The cats who preside over our house certainly like to interact with the keyboard, but they walk back and forth, they lie down, but they never seem to close tags or care about the user experience.  They scoff at SEO. I guess Jean-Baptiste has better-trained cats.

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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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Hence – an offline editor makes sense. How that works with one’s theme and layout – a slightly more complicated question.  But at least one can get copy formatted for insertion into the WP Post Editor more quickly offline.

Word processors – MS Word, OpenOffice, of course can save files as html.  But a dedicated offline blogging tool might be easier to fine-tune for a particular blog theme. In the course of looking, I found this outstanding post  5 Best Offline WordPress Editor For Your Blog.

And – under the heading of finding treasure while searching for everyday tools, I found the post on EdwardKhoo.com. This is an outstanding blog – lots of helpful how-to posts about irritating problems not otherwise widely addressed.

The blog itself is an outstanding implementation of Darren Hoyt’s Mimbo Theme, available on ProThemeDesign, where one can find the work not only of Darren Hoyt, but also of the brilliant Ben Gillbanks. Check out their new theme ByLine.

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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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