Tag: WordPress

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blogs_glow_v3.3

Yesterday at 4 O’Clock the glow blogs system was upgraded to WordPress 4. The site was down for around 4 minutes.

Glow blog are now running on WordPress 4, not much a a big deal as most other WordPress blogging site are doing the same. But we just upgraded >140000 blog for WordPress 2.9.2 to WordPress 4.0.1 a pretty amazing effort. Setting up from scratch would be simple enough, looking after all of the foibles of a creaky system a bit more complex.

It has been a pleasure working with the Blogs Team for this release, including:

Sonali Nakhate Project Manager; Turnbull and John MacLeod from the technical team at Scottish Government; Grant Hutton and David Orr of the test department at Scottish Government and Code For The People, now part of Automattic who managed to get aquihired by the company behind WordPress.com during the project!

We also got a ton of support in all sorts of ways from the extended glow team at the Scottish Government and Education Scotland and from many in the wider Scottish Education community.

A First Step

Although this is the second phase of the blogs project it is really just the precursor to the next phase. We are starting to discuss the plans for phase three now. This is, I hope, the really exciting bit…

The Glow Help Blog is being updated and I am listing some of the main changes here: Blogs Update Phase 2 WordPress 4 – Glow Blog Help.

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image

On of the real benefits to upgrading glow blogs to WordPress 4 will be its mobile interface. When WordPress 2.9.2 came out in 2010 we were just into the start of the mobile web and the term responsive web design had just been coined.

Now a large percentage of the population have devices in their pockets that are more than capable of posting content online.

. The WordPress  dashboard now  is responsive resizing and rearranging the tools to fit on my screen. Adding an image is simple and a gallery is easy enough.

WordPress now lets me select several images to insert in a post or create a gallery.

This post was started in the train, continued on the tube platform and finished on the couch all using my phone.

Personally I am not the greatest typest on any device. Many folk will be faster. Or I could start a post while mobile, capture images and save that as a draft for later.

I am looking forward to seeing how glow bloggers go mobile next year.

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IMG_0072.JPG

Since WordPress 3.9 the TinyMCE editor now automatically cleans out all but the semantic HTML from Word (or Rich text copied from elsewhere), meaning any fonts, styles, etc. You preserve headings, blockquotes, lists, links, bold, italic.

From: Peek in the SPLOT: TRU Writer

This means WordPress handles text pasted from word a lot better that the current WordPress 2.9.2 does

Even though, like Alan, I don't think writing everything in word is a great idea lots of folks do exactly that. This then should be useful for #glowblogs after the upgrade.

I'll be posting a few things here about the changes in glow blogs coming in January over the next few weeks.

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Last Friday at the same time as the glow authentication changed, the new glow blogs service went live. I posted about this over on Glow Connect.

It was pretty exciting stuff, the developers were really working right up to the last minute and beyond to deliver the service. Even so we have gone live with a few know issues and have already discovered a few more.

At the start of the processes I certainly was not aware of all the complexities involved nor the scale of the job. Turns out it was a big complex job!

Luckily for me I ended up working with an amazing team, not only in the Scottish Government, but in the developers and suppliers. All of them worked long hours with very positive attitudes as I grumbled along. I am tempted to turn this post into a list of these characters and their qualities, but probably enough to say all of the blog team were essential to the process.

What Have We Got

Stray Puppy by p medved
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

At the end of this phase we have a working set of WordPress MU, one for each Local Authority, running the same version of the software as before and we have the known issues linked above.

The main improvement so far is around blog creation. There is no connection to SharePoint/old glow groups. This simplifies the process a great deal. This and other Main Changes are listed in the Glow Blog Help, some of these are not improvements but changes.

One more improvement, not listed, is that you can now upload files of up to 50mb to blogs. This should make it a lot easier to podcast or share small videos without using a third party site or service.

On Wednesday I popped back to North Lanarkshire to watch my colleague Ann McCabe set up a class of e-portfolios, this was much quicker than before, taking away at least half the steps. There is still plenty of room from improvement and I got a great idea to take back to Victoria Quay from the RM help desk who I visited in the afternoon.

Next Up

Given the above, if this was the end point in the process I’d be pretty disappointed. A lot of work for not much in the way of improvement. I am not disappointed due to two things, phase 2 and phase 3.

Phase 2 was looking quite simple, upgrade to a new version of WordPress. This will bring a host of benefits, better user experience especially on mobile being the main gain. More important, in the longer run, is that it gives us a much better base to develop on.
The other aspect of phase 2 will be to backfill in things that were dropped out of phase one or needs that were discovered in phase 1.

It looks like phase 2 will take a bit more work than I expected, but this will start straight off. Already some of the first problems to be discovered has been solved and the developer team are just waiting to decide when to deploy the code. Another potential ongoing problem with server load is now beginning to be understood and the team are working on finding the best solution. The team are keen that the server gets a chance to bed in and are suitably cautious about changing things on the live system, best practises for ongoing change and development are being put in place.

Bright Future

After we get to phase 3 of the project things might speed up a bit. We will be using WordPress 4 which will allow a lot of nice things to happen.

The one I am most excited about is giving a more flexible service. In the old glow blogs it was a constant frustration for myself and many others that our theme and plugin requests were never answered. I am not entirely sure of all the reasons for this, but having peeped behind the curtain I presume some of this was to do with testing.

Watching the new blogs service develop gave me a bit of a shock in the amount of time and effort it needs to deliver a service of this scale. Like many folk who publish stuff on the web I frequently make changes without much of a care and worry. The Technical Architects and developers for glow take a somewhat different view. There first concern is the preservation of users data and stability of the service and given they are taking care of over 100,000 blogs…

The glow blogs system now consists of 4 main servers: integration (where new code is added after code review), explore (for testing), pre-production (more testing) and live. With the older version of WordPress we are using a lot of the development and testing is manual, the testers here and volunteers going through lists of test to test the functionality of the blogs. In addition there is security, load and a many more tests.

Going forward the process should be automated, the newer version of WordPress can have a deal of automatic testing, code going onto the integrate server would be pushed through the different servers being automatically tested on the way, this gives us the possibility of a much more agile service.

On the Way

On Friday last week there was a fair amount of cheering and happy faces around the glow office, since then feedback has been mainly positive. I am not really ready to celebrate yet, there still is a lot to do before we reach the point learners and teachers in Scotland have a world class blogging platform. There so many possibilities out there for doing all sorts of things with WordPress. We would, of course be really interested to hear of any ideas of what you would like from Glow blogs.

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flickr photo by krystian_o Attribution License

43/365 by krystian_o Attribution License

TL:DR I’ve just migrated my blog, please let me know if you find broken things and I’ll try and fix them.

In the midst of the glowblogs migration project I am involved in professional I’ve been working on a wee migration of my own. For the past nine years I’ve been blogging using pivot (later pivotx) this weekend I’ve moved to WordPress.

Why?

I started using pivot back in 2004 as my class blog mainy because it did not need a database on the website and then that cost a bit more. I stuck to it as I found it easy to theme, and adapt for various classroom projects. It seemed fairly natural to use the same system myself.

Pivotx seems to be changing but quite slowly, the promise of pivot 4 was from 2012.

I’ve been attracted to several interesting WordPress technologies and plugins and now use it for edutalk, ScotEduBlogs and my ds106 blog. The feedwordpress plugin is of especial interest.

A wish to eat my own dog food given I am promoting WordPress for glow.

How

Originally I though of turning the whole site/domain to WordPress, to include my ds106 blog: 106 drop in, but that looked a wee bit to tricky at the moment. I also have a bunch of straightforward html pages and experiments which I want to leave in place. Also there are a few challenges to moving the pivot posts to WordPress that seemed enough for now.

There is not a simple pivotx imported for wordpress, I found Migrating your blog from PivotX to WordPress | filmvanalledag which looked as if it was a near fit, but missed out tags and comments. I’ve also been using disqus comments for my blog but wanted to move to standard ones without losing disqus.

That filmvanalledag post gave me a great start with example.org/?feed=rss&c=*&n=10000 I used this to download the rss feed for all of my posts (>800).

I decided that the RSS import would lose all my tags and comments so went for another approach. I have a bit of experience with kludging together a standard WordPress import from other things. This is probably of little interest to anyone but myself, but briefly I use SuperCard to creat a simple pseudo database of the rss add in the missing keywords by downloading them directly from the database and then manipulate it into a wordpress friendly format, for example getting the tag list like this:

uid,"tag","contenttype",target_uid
2533,"assessment_is_for_learning","entry",1132
2535,"blogging","entry",1133
2537,"scotedublogs","entry",1135
2536,"newyear","entry",1135

Directly from the database and turning it into:

<category domain="post_tag" nicename="glowscotland"><![CDATA[glowscotland]]></category>
<category domain="post_tag" nicename="glowscot"><![CDATA[glowscot]]></category>
<category domain="post_tag" nicename="blogging"><![CDATA[blogging]]></category>
<category domain="post_tag" nicename="wordpress"><![CDATA[wordpress]]></category>
<category domain="category" nicename="wwwd"><![CDATA[wwwd]]></category>
<category domain="category" nicename="jj"><![CDATA[jj]]></category>

For each post.

I tested the import of my export on a local version of wordpress and also worked out some htaccess stuff.
My old blog links were like this: http://johnjohnston.info/blog/?e=2462 and wordpress expects this http://johnjohnston.info/blog/?p=2462.

It took me a fair bit of googling and testing to get something that worked, although not quite correctly, http://johnjohnston.info/?e=2464 once I turned on pretty links goes to http://johnjohnston.info/blag/what-is-openness/?e=2464, not removing the ?e=2464, ?p=2464 works properly. Once tested I created a new WordPress on the site, at /blag, set it up, did a little more testing and have just moved it to /blog after changing the urls in the General Settings Screen.

The other main problem was that I was using disqus for my comments on the old blog and being a packrat I did not want to leave them behind. So I’ve added a bit of logic to this new blog where older posts will display the disqus form and any comments but going forward I’ll use the standard WordPress ones. I can’t see any way to import the old disqus comments into WordPress at this point.

There are more things to fix, and I’ll try to pick these up as I go along. After that I’ll be looking to play around with some wordpress plugins and the like.

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One of the biggest frustrations working on the glow projects is the limits it places on open communication. I was expecting to be able to blog ideas and thoughts as I progressed through the blog migration. It turns out that this might have lead to procurement and legal difficulties.

A Very Excited Puppy by edanley Attribution License

I am delighted and excited that the blog migration project, which is what I’ve been spending the majority of my time on since January, is at a point where we can discuss our plans.

After a lot of work and investigation it has been decided that the best way to go forward with the blogging service is to continue to use WordPress for Glow Blogs. This might have seemed to be a no brainer, but we had to be sure we would not run into possible procurement challenges by assuming WordPress was the only solution.

How We Got Here and Why It Is Taking So Long

Current blogs hooked into sharepoint, use a very old version of WordPress.
There has been a lot of investigation on how the old blogs worked and were knitted into the sharepoint system of ‘Old Glow’ we now have a good understanding of the technical architecture and best way to move forward.

Things That Need to Be Done

Authentication, Blog Creation, User Management.

The new blogs will need to authenticate to the new RM Unify project. Blog creation is current done in the ‘Old Glow’ sharepoint portal. The new service will need to include an independent system for creating blogs. Likewise the old system used the old portal for user management, a new system will have to be created inside the WordPress platform. We anticipate that there are many opportunities for improving the blog creating and user management in the new system. We will also, hopefully avoid the problem of being tightly coupled to another service which should make future development of the blogs less problematic than it has been in the past.

We Have a Plan

We now have a full-time WordPress developer in the glow team who will have the role of overseeing the technical aspects of the blog project. We have procured the services of Code for The People to manage the migration process and upgrade to a more recent version of WordPress.

  1. Move: existing 2.9.2 blogs to new home, development of new authentication, blog creation and User management. This will reduce risk of any problems that might arise from trying to move directly to a new and up to date WordPress setup.
  2. Upgrade: to more recent version of WP We will, again to reduce risk, upgrade in stages. This should not be visible to end users.
  3. Improve: Phase Three…

The benefits of the new blog system should become apparent quite quickly.
Firstly here are many features of more recent versions of WordPress that will improve the system without any development. A better editor, better mobile experience, better handling of media.

Going forward into stage three, there should be an opportunity for a wider range of themes and plugins and the development of a system for requesting in installation of these.

We should be able to make pupil profile improvements. For example the creation of the profile blogs current take many many steps. It takes me about an hour to take a class through creation. We should be able to improve that, and perhaps other types of blogs site, by providing a wizard that is build into the system. We have the chance to develop a better system for producing the p7 & S3 profiles.

Aggregation, this could make the following and commenting on pupil profiles by staff much more efficient. Teachers could potentially have a page where they would see any new activity by any group of pupils they interact with.

There Is Always Some Risk

There are few possible risks which may result in extending the planned short freeze on the platform. If these push our migration date past Oct 3 the current blogs will not be accessible. Our current estimates are that we will meet our deadlines.

  • There is a potential period of blogs having a procedural content freeze or outage for a few days in the Summer. Possibly another content freeze in September or October. We will do our best to keep users informed about this. We have not yet identified length of these periods.
  • Things go wrong, exceptionally big project
  • I’d guess this is one of the biggest WordPress setups in the world, we are moving from version 2.9.2 to 3.9 or later this is a challenge.
  • There will be a great deal of testing of all stages in the migration, we will be starting the testing early to maximise benefit while minimising risk to delivery dates.
  • There are a lot of different aspects of Procurement that are hard to fathom before the exercise is complete. It is difficult to estimate times we have still to finalise the procurement of the hosting for the blogging system.

Class Sets, will not be ready for switchover time. RM unify does not currently have a way for the blogs to gather class and curricular groups to help with adding users to a blog and assigning them roles. We will develop interim solutions to assigning roles to multiple users (probably pasting in a list of usernames). This will hopefully be short term and be replaced by a more robust solution when class sets information is available in glow generally.

I managed to avoid ‘blog with two tails’ as the title of this post, but could not the puppy pictures;-)

Although this feels at times as if it is a long drawn out process, it has been (and is being) made enjoyable for me by working with (or mainly watching the the work carried out by) a great team of folk on the blog project. The first time I’ve worked with a Project Manager, Business Analyst, Technical Architect, Tester or Developers in a formal setting has been one of the best things in my secondment so far.

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I’ve written here about FeedWordPress quite a few times and if you have spoken to me about technology for learning I’ve probably mentioned it to you too. FeedWordPress is a WordPress plugin that lets you aggregate, on the one blog, many blogs (or other sources that provide RSS).

FeedWordPress is used extensively on DS106 (Which I probably talk about far to much for my co-workers comfort) and we now use it on ScotEduBlogs to aggregate over 100 Scottish educational blogs.

I’ve posted about how I think this would be a great tool for learning in schools, allowing pupils to work in there own spaces but pull project related content from multiple sources together.

I’ve just found a wonderful example of this in use (somewhat more interesting than ScotEdublogs and easier to grasp than ds106)

This site allows 20 students to record botanical findings, they do so by posting to their own blogs. The results are aggregated on to Field Botany | Plants of the James River Park System, There are already 700 posts.

Belle Isle

The students can post photos and informatino straight to their blogs with mobile phones while in the field.

Tom Woodward on who’s blog I discovered this site explains the details:

This early days for the site but in the end the intrepid biology duo of Jill Reid and Dianne Jennings will worked with their students to create a site that local residents can use to identify plants in our James River Park System.

Tom goes onto explain how he set the site up and the plugins used.

Glow Blogs

One of the problems with suggesting FeedWordPress for learning is that it requires a fair bit of work to get going, you cannot use it on WordPress.com, edublogs or other sites that host blogs for you, you need to set up your own hosting and add and configure the plugin. As we work our way through requirements and procurement of the new blogging solution for glow the possibility of being able to offer this sort of factuality is very exciting…

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The Unicorn in Motion Rainbow

A wee bit of an update on the ‘glow product owner’ gig. The title is a bit of a mouthful and still difficult to explain. I should now be able to give an elevator pitch, but I am not quite there yet.

What I can do is give an idea of what I’ve been doing so far. We have started the business of creating teams that develop various aspects of the glow environment as projects.

The one I’ve had most to do with so far is the blog migration project. The main folk involved in this are: a project manager, a business analyst, a technical architect and myself as product owner. This is not a full time job for anyone, we are all involved in other projects, activities and meetings. We can also involve other people, say another technical architect with specialist knowledge or procurement experts.

We start by gathering requirements for the project, looking at what the blogs and e-portfolios do at the moment and what we would like them to do at the finish. A lot of this is understanding and unpicking how the blogs are connected to the glow service and authentication as it stands. This turns out to be quite complicated;-)

There are procedures for this sort of operation, with a standard way of writing the requirements. Luckily for glow I don’t directly do any of the writing, I just discuss, review and sometime make a decision.

By now we are near having a first draft of the requirements for the blog migration. Then this will then go for further examination from the technical and procurement experts. Then on through, options, ‘invitations to tender’, procurement and more.

I’ve probably missed a few steps and got some in the wrong order. The project also has dependencies on other projects, for example the authentication one, Ian owns that one.

A lot of this is not really what I am interested in, but more a way to get to what that is. That is things like, mobile blogging, better media handling, a quicker setup for e-portfolios plus some rainbows and unicorns. Things that will help learning. The whole project process is just a means to get from where we are to where we want to be through the procurement jungle and down the options river on a technical raft.

The other job I have is to decide when to drop a feature. This might be a blue sky idea that I love or something more realistic. The problem(for me) will come when that feature will have an impact of delivering on schedule, then I’ll have to move from giving ideas and advice to making the call.

The process is a fair distance from what my ideas of the job were. I had some sort of romantic vision of myself and a team of crack developers cranking out amazing services that just work. I now understand that there is a lot more to it. Before the crack developers start to work lots of other folk have their parts to play. Turns out that these folk are smart and a pleasure to work with. Maybe we will get rainbows and unicorns after all, it might just be it takes a bit more work than I though to get there.

The gif at the top of the pages is based on the public domain image from: File:The Horse in Motion.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia by Eadweard Muybridge.

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Wordpress code skew

A while back when posterous shut up shop we took edutalk.info and made it a wordpress site. I blogged some of the process EDUtalk Setup – WordPress Tech Notes.

This weekend I’ve been trying to improve the workflow for the live shows we do as part of the site.

Previously we have a page which lists all of the planned shows. This page is just edited by hand, and show information needs to be deleted after the show goes out.

I’ve felt for a while that we should be able to do something better. My idea was as each show was arranged it should be a post which would be published on the Forthcoming page until it was broadcast and recorded, the post would then go to the main page. The problem I for saw was that the posts would be dated when first published and not when the audio was added. The Radio ‘episodes’ would then not fit in with the main flow.

I did a bit of googling1, and found you can:

  • create custom posts types in WordPress which could have extra fields, for example date.
  • sort post by this date field (on the Forthcoming page)
  • publish/show ‘draft’ posts (on the Forthcoming page)

So this is what I did:

  1. Made a custom post type called show
  2. Gave the editor for shows a ‘Meta Box’ with a field for the planned show date.
  3. Added a datepicker with jQuery UI.
  4. Created a schedule page where draft shows are shown sorted in order of the datepicker field

The process of posting is now:

  1. When a broadcast is arranged we create a draft show. This then shows up in the correct order of the Schedule page.
  2. After the broadcast we will add the archived audio to the ‘show’ and publish it, it will then be automatically removed from the Schedule and be posted, with the correct date onto the blog.

What is to Love?

Out the box a wordpress blog is a useful publishing system, it is pretty easy to use. I’ve found when introducing staff to blogs they can use them quickly without much explanation. They usually find it easier to use than editing their school websites.

The next step is to activate some plugin, edit themes and add some widgets, this will enable lots more functionality. For example the FeedWordPress plugin pulls in audioboos tagged edutalk and publishes then on the Edutalk site. The WPBadger plugin allows us to issue open badges.

After that you might need to dig a little deeper and edit the code, this is a lot less scary than it sounds. It looks like wordpress is designed for folk to tweak and edit even if they have no real coding chops. Everything seems to be in its own we compartment and made to be easiy to edit. Experimenting with code in a child theme makes it easy to step back if you get into trouble. There is also a huge community of folk posting information on the web, and the WordPress Codex: the online manual for WordPress and a living repository for WordPress information and documentation..

I had only the vaguest idea of what I was doing to improve our workflow, but a very short time on google sorted it out.

This makes wordpress a very nice platform for developing online spaces, there is not a huge gulf between just using the software ‘out of the box’ and beginning to customise it to your needs.

Glow Blogs

Tomorrow is my last day working in North Lanarkshire before I take a secondment to work with glow. At the moment, thousands of glow blogs exist, running on a fairly old version of wordpress with very little opportunity to do much in the way of customisation. I hope that glow will both continue to supply WordPress blogs and to make them much more powerful. I’ve no idea if I will be in a position to influence this, but this is what I would like:

  • The MextAwebLogAPI to be activated, this allows posting to blogs from mobile applications.
  • More plugins, especially FeedWordPress that would allow a teacher to ‘collect’ their pupils blogs or anyone to create a space were others could easily contribute from their own blog.
  • Access to editing the code, either through the web interface of via ftp (I guess this might be the hardest one to pull off).
  • More themes (there are only about 6 in glow) would not do any harm.

One way to do this, would be for glow to supply web hosting, these spaces, like cheap webhosting all over the internet, could allow one click installs of WordPress (and lots of other software). I explored this in a recent post here: Glow should be at the trailing edge? but have not really got an idea if this is possible from either a cost or execution point of view? I hope to find out soon if this is a possibility or a pipe dream.

A final note, this blog does not run off wordpress but pivotx. Edutalk, ScotEdublogs and my DS106 blog, 106 drop in, are all WordPress.

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Code eyes

These are some technical notes on some of the changes I’ve made to the standard WordPress site for EDUtalk, I am not sure if they are of much interest to anyone but myself, but writing them up here will, 1. get them clear in my mind, and 2. provide a reference.

The site is running on WordPress 3.5.1. I made a child theme as I wanted to edit some of files and mostly be upgrade proof.

If you have no interest in this you might be interested in the main facts of the move: EDUtalk Has Moved, or just head over to EDUtalk and listen to some great audio.

Plugins

  1. Akismet, spam protection, pretty much a no brainer.
  2. FeedWordPress, this is very much at the heart of the new site, this plugin allows you to syndicate content from other sites, in our case audioboo boos tagged edutalk and iPadio phlogs with the same tag. Posts form these sites with the tag are added to EDUtalk. The plugin also allows us to make the titles link to the original site rather than our own post page, I believe this is a better way to do things for the authors who submit content by tagging.
  3. MediaElement.js – HTML5 Audio and Video, I installed this initially but it is now turned off. Instead I have used this JavaScript myself. As I understand it the plugin will provide html5 and fallback players for audio inserted with a short code player. As a lot of our content comes via FeedWordPress it would not work there unless we manually edited posts.
  4. In the process of importing all of the old content I found the Categories to Tags Converter Importer and WordPress Importer plugin invaluable.
  5. The Safe Redirect Manager plugin redirects links from the old site to the new one, for example, /pages/radio-edutalk to /listen.

Child Theme Files

It seems that the way you best edit a WordPress theme is through Child Themes, this avoids problems when upgrading.

I started by copying the content.php file from the theme to the child theme folder. Here I edited the php to add an html 5 audio player to the top of a post, if the post had an enclosure. I used:$enclosureData = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'enclosure' ); to find out if there was an enclosure. I had a bit of hassle as Audioboo encloses images as well as mp3s, but looped through the enclosures and used the first audio one I found.

I had to edit the main theme function.php file to comment out a bit of code that removed enclosures if they were not linked in the post. This proved a problem when doing some manual edits of the imports. I got information on how to do this from this post: How to stop WordPress 2.8 – 3.5 from deleting enclosures | Kevin J Edwards. The main tool used in building edutalk.info was google. In this case I edited the theme’s own function.php file, rather than the child themes, as the child theme’s function.php is added to, rather than replacing the parent theme. If there is a better way to do this, I’d like to know.

I did create a child theme function.php and added functions to include the jQuery and MediaElement.js. I then copied the footer.php to the child theme and added a script to added a flash player to the audio tags for browsers that do not play mp3s natively. 

jQuery(document).ready(function() {
	jQuery('audio').mediaelementplayer();
});

Pretty simple stuff.

Originally I added a bit more jQuery to hide the audioboo and ipadio players and maps in the post. They were not making the posts look very nice, and I found it difficult to style them. Later on, as I found that the pages were loading very slowly, I went back into the content.php file and added some code to only show the post content, if it was in the Radio Edutalk category. Even with only 6 posts per page this made a huge difference in speeding up the page loading (twice as fast). I changed:

<?php  the_content( __( 'Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&rarr;</span>', 'twentytwelve' ) );  ?>

to

<?php if(in_category(5)){the_content( __( 'Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&rarr;</span>', 'twentytwelve' ) );} ?>

5 being the category for Radio Edutalk, I’ll be adding another category for mailed in audio if needed. Thinking about it it would be best to change to not in the audioboo and ipadio categories.

Screenshotpingdom

Altogether it was not very hard to figure this out with the help of google. WordPress is extremely well documented. The code is also easy to edit, without having to understand the whole thing. There are probably a lot of better ways to do this, and I’d be delighted to find out.

I’d also be interested in any other ways to improve the site, speed it up or add useful features.