On Tuesday, I was quite pleased to announce the first formal release of the Publish2 WordPress plugin. With the 1.1 version, journalists on Publish2 can easily add their link journalism to the sidebar of their blog, add a reading list much like I have on my own website, or have simple, intuitive access to their curated links at the point when they’re most likely to need them the most: when writing a story.
Ok, enough with the public relations speak. That last bit is what I’m really excited about. We’re calling it Link Assist, and I’m itching to write about some of the the philosophy driving it.
I digress to set the scene. Link Assist is a widget-y bit of functionality that lives in the sidebar of your edit post page within WordPress (where you’d actually write a post). Getting it set up is a simple process of dropping your link journalism URL (this is mine) into “Your Profile” under “Users” and hitting the checkbox for Link Assist. Once you’ve done this, Link Assist will load automatically and in the background every time you set up to write a new post.
This is where the magic happens.
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The Daily Emerald is working hard on moving its web presence forward. Largely, it’s me setting up the technology and implementing design, but the rest of the newsroom understands imperative to innovate quickly and start transitioning to a better digital product. The result of about five hours hacking a WordPress template yesterday is ODE Blogs, an aggregator for the current four Daily Emerald blogs launched at the moment: Press Pass from the sports desk, Pizazz from Pulse, Our Words from Opinion, and Up Close from the photo team.
As always, open source technology is at the heart of these cool updates. We’re using separate instances of WordPress for each blog, which makes user administration a lot easier and the ability to sandbox the layouts. The aggregator serving as the blog landing page is a semi-custom WordPress theme with a slightly hacked SimplePie plugin that allows us to merge the RSS feeds and order them by publish date (hat tip to Jenn Vargas for that lead).
This design isn’t stay static, though. What you see now will change in the coming weeks as we work to unify the user experience of the paper, the WordPress blogs, and (keep your fingers crossed) the main College Publisher 4 site. Our hope is to have visual cues across all products which make navigation common, intuitive, and simple.
I’m proud to announce the Oregon Daily Emerald now has one more online property: Up Close, the Photo blog. To the tune of Boston.com’s The Big Picture and the Seattle Times’ Best Seat in the House, we’ll be expanding upon the number of images traditionally available in print and on our website by publishing the good ones that don’t make the cut (including the foul which granted Oregon a game-winning penalty kick last week):
Personally, I think this makes a lot of sense. Daily Emerald photographers, including myself, shoot hundreds of images each week. Many of the good ones don’t make it to print, as we obviously have limited space to run content. Having a team photo blog, however, will be an excellent forum for all of us to showcase our work, as well as highlight some of the challenges we face making excellent images. As a kicker, the images will be a full, gorgeous 900 pixels wide.
Furthermore, this is the first of many upgrades I hope we’ll be making this fall. Everyone in the newsroom is already in love with Google Apps, and I hope the other digital upgrades I’ve got in mind are just as well received (although I got the classic, “Twitter is so stupid,” comment a few days back).
(i.e. the era of me beginning to release WordPress themes)
In what must be the simplest WP theme ever known to man, I present “Under Construction“. It doesn’t do blog posts or even static pages; it only does one thing and it does it well: tells visitors your real site won’t be up for another six months.
I’ve launched two new pages today:
- Blogroll follows along the definition of a traditional, well, blogroll and links to some of my favorite media. I’ve listed the podcasts I hear on a regular basis along with the RSS feeds I absorb with Google Reader. The actual links to both sites and feeds of each source will be updated when I feel like doing it. I thought it might be cool to have all of that together in one place; currently no meta service I know of will allow someone to see what I’m subscribed to.
- For Sale is a compilation of all the stuff I’m trying to sell on Craigslist and in the Facebook Marketplace. Have a look! It’s all priced to sell.
One of the coolest things about WordPress is the ability to create themes. It makes the seemingly simple blogging software into a (somewhat) full fledged content management system; so much so that when I start a project for a new website I ask, “why not use WordPress?” Publishing new content in the form of posts or pages is so easy, it’s nearly pain-free!
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