Most WordPress sites come with a large section on the right side of the page for small bits of information to be shown using “Widgets”. If you’ve been frustrated with this section and wanted to know how to get rid of the default “Categories” and “Archives” widgets, how to add your own widgets or even how to get rid of the sidebar altogether, these videos are for you! (More …)
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The upload quota on WordPress at LPS is currently set at 40 MB. A typical photo directly off of a digital camera is between 1 and 2 MB, and with newer cameras even larger. Given these two things, you could use up your whole quota in a single photo gallery! Bummer! So how can you do far more with the same quota and images? (More …)
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Brian Fitzgerald
The Computing Services Help Desk is a great resource when things just aren’t working for you, but sometimes we are just looking for a tip, trick or some general advice about how to do something. In those instances, the WordPress discussion forum might be just what you are after. Freshly launched in the WordPress group, this is the perfect place to ask those questions and get answers from the WordPress at LPS community. Think you’re pretty good with WordPress, or perhaps have battled the very issue that somebody else is struggling with? Chime in with your own answers or suggestions.You can find the group here: http://wp.lps.org/groups/wordpress-at-lps/
Join the group, then click on “Forum” to participate.
Stay up to date with what’s going on in the group via email. Just click on “email options” to get immediate, daily or weekly group summaries.
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Brian Fitzgerald
WordPress has long had a pretty intuitive menu-ing system that automatically added new pages to your menu, allowing for submenus made of child pages, but there were some basic things missing. What if you wanted the menu item to be something other than the page title? What if you wanted to exclude some pages from the menu? What if you wanted to have your items displayed in a different order?
These concerns have all been addressed in WordPress 3!
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Brian Fitzgerald
WordPress at LPS has been upgraded to version 3. This big upgrade couldn’t come at a better time for us as we still have a little over a month before things really start swinging back into full gear for the new school year. What’s new? Well, you will find it to be very familiar overall, but there a few tasty things in the new version. Check out the informational video here…
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Brian Fitzgerald
If people are like onions, Quicktime movies are like sandwiches…
If I asked you, “Do you like sandwiches?”, you would probably want to know what kind of sandwich. I wouldn’t want to say, “I love sandwiches!” and then have a Muffuletta dropped in front of me (which I really do not like).
Quicktime movies (or files with a .MOV extension) are similar. Movie files are usually made of two tracks: an audio track and a movie track. Audio and Video come in many different formats each but as long as Quicktime likes them, they can be combined to make the video sandwich that an MOV is. A quick look at the Wikipedia page for Quicktime reveals at least 132 combinations of audio and video that could create a Quicktime file.
So, what does this all mean for putting video on the web? Well, most of the time we are not using the Quicktime player to watch video on the web. We are using the Adobe Flash plugin to watch video or in the case of sites that are preparing for HTML 5 media, the browser itself is decoding the movie for the viewer. In both of these cases, the delivery tool is MUCH pickier about what it will eat than Quicktime is and audio/video has to be prepared a little more carefully.
This sounds like a lot of work, but generally it is just a matter of finding a tool that will make this easy and lucky for us there are a few, and I’m going to focus on two: Quicktime Player and Evom.
If you have Snow Leopard on your OS X computer, Quicktime Player is able to do an excellent job of saving files that are ready for the web. Just open the file and choose “Save for Web” from the file menu. You will end up with a file that should be perfect for your web site.
Another option is to use Evom. Evom is a free application for OS X that will let you drag and drop a video on to it and have it converted to a web-ready format that should play easily. There are several ways that you can use this tool, but I recommend the following steps.
- Drag and drop your file on to Evom
- Choose HTML5 as your format
- Convert it
- You will end up with two files (OGV and MP4), throw away the OGV
- Use the MP4 file
Hopefully, these steps will help you create a movie file that will work great on your web site.
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Brian Fitzgerald
Within the last couple of days, comments have been coming in indicating that forms that had been previously available were suddenly unavailable. It seems that Google has made some changes to Google Spreadsheets that has caused this to happen. Ever since we turned Google Apps on at Lincoln Public Schools it has been impossible to publish documents in such a way that the entire world could see them… with the exception of Forms. Up until now, a form could be published to gather content from anybody regardless of whether they were or were not an LPS staff person or student.
I don’t know when the change happened, but everyone is now limited to using forms with those who have an LPS login. That sounds simple enough, but that’s not all. If you have been experiencing problems with this, you may have noticed that you do not get a login screen when you try to access the form. Instead you have received a message indicating that you cannot access the form with no options to continue.
You've got to check the box
In order to fix this on your forms, you need to check a box in the form creation/edit screen that says “require lps.org sign-in to view this form”. Check that box and visitors will be able to login, then complete the form.
Q & A
Can’t you put it back the way it used to be?
I’m sorry, but we don’t have that option. We don’t have much control over this. We are unable with this product to say that Forms can be published while other file types are not. We are also unable to say that staff can do this but students can not. Until Google upgrades the application suite with those options we have to all live under restrictions that are a little tighter than we would like.Could you have warned us that this was going to happen?
You can watch Google’s forums and blogs and get the same information we do. There is not generally any sort of heads-up on changes like this. From their perspective, they were probably fixing a pretty big hole in their security even if from other perspectives they were shutting off a feature that had been well used.More information
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Brian Fitzgerald
Found something today in WordPress that is really driving me crazy. I am converting Hill Elementary to WordPress and thought I’d be clever and start by uploading all of the images that I would need to the image gallery (around 100). I figured I could then simply go to the library every time I needed an image rather than uploading over and over. The problem is that the image library doesn’t load very many images at a time, requiring a lot of paging through the images. It does allow for searching, but that is only useful if your images aren’t all titled things like IMG001.JPG, etc.
What would I do to fix it? The easiest would be to provide an option to load more images at one time. I would happily wait for 100 images to load rather than flip through 10 smaller pages.
WordPress 3 is on the horizon. I don’t know if this is changed in that, but I’m hoping.
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Brian Fitzgerald
I was working on my wordpress site this morning and lamenting how slow it was loading. My first thought was, “What is going on with the server?!” Sometimes the server does slow down and we are always looking for ways to optimize and deliver better performance to our web sites, but very often there are things you can do to speed up your own site. Here are some things that I have put in my mental checklist to workthrough when my site starts to feel sluggish. (More …)
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Brian Fitzgerald
I was working on my wordpress site this morning and lamenting how slow it was loading. My first thought was, “What is going on with the server?!” Sometimes the server does slow down and we are always looking for ways to optimize and deliver better performance to our web sites, but very often there are things you can do to speed up your own site. Here are some things that I have put in my mental checklist to workthrough when my site starts to feel sluggish. (More …)
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