Monthly Archives: January 2012

Class Interviews Coming Up Soon

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The Winter Clark College CTEC 280 Introduction to WordPress class will be working on creating multimedia posts in WordPress coming very soon. Dig out your digital cameras and recorders and bring them to class. If you have ones to share, bring those. I’ll be announcing when soon.

If you currently have a video hosting service like YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion, etc., bring password access with you for uploading video.

NOTE: Currently, the computers in the room only connect via USB, so bring USB connectors (and extra batteries or chargers).

PDX WordPress Meetup January 23, 2012

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The next PDX WP Monthly User Group Meeting in Portland is Monday, January 23, 2012, from 6PM to 8PM. RSVP your intention to go, and those needing rides from Clark College, Cait and I will be there with two vehicles ready to go. Meet outside the classroom in the hall and we’ll be getting into the cars and leaving by 5PM.

If enough people are interested, we’ll have some dinner immediately after the meeting within walking distance.

If you are going on your own:

U.S. Bancorp Tower Conference Rooms (by the security next in the northeast corner)
111 SW 5th Avenue, Portland, OR 97204

The next meeting is February 27, 2012, at 6PM in the same place, so put it on your calendar.

Email Obfuscation Tools and Scripts

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There are a variety of ways to protect and hide emails and other information from email harvesters or just to protect your privacy through obfuscation, a technique on the web that allows displaying of email and content within web browsers so browsers can understand them, but masks them from web crawlers and bots.

A typical email link would be: 

<a href="mailto:fredsmith@gmail.com" title="Email Fred">email</a>

An obfuscated email address link would look like this:

<a href="mailto:&amp;#102;&amp;#114;&amp;#101;&amp;#100;&amp;#115;&amp;#109;&amp;#105;&amp;#116;&amp;#104;&amp;#064;&amp;#103;&amp;#109;&amp;#097;&amp;#105;&amp;#108;&amp;#046;&amp;#099;&amp;#111;&amp;#109;" title="Email Fred">email</a>

Free Online Tools to Obfuscate Email Addresses

Instead of doing this manually using HTML Character Entities, there are a variety of free online tools to obfuscate email addresses. The output can be set to be in HTML characters or use JavaScript or other code methods. NOTE: WordPress.com blogs are restricted to only HTML Character Entities.

There are a variety of WordPress Plugins that will handle the job for you automatically, too. Check the WordPress Plugin Directory for the latest versions and options.

For more information on obfuscation, see:

Testing Video Floats and Alignments

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Alex Ferguson came up with a way to help us align videos with the text, floating them to the left or right of the post content area so the text will wrap around the video.

NOTE: This is not for the timid nor typical usage. This was an experiment and it works. To embed a YouTube (and most popular video services) video into your blog post, simply paste the URL into the post on its own line with a space above and below.

Let’s see if this works.

It does, but the technique is a little trickier than you might thing. Remember, this is for within a WordPress.com blog, thus we have to work around some of their limitations.

The code involves creating a DIV with the alignment class for left, right, or center, plus the WordPress.com Youtube shortcode with the width and possibly height set. 

<div class="alignright">

</div>

In the link to the Youtube video you should see &w=400&h=450. This sets the width of the video to 400 pixels, narrower than the typical 500 or so, and the height to 350 pixels. Every Theme has a different column width so you will need to play around with these to get them the right size for your WordPress.com site.

This is what we call a “hack,” a way around the typical way of doing things. I recommend you save this in a reference text file so you can copy and paste in the video link next time you try this in a post.

Thanks, Alex, for experimenting with this!

What Do Students Want to Learn About WordPress

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On the first night of class I asked the students of Clark College’s first Introduction to WordPress class to explain why they were there and what they wanted out of the class. Here is that list.

  • How to make my site “mine”
  • How to design
  • How to fix the CSS
  • How to maximize SEO
  • How to publish and edit (resize) photographs
  • Understand basic HTML and CSS
  • Learn about analytics and tracking traffic
  • Understand how WordPress works and underlying technologies
  • Understand how to handle permissions and multiple users
  • Understand more about Open Source, licensing, and GPL
  • How to handle multiple contributors and authors
  • How to publish on the web
  • How to integrate social media
  • How to migrate from one site to another (import/export)
  • How to re-brand a site and make it fresh and new
  • How to handle spammers and nastiness on the web
  • How to create good content.
  • How to make the page and content easy to read
  • How to monetize my site.

As with everyone WordPress touches, it boils down to:

  • Web Design
  • User Experience
  • Content Management
  • Content Publishing
  • Social Media, Marketing and Advertising

Example of a Gallery Post in WordPress

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This is an example of how to create a gallery in WordPress. There are a variety of options you have with the gallery shortcode on WordPress.com and self-hosted versions of WordPress.

The following images are from the morning of January 17, 2012, when a snow storm moved into the Pacific Northwest and dumped almost a foot or more on the 1000+ foot elevations, including us in North Plains, Oregon, in the Coastal Mountain foothills. Photographs are by Lorelle and Brent VanFossen.

This is a caption

Example of a Sandbox Post for Testing WordPress Themes

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This is the H1 Heading

This is an example of a sandbox post for testing WordPress Themes and web page designs to ensure every design detail within the content area of a Theme meets with your design needs.

To use this sandbox post for your own testing, right click the following link and save the file as a text file. Open it within a text editor and select all of the text and paste it into your WordPress site with the HTML/TEXT editor – not visual editor. Save the post or publish it to view the post content designs.

This is the link to the sandbox post text file.

This sandbox post is available for free. Use as you wish.

At the top of this paragraph should be the H1 heading for your web page. If it is not visible, the design settings for the H1 tag is set to display:none which many WordPress Themes use to hide the blog title text and replace it with a graphic. Do not use H1 within your blog post area.

If the design in the H1 heading looks like your blog title or blog post title, then that is the style set for that HTML tag and you should not use it within your blog post area.

Inside of this test data section are most of the basic HTML and XHTML and CSS styles that you might use within your WordPress Theme. You need to know what that will look like as part of structuring your styles.

This is the H2 Heading

Above this paragraph should be the H2 heading for your web page. WordPress Themes use the h2 heading for various purposes. Logically, it should be either the post title or the first heading in the post content.

However, it is used all over WordPress Themes including the subtitle, tag line, post title, comment area, sidebar area, and even in the footer. Be specific when styling each h2 headings to ensure you are not styling all of them.

This is the H3 Heading

Is this the same heading as is in your post title or is this the section headings found within your sidebar? Or is it different? This is the post content heading for the HTML tag h3, as is the one below, H4, for section headings within your post to divide up topics. If there is an H3 or H4 tag in your sidebar, you will need to identify the parent HTML and CSS container for the sidebar and style those appropriate in your blog’s stylesheet.

For more information in searching for your styles in your WordPress blog, see CSS: Studying Your CSS Styles.

Also notice how the links in that paragraph are styled so you can style links within your post content area. Links have three styles. There is the link color, link hover color, and visited link color. Be sure and design for each style.

This is the H4 Heading

In this section under the H4 heading, we’re going to look at what the post content, the meat and potatoes of your site looks like. In general, you will have multiple paragraphs, so we will add another paragraph so you can adjust the spacing in between them to the look you want.

Paragraphs are not just for typing your blog babble, they can also hold frame and hold other information within your content area to help make the point you want to make in your writing. For instance, you will commonly have three types of lists.

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Clark College WordPress Class Featured in The Columbian

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We’re famous! Jacques did an amazing article for us in The Columbian on Saturday in “Blogging pioneer blazes trail for WordPress at Clark College.”

Get your copies online and off. It’s snowing here so I’m not sure I can get off my mountain and across the river, so if someone can get me a couple extra copies, I’d really appreciate it. Get a bunch to send friends and family and put in your scrapbook! Congrats to all!!

WordPress.com Terms of Service and Copyrights

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For those worried about the issues of content ownership in regards to WordPress.com (as opposed to Facebook and others), here are the relevant sections from the WordPress.com Terms of Service which covers both your copyright protections as well as respect for the copyrights of others:

Section 8: Copyright Infringement and DMCA Policy. As Automattic asks others to respect its intellectual property rights, it respects the intellectual property rights of others. If you believe that material located on or linked to by WordPress.com violates your copyright, you are encouraged to notify Automattic in accordance with Automattic’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) Policy. Automattic will respond to all such notices, including as required or appropriate by removing the infringing material or disabling all links to the infringing material. Automattic will terminate a visitor’s access to and use of the Website if, under appropriate circumstances, the visitor is determined to be a repeat infringer of the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of Automattic or others. In the case of such termination, Automattic will have no obligation to provide a refund of any amounts previously paid to Automattic.

…By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog. If you delete Content, Automattic will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Website, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable.

The 10 HTML Tags You Must Know to Blog

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code wordle - group of words that are synonyms and types of codeTalk to the serious blogging and web publishing pros, the ones turning out brilliant content fast, and you will find that they all have one thing in common. They write with HTML.

Writing with HTML in WordPress isn’t complicated nor does it require a degree in foreign languages or web development. We’re not talking about building a web page from scratch every time you publish. We’re only talking about the HTML that goes into the post content.

How much HTML do you have to learn? Only 10 HTML tags. That’s it. Less words than you probably know in Spanish or another foreign language.

The most commonly used HTML tags in the post content area are:

  1. Anchor Link Tag <a href="…">link</a>
  2. Image Tag <img src="…" />
  3. Headings <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>
  4. Paragraph <p>Text here</p>
  5. Bold <strong> not <b> and Italic <em> not <i>
  6. Lists <ol> and <ul>
  7. Blockquote <blockquote> and <cite>
  8. Line Break <br />
  9. Horizontal Line <hr />
  10. Code <pre> and <code>

How many of these do you use commonly in your blog posts? All of the ten? When was the last time you needed to put code in your blog post? Rarely, if ever. At most, you use 5 of these in most posts you publish. I think you can handle that.

The five are links, headings, bold and italic, lists, and blockquotes – unless you are a poet. Then add the line break to your collection for six easy to remember HTML tags.

Sure, there are more HTML tags you can use in the post content area, but these are the most common. Tables, font colors, etc., are rarely used and if you need to use them, you probably already know how.
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