University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications

A few projects that have come up recently that were best accomplished by setting up some instances of WordPress.

The Study of the U.S. Institute on Journalism and Media is the first case where I’ve set up WordPress more as a content management system for pages rather than as a blog. I think the template still needs a little work. The Summer Times 2009 is the repository for the collected works of the campers at the 2009 Summer Journalism Institute here in the College.

Here are some plugins that I have found useful:

• NextGEN Gallery – Both Summer Times and the Institute asked for photo gallery functionality. The former made good use of this. The latter’s event starts this weekend and I imagine we’ll start seeing stuff from them soon.
• Simple LDAP Login – Enables creation of WordPress accounts using network login credentials.
• XHTML Video Embed – Summer Times needed to embed YouTube videos in posts. This does that and more.
• pageMash – Lets you rearrange page hierarchy by dragging and dropping.

I’m heading out tomorrow to begin my journey to this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX tomorrow through Tuesday (flying back Wednesday). I have described it in the past as a giant, five-day-long group hug for the builders of the web. This will be my fourth visit to this conference in the past five years.

You can stalk follow me around on

• Twitter
• Flickr
• Sched
• my.SXSW

The content from the Fall 2008 issue of communigator is in the process of Web production.

I once again wanted to do a more-extensive redesign of the site this time, but that didn’t happen. Or at least it didn’t happen for initial production. It might happen after the fact, though.

For the first time, however, I added an option of downloading a PDF file of all the glossy pages and that’s been downloaded by a surprising (to me) number of readers.

The College’s Center for Media Innovation and Research launched last week The Journalism Now Podcast, hosted and produced by my colleague and friend Dave Stanton.

I’m involved to the extent that I provide the Web server infrastructure for the site. The site was originally launched on one of our weakest servers. Last week before the podcast launch, however, we moved the site from that server to a virtual machine on our strongest virtual machine host. The old, weak server is now in line to have its remaining sites moved to a virtual machine so that its life as a Web server may come to an end. Eventually all of our Web servers will be run on virtual machines.

I updated the WordPress instance that powers this blog to version 2.7 this morning.

The admin UI is once again very different and I like what I see so far.

I’ve written a few times before (1, 2, 3) about techniques for rotating images in place on a page, such as is done on the home page of the College site.

The brief history is that it started in JavaScript, then went to Flash, and now is back to JavaScript using the jQuery library and the jQuery Cycle Plugin.

One of the motivations for finding a new solution was that it seemed from the server log reports that the Flash movie was making an awful lot of server requests. That just struck me as inefficient. Also, when viewed on the iPhone, only the placeholder jpeg image was showing because there is no Flash on that platform.

The new method is also easier to deal with in that all the components to be rotated are just DIVs in the page and can contain anything that fits the space. I also don’t have to deal with an XML config file, which made it easier to implement in a place where a CMS is present. (I used a Textpattern form to contain the rotating content, but could have almost as easily put it into a story.)

I still need to post here more often. Maybe now that it’s Fall and I’m working on some cool stuff, I’ll make (or find) time. According to Google Analytics, the most viewed posts in this time frame were:

• Date sorting by filename in PHP
• Dreamweaver tip: Import and Export site definitions
• New Mac essentials
• Hooking up to the UF Campus Map
• My essential Firefox extensions

All the content from the Spring 2008 issue of communigator is now online. I wanted to do a more-extensive redesign of the site this time, but ended up in a time crunch on some early content so all the design changes were tweaks. They’re good tweaks, I believe.

Some articles received some special display effects courtesy of jQuery and some code examples provided by Dave Stanton.

• Unmasking Gonzo uses an “accordion” effect to display sidebar content and larger images are popped up using ThickBox.
• Alumni notes uses jTabber to provide a tabbed interface for its content.

The redesign is started already and will hopefully be in place next issue.

I did. So should you.

Sort of, it’s offset by two weeks (April 17 – July 17). According to Wordpress.com’s Blog Stats, the most viewed posts in that time frame were:

• Date sorting by filename in PHP
• Dreamweaver tip: Import and Export site definitions
• New Mac essentials
• Hooking up to the UF Campus Map
• College Facebook page launched

Yes, I still need to post here more often.