Slocum’s portfolio is outstanding, and it’s clear that they exploit each other’s talents to good effect. A look at the staff portraits makes the point well: each of them is outstanding, and is the visual anchor for each staff member’s “About” page. In fact, it makes a strong case for engaging a team, whether it’s an established full-time team, or an ad hoc team assembled for a project, for even relatively simple projects. The simplest statement of the principle is that no one should proofread or edit their own copy in any text that matters.

My installation of the WordPress plugin was entirely snag-free [plugin page on WordPress repository]; what’s more, the people at Slocum took the time to provide a clear and detailed entry in the WP Plugin Repository. NB: if you install via the WordPress dashboard, there are several other similar-sounding plugins, with similar descriptions of functionality. I tested Mr. Desrosier’s plugin first because it was featured prominently on the Evernote website. What you’re looking for is “WP Evernote Site Memory,” with a credit in the description field for Slocum and Mr. Desrosier.

Other developers have produced Site Memory functionality for Joomla and Tumblr, and Evernote also provides information for developers; it’s all readily navigable on the Evernote Site Memory page.

One other Evernote plugin for WordPress, EverPress, is essentially the opposite of WP Evernote Site Memory.

EverPress is an automatic RSS posting plugin primarily designed to integrate with the information capturing service, Evernote. This plugin allows Evernote users to automatic post their shared notebooks to WordPress. [EverPress also supports]post scheduling – by day, week or month, and time of day; [and]post settings – set the author, category, status (draft, public and private) and tags.

EverPress is the creation of Martin Hawksey; we hope to have tested and reviewed it in short order.

Originally posted on Discovery Strategist.

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Mr. Cooper may be the best teacher you ever have. Pay attention to him at Kambeo – coming soon.

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WordPress Post Formats. Image courtesy of Greg Rickaby/GregRickaby.com.

Check out this impressive array: WordPress Post Format Eye-Candy: Tumblr Style Theme Inspiration Showcase by Kym Huynh at WordCast. The problem those site designs solve is inherent in WordPress, which will permit the posting of many types of information. Just text alone – WP is ready to accept haiku-or-shorter-length compositions, documents long enough to require pagination, lists, lots of white space, no white space – lots.

This is a problem when – for instance – the post title is very large – and the post body itself is very short. It’s  not pleasing to the eye  – and not an efficient use of screen space. Such as

An h2 post title which sits atop a very short post

A very  short post.

There is a feature now available for theme authors called “post formats.”  Here’s the WP Codex entry on “Post Formats.” And here are some other excellent resources.  At present – if I understand things correctly – only  the Genesis theme framework from StudioPress uses this feature, and so far not in every theme. (One nice theme that uses most or all of the formats is Tapestry).

From Greg Rickaby, a designer who works mostly with the Thesis Theme and with the aforementioned Genesis, these posts:

• How To: Post Formats for Genesis Child Themes (this post predates the adoption of page formats by the folks at Studio Press, but if you’re comfortable altering your functions.php file, it’s my impression that this post will help you introduce page formats into an existing theme);
  
• While you’re there, checkout Mr. Rickaby’s Fringe child theme forGenesis
• How To: Enable Post Formats in WordPress (If my post is confusing, start with this post from GregRickaby)

From Andrew Nacin, a WP Core Developer, and excellent elucidator of WordPress and other issues),   On standardized post formats gives some insight on how this evolved, and reminded me not to take for granted the people who labor over open-source apps and who generally are not rewarded in a way remotely proportional to their efforts. Mr. Nacin points out that this is still a work in progress, and

Are there flaws? Yes. There are a few confusing factors here. One, as Mark [Mark Jaquith - see MarJaquith.com, and/or this post] suggests, a ‘custom post type’ is a horrible name for what it really is. Ironically, the best name for ‘post formats’ (trust me, we pulled out our thesauruses for this one) would have been ‘post types.’ Then there’s the confusion where some have used the term ‘custom post formats’ even though they’re not talking about custom ones at all — probably because of confusion around the similar-sounding ‘custom post types’ term.

To point out another example – an “aside” for these purposes, appears to be defined as a post without any title ir caption, and below a certain length. In one theme I tested, it was clear that, less than one complete line of text, and the post stayed as an “aside.” But when I added five lines additional copy, WP – or the theme – in any case, automatically – switched the radio button from “aside”to “standard.” One assumes that eventually themes will come with  some documentation about the limits of formats – perhaps some control over them. But – even as is, this feature is an enormous step forward in WordPress’s trajectory towards being even more flexible without the average user touching code. My point  is that while this feature is likely to get rapidly better, even as is it’s  an outstanding improvement.  How hard it is to incorporate into an existing theme I couldn’t  say.

Last,post types and formats and taxonomies, oh my! from Otto on WordPress.

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• DummyTextGenerator.com
• HTML-Ipsum
• Duck Island Greek Machine (which is only one of the options at Duck Island)
• Lorem Ipscream (with a tip of the hat to Russell Heimlich for this great post)
• This outstanding html-formatted placeholder text, created by JonTangerine (and his “Silo” has many more useful tools – don’t miss it)
• Faux-Texte

Alyssa Gregory identifies seven tools of a particular type; her readers identify six more, not counting some other assets one would find following the links out, like in Russell Heimlich’s “Yummy Lorem Ipscream,” which includes, just to give an example, a list of dummy image generators. (I didn’t even know they existed, so vast is my ignorance).

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My very much past-warranty brain says that I already know how to wrap text around an image  – a simple task  – but especially as the other blogs grow – we’re trying to standardize post styling, among other things.  Big white space – asymmetrically placed images with text hugging the top and bottom margins – not desirable.

So I found a brilliant tutorial by Liz Jamieson, proprietor of Big Satchurday,  AKA http://LizJamieson.co.uk – which provides a way to solve the problem (1) via a WordPress Plugin, (2), using settings in the WordPress native image uploader and style dialog; (3) using HTML – but no CSS – as she explains, mostly visually, how to go about it. It’s the perfect style for a tutorial – you can skip ahead easily when you know you already understand a part, but wherever you get stuck theres detailed explanation.
So I suppose I should insert an image or two. The image of the cherries in the upper-left-hand corner was resized in the WP native image editor to 150 x 150 thumbnail. Using the radio button to align the image left, 10 pixels vertical margin, 15 horizontal, seemed (and seems) right to my eye.

The resultant settings look like this in the WordPress image dialog. NB: You will likely have to place the image, save it, and then edit.

"Advanced Settings" tab in the WordPress upload image dialog box

So check out  How To Add Images/Photos With Wrapping Text in WordPress via the HTML Code Window : Big Satchurday.  Liz Jamieson  definitely goes on the “how-to” and “panic-button/how-to” link lists.  There’s a screen grab of one of the relevant portions of the image dialog box – the “Advanced Settings” tab below.

Other acknowledgments – the image of the cherries is a public domain image from Wikimedia Commons; the screen grab was done with the FireShot add-on for Firefox (there’s a pro version that I plan to check out as well) by Evgeny Suslikov.

And to see if WordPress can manage overlapping image alignment, we’ll add a little Lorem Ipsum and then another  more or less arbitrary image aligned right. But before the filler text, we’ll quote Liz Jamieson, who wisely advises against trying to wrap an image without enough text. It’s roughly analogous to attempting to gift-wrap one volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica with a man’s handkerchief.  It won’t end well.

If the image you select is too large, it won’t look good when text is wrapped around it (because it will take up all the available horizontal space on the screen leaving your text nowhere to go, and therefore it won’t wrap). To safeguard against this, your image should not be wider than say, 300pixels.

"Four Freedoms" Flag, ca. 1943

I’ve quoted Ms. Jamieson in blue because I don’t yet know how to work in a blockquote tag or indentation across  from an image.  So here goes with another image on the right, again using the easy way out of the upload  image dialog. While it worked out the way I’d intended, again WordPress somewhat idiosyncratically requires that one select and place the image, save it, and then reopen and edit it. Only on the second try did the right-alignment take.

I’ll go over Liz Jamieson’s other techniques (via HTML, and via plugin) in coming posts.

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There are 36 pages of plugins using the tag “revisions” in the WP Plugin Repository.  Better Delete Revision seems best suited to  catch up delayed maintenance; there are other plugins and WP solutions that ditch revisions at specified events (publication of post, after a certain number of days). But this works quite well; and taking a leaf from legal blogger Jeff Vail and medical writer/surgeon Atul Gawande²  I’m thinking about making a monthly or weekly maintenance checklist, and I think Better Delete Revision will be on that list.

Better Delete Revision comes from the site http://www.1e2.it – here’s the link to the plugin page – but be forewarned, it appears to be an Italian-only site.  The plugin, however, seems to work fine on English post drafts.

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1. Link to WordPress Plugin Repository.
2. See, e.g., A Lifesaving Checklist ; The Checklist, and  The Checklist Manifesto.

Again – the laboratory glassware could be part of a scientific experiment – an informal distillery – or both. Ambiguity is fine as long as all of the meanings are intended.

The Proof Branding team also maintain a well-worth reading blog, have some pretty cool titles (see their “About” page), and manage to project a lot of confidence without a trace of pretension. Since I’ve spend most of my professional life nosing around fraudsters and con artists – one of my working hypotheses is that the fakers always hit one or both parts of that equation  (confidence, pretension) with a false note.

We must note one disturbing tell-tale: like one other well-known designer who many suspect is actually just fronting for the actual work of his own dog – one of the named creative leaders at Proof Branding  well, from the client’s point of view, it’s the work that matters, and any dog that good at site design  – well, it’s hard to imagine a dog designing a website who didn’t want to.

Proof Branding’s portfolio – and every page on their site – will be well worth your time, and because it’s so good I can easily get a dozen blog posts out of it and look excellent merely by virtue of my good taste, I’m just going to close with a screen grab from their Services | “What We Do” page:

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Also – if you need more explanation of the post issue – Mark Jaquith’s post here should help. My current understanding is – that, all in all, it’s a good thing – but I’m still not sure what the new categories are. I’m beginning to suspect that it’s very obvious, and that I’ll be embarassed when it’s pointed out to me.

Without further delay, from Otto on WordPress:

Custom Post Formats and why you don’t need them

As soon as this was announced, naturally theme authors got up in arms, because theme authors are a rowdy bunch of folks. They like to do things their own way. So there was instantly the question of “how do I add my own format”? The answer is: you don’t, nor should you even think about it.

Why? Why prevent customization? Think of it from the perspective of the user:

• They’ve got an existing set of posts.
• Those posts have formats.
• They switch to your theme, which uses some custom formats.
• Now their own posts don’t display properly with the new theme, because it’s using a whole different set of formats.
• Bad user experience, that is.

Now, from the perspective of a theme author, I understand the reasoning here. You want to be able to display things differently.

The problem is that you were already able to do that before.

Custom taxonomies have been around a long time. All you had to do was to a) create a custom taxonomy (call it “mytheme_formats”), b) allow users to sort posts into your taxonomy, and c) display things differently in the theme based on the terms in that taxonomy.

Post Formats is just a taxonomy. It’s a set of adjectives, describing the nouns that are the posts. So now we have “aside posts” and “gallery posts” and “chat posts” and “video posts” and so on. If you want to make your own formats, then you’ve had that ability forever. Why have you not already used it?

The answer to why you didn’t do it before is because there was no standard set of formats.

Without a standard set to work with, users won’t have any idea what your formats mean. You have to write documentation. You have to educate the user. You have to explain what this weirdness in your theme is.

Post formats changes that. Now you have a standard set of formats, and the user, having used other themes that support those formats too, will have some idea of what they mean already. But in order for this to work, themes must all use the same basic formats. There has to be a standard set of adjectives to describe the posts.

If you want to create your own set, then create your own taxonomy and box to have your set in it. But don’t complain when users don’t understand why your theme’s formats don’t mesh with the formats of every other theme that does support them.

The point of standards is to be standard. You don’t have to support the standard, but you also will have to deal with the consequences of being non-standard.

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