Tag: WordPress

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Posting to WordPresss is pretty simple on the go. Recent versions of WordPress have a fairly good performance on Mobile Safari. the WordPress app performs a little better the body field is less ‘jumpy’ and uploading photos a little simpler.

There are a few other blogging apps but I’ve not stuck with any.

I tend to write posts in drafts as there is even less chrome and more space to type. It also has some clever shortcuts, helps with markdown and can do cleaver stuff with text and scripts.

A while back I noticed that the new version of Workflow had actions for posting to WordPress. I made some quick tests sand it seemed to do the trick.

Today I started thinking about it again. Workflow allows you to make posts, pages and media. When I tried uploading media I was disappointed that uploading an image returns the url to the attachment webpage rather than the attachment itself.

I’ve tried to extract the url form the page but the best I have is to extract all of the urls on the page and present this as a list to choose from. This is copied to the clipboard.

image upload

So I have an workflow that is an action extension. This allow me to pick a photo then run the workflow. It is presented as a document picker in other apps, for example pixelmator. When this workflow runs it resizes the image and uploads it to my blog. It then grabs the attachment page and pulls a list of links out of that. I can pick a link to copy to the clipboard.

Making a post

The next workflow I have is one for making a post. This runs from drafts.
It first set a variable to the draft. Then it shows the photo library. When a phot is picked it uploads the photo to the blog. As in the first script it downloads the attachment page, extracts the urls and let’s me pick one. This time the one picked is put in another variable.

The workflow then get the first variable, and posts it to the blog as a draft. It asks for a title and used the url to the uploaded image as the posts featured image.

It also asks for tags when it runs.

The featured image for this post is a couple of screenshots taken on my phone. They were stitched together with workflow and the result edited a bit in snapseed.

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Since I changed themes here I’ve been using featured images a lot more on posts. 1

There are a couple of things that bother me about WordPress featured images, the fact they do not show up in an RSS feed and that any attribution needs to go in the body of the post.

This morning I read Transforming Photo Attribution from Credit to Stories on Alan’s blog, which mentioned these problems while discussion a much more important one.

I though I’d see if it was easy enough to find a fix and headed to google.

First I found a few plugins but also some DIY advice. I decided that these looks simple enough for me.

Featured Images in RSS

How to Show Featured Image in WordPress RSS Feed shows how to do just that. You need to edit the functions.php file in your blogs theme 2.

All I needed to do was copy the code suggested from that site and add it to the bottom of my functions.php file which I already had in my child theme. The post shows how to edit this file via the WordPress dashboard. I do this with my ftp application.

A quick look at my feed in Forefox (Safari dos not show RSS any more 🙁 )
http://johnjohnston.info/blog/feed/ or http://feeds.feedburner.com/johnjohnston
Looks good.

Captions for featured images

Again there are plugins for this, but I found:
How to add caption to the featured images in WordPress which had done the trick.

This uses the built in caption from the media library. To do this I needed to copy the content-single.php file from the theme to my child themes folder. I then edited that one.

My theme’s code was slightly different to the example but it was easy enough to figure out where the code for the featured image/thumbnail was and add:

<?php if ( $caption = get_post( get_post_thumbnail_id() )->post_excerpt ) : ?>
    <p class="featuredcaption"><?php echo $caption; ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>

After it. I also added a bit of css to the child themes styles.css file to align the text right. I’ll think about how to make that better looking….

What I particularly like is that this approach uses the built in WordPress caption for the image. When I started thinking about it I was thinking about adding a custom field and complexity. I keep finding that WordPress is already half way to do what I want, if only I knew where to look. Until I do google will keep me right.

  1. I choose the theme because it supports indyweb features I wanted to test. I’ve still not got my head round many of them. ↩
  2.  This just works if you can edit your theme, so you would need a self hosted blog. I use a child theme here which should avoid changes being overwritten if the them is updated.Child Themes « WordPress Codex covers the details ↩

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File under another thing about WordPress I didn’t know.

I do not use the more tag on this blog very often, but it is a handy thing if you do not want all the text from a post filling up your home page. I was using it elsewhere today and wondered if I could edit the text from the standard Continue reading → turns out you can. You need to stitch to the Text view in the post editor, rather than the Visual, There you will see:

<!–more–>

you can edit it like this:
<!–more Find out more about more… –>

Find out more about more…

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I quite often read above my understanding age, which is why Hapgood is in my RSS feeds. The other day I read: Connected Copies where I read this:

the future of the web involves moving away from the idea of centralized, authoritative locations and into something I call “connected copies”.

This lead me to AMBER where it says:

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society wants to keep linked content accessible.

Whether links fail because of DDoS attacks, censorship, or just plain old link rot, reliably accessing linked content is a problem for Internet users everywhere.

Having blogged for a while I am very aware of this problem, links I’ve made have fallen away. My bookmarks are full of holes.

Just the other day I linked to a couple of posts here that were made this month. They have already gone.1

Preserve Links Now. The plugin added this to my post editor.
Preserve Links Now. The plugin added this to my post editor.

I’ve installed the Amber WordPress Plugin here and set it to use the Internet Archive to ‘save links’ when I make them. I could have chosen to save them here, but I wonder if that could get messy?

The other thing that crosses my mind is what if people want to rub out something they have published. When a post is taken down deliberately, should I be archiving it?  The posts I mentioned above were deleted by the author (I presume). Should I then make public copies available?  That is what would have happened if I’d had the amber plugin working at the time.

I don’t know the answer to these questions or how the plugin works, but I’ll keep it running here for a while and look out for broken links.

After hitting the button
After hitting the button I get a list of links preserved. Presumably on the Internet Archive.

 

Featured image Flickr photo Public Domain: Image from page 28 of “The effect of black rot on turnips, a series of photomicrographs, accompanied by an explanatory text” (1903) | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

1. These links were to posts Dean Groom made about Microsoft acquiring Minecraft EDU. Strangely they have persisted in my RSS reader. I’d recommend a more recent one that is still there: Media Literacy: 5 key concepts to teach this year | Playable ↩

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I am posting this with the WordPress.com desktop app on my mac. The app has been out for a while but I’ve just got round to testing it.

I’ve done  nothing to set this up other than log on with my WordPress.com username and password, I am presuming that I can post with the app because I’ve got jetpack installed.

The editor looks pretty much like the WordPress.com editor as opposed to the web interface to my self-hosted WordPress blog.

WordPress

The application feels a bit like a site specfic browser.

On my site I am having problems uploading images so will be switching to the browsers to finish this post off.

Screen Shot 2016-01-25 at 20.52.55

It does not give me access to things added to my editor by plugins. For example the post to medium plugin or the indie-web post kinds plugin.

I guess the writing ‘experience’ is a bit smoother than the browser. I am surprised that there is now distraction free mode for writing.

Hitting preview opened Safari but pointed to the post without &preview=true the first time I clicked Preview. The next time was fine.

There are a huge number of Revisions saved. I don’t know if this is a good thing.

An interesting editor but I think I’ll stick to writing posts locally with TextMate for now. This gives me local/dropbox backups and lots of shortcuts.

It is worth noting that this app will currently not work with Glow Blogs. I suspect that the WordPress.com connection would worry the security folk at Scot Gov.

From what I’ve read this app is part of major changes happening with WordPress and the Rest API hence the featured image!

Featured image credit: wordpress revolution | Flickr – Photo Sharing! CC BY NC by Tom Woodward.

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#Autumn #autumnleaves

I’ve not really checked out the new features of WordPress 4.4 in any depth but this new feature looks interesting. Just pasting a url to another WordPress blog post into the editor creates an embedded ‘card’ with some details.

I could imagine this would make a nice way of linking to pupil or class blog posts in a school blog. Hopefully we will not wait too long before Glow Blogs get to WordPress version 4.4.

I’d have like it even more if the embed above had picked up the featured image for the post. Update, I think there is something unexpected going on with this post, either from the styles here or on the embedded post. looking at the source, there does seem to be an image in there! More investigation tomorrow. Update 2: the thumbnail shows up for me now!

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There is a lot of it about, a lot of find out about. short term I don’t think this will have any effect on Glow Blogs, long term who know. Here are some things I’ve been reading.

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Einburgh-WapuuOn Saturday I was talking about Glow Blogs at WordCamp Edinburgh 2015.

Here are my slides as pdf and shared on iCloud (I’ve never used iCloud in this way). The slides are pretty minimal. There should be video of my talk posted at some point.

It was an interesting day altogether, the worst thing about it was there were two sessions at a time so I missed half of it!

A mixture of WordPress developers and designers for the most part, a different audience for me. Of course I came away knowing how I could have made the presentation a bit better…

I also came away with a bunch of links, and ideas to think about.  As usual meeting folk from a different zone there were a lot of good things that could be taken into education, as usual it takes me a few days to start making these connections in my head.

The Edinburgh WordPress group have monthly meetups . Iif they had not been on Wednesdays, when I’ve had Edutalk commitments, I would have loved to get along to while I’ve been working in Edinburgh.