design.

    Luckily, there’s some good news for me:

    • While there still isn’t a built-in ExpressionEngine import tool, there are a few utilities floating around that will get me most of the way there.
    • Between new themes, new plugins, and new widgets, I’ve been able to get a test WordPress installation to do about 90% of the things that my current setup can do (and a bunch of things it can’t do) with no programming.
    • There are tons of cheap WordPress hosting options that work even for non-techies like me–particularly since the amazing Fantastico installer that many ISPs now provide includes a WordPress installer.

    So, while it will still probably cost me some money to make the migration (particularly if I want to get some help to make sure all current EE links get auto-forwarded to their new WordPress URLs), it’s looking increasingly affordable.

    I’ll keep you posted.

  • WordPress Related Entries plugin

    A while back I hinted to the hackers in the crowd that I would love to have a tool for aggregating the posts related to a particular meme on my site. Well, it looks like somebody did it. Unfortunately, it was for the wrong blog tool.

    D’Arcy Norman called my attention to this WordPress plug-in that does pretty much what I wanted. Very cool.

    Overall, I’m very impressed with what I see at WordPress. We’ll have to see whether the pMachine hackers catch up and create an equivalent plug-in before the WordPress hackers finish developing their import tool from pMachine blogs….