Learning, teaching and research » Wordpress

New student led e-journal – Roundhouse: A Journal of Critical Theory and Practice

Terry — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:14:07 +0000

Today sees the launch of a new politics e-journal – Roundhouse: A Journal of Critical Theory and Practice - at Leeds University. A team of 3rd year undergraduate students have led the editorial process and the first edition showcases nine articles from recent graduates examining the ‘applied turn’ in Critical Theory along with an editorial statement of principles. The journal has been discursively edited, peer reviewed and developed by Critical Theory students from the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Leeds. According to their launch announcement:

“Roundhouse’s main directives are student inherited research and horizontal learning. It aims to spread communicative practices in higher education, create a more flexible style of learning and directly challenge the image of undergraduate students as ‘passive consumers’”.

If you visit the e-journal (and we hope you will!) you will see that the publishing platform we have used is a Wordpress installation used as a web content management system. The underlying functionality is pretty standard but we have created our own Leeds University institutional theme. The articles are available as either pdf downloads or viewable on line as web pages. There is a facility for public (moderated) commenting at the bottom of each article so please feel free to make observations and ask questions. The authors will be very happy to engage in discussion about and around their work and Critical Theory generally.

I have been involved with the development of this journal over the last 6 months or so in an advisory capacity and helping set up the Wordpress installation for its publication but the editorial process was undertaken by a small group of very enthusiastic students. If anyone is interested in the process, the issues, difficulties etc. then please feel free to contact me, here as a comment or email.

Blogs are dead. Long live the blog.

Terry — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:33:22 +0000

It is rumoured that blogging running out of steam. Several colleagues in the educational bloggersphere have reported that they are not blogging as much as usual and are tending to be more active in Twitter. I am also aware of a few bloggers who have stopped blogging as they feel pressurised by the reputation and expectations they have built up with their readers. One or two have since returned having established more realistic ‘rules of engagement’. The article in today’s Guardian in the New Media section, a cut down version of a blog post by Andrew Keen, touches on this - Blogs are dead. Long live the blog. It seems blogging is transforming itself and in the process becoming more like the hub of a personal learning/research environment rather in the way some envisiged from the start.

“Blogs will become aggregation points,” the shamefully youthful, soft-spoken Mullenweg explained, as he mapped out the future of blogging for me between bites of Dutch smoked salmon. “They will become our personal hub. Places where we store all our personal media content such as our flickr photos and Twitter posts.”

I suspect that Mullenweg is right. When blogging was invented in the late Nineties by my dear Berkeley friend and neighbor Dave Winer, it represented an easy self-publishing tool, a simple way to publish dirty great lumps of one’s own static text. But just as the Internet has dramatically evolved over the last ten years from a self-publishing into a real-time broadcasting platform, so blogging is transforming itself with equally dramatic vigor.

WP as a web content management system

Terry — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:39:28 +0000

I’m toying with the idea of turning my whole site over to WP using it as a content management system. I assume this would allow me to have a site blog as a tab on the home page. I’ll investigate further. In the meantime a couple of links to resources:

Wordpress as a CMS – Content Management System

48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress

Modifying the Cutline 2.1 theme

Terry — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:28:41 +0000

When installing this theme the About and Archive links in the header produced missing pages messages. To fix this I had to do the following.

Create a page each for the about and archive sections. I gave theses the titles ‘About’ and ‘Archives’.

Set the post slug to ‘about’ and ‘archive’

In the Options section of the Dashboard change the permalink from default (which creates urls with post numbers) to ‘Date and name based’.

Copy the .htaccess code generated by this choice when the ‘Update permalink structure’ button is clicked directly into an open notepad++ window and save file as .htaccess. (Notepad++ must be used rather than Notepad or a normal text editor as the file must be saved without an End of File (EOF) code).

ftp in binary transfer mode the .htaccess file to the root of the WP folders on the server.

The reason for this palaver is that the default urls of posts and pages refer to the post or page numbers in the database by default, but the links to pages in the header assume urls will be post and page names (or more precisely, their ’slugs’). The permalink structure can be changed in options but for some reason an .htaccess file is needed with appropriate code in it for browsers to understand these links and find and display the pages. On installing a WP theme there is not usually a .htaccess file so this has to be created and made writable.

Wordpress for Dummies

Terry — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:25:55 +0000

Just received Wordpress for Dummies from Amazon (thanks Dan and Nicky!). It looks like some people make a good living out of providing WP hosting and/or themes design. There is a multi-user version of WP where everyone can customise their own blog. WP can also be used as a powerful web site content management system and the site doesn’t even have to have a blog if it is not needed. There is a lot of info in the book about customisation of themes, using and maintaining static pages and adding widgets and other components to extend a WP based environment. Watch for dramatic changes here or possibly its total destruction. Must find out how to back this lot up.

First new post in Terry’s Blog (Wordpress)

Terry — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:17:23 +0000

I have imported all the post from Eduspaces from the beginning (August 2005 when I joined what was then elgg.net). I have had to spend a couple of hours editing the posts in code view as extraneous codes hid large blocks of text. I have also put all the posts in the Eduspaces category.

Still to do:

Go through all the posts to add additional categories and tags
Copy and past all the comments that have been lost in the export/import using rss. I may post multiple comments as just one comment with appropriate atributions (Now done 03/03/08 5.00pm)
Make a list of all my Eduspaces friends and track down their blogs to put in the blog roll