Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category
WordPress.tv
January 17th, 2009
WordPress.tv is a video training and support site, just launched today but already an amazing resource. You may never need to read a book, wade through the Codex or search the forums again!
The How To section has a large and nicely-organized collection of short screencasts showing how to use various features of your WordPress site, whether it’s on WordPress.com or self-hosted. This includes the most basic functions, like Writing and Publishing a Post, As a trainer, I was especially happy to see these, because they’ve done a whole lot of screencasts that I was planning to do myself, and done a much better job than I ever would have! I like watching these full-screen with the HD on. The quality is excellent, very crisp and clear, and they are all nicely embeddable, like the one below which shows how to rearrange the elements of the writing screen.
In addition to the how-to videos, there are also WordCamp presentations, interviews and much more. It’s much easier to learn how things work by watching a video than by reading instructions, and I’m looking forward to watching this great new resource develop!
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Add Polls to Library Websites and Blogs
October 24th, 2008
Wish you had time to make your website more interactive? Try adding simple, fun polls! It only takes a few minutes to create your own polls using one of the free polling services.
The sample on this post was created using a free PollDaddy account — feel free to make a selection and click on Vote to try this out. You’ll be shown the results by percentage. In this case, I allow the user to choose “Other” and input their own answer. The names they add this way aren’t seen online, but I can see the full results on the PollDaddy website.
You can set options to try to limit users to a single vote by cookie or IP address, but either method might be problematic on library workstations. But there’s no statistical validity to this kind of polling anyway, so use it just for fun. These are especially popular on blogs and pages for kids and teens.
If your blog or website is running on WordPress, checkout PollDaddy’s WordPress plugin to make it even easier to add these to your site. But on any site, it’s pretty much just a matter of filling out a form and then copying and pasting a snippet of code to your post or page.
I like Polldaddy, but other sites are similar. If you pay for an account, you get more options, but you may find you can do everything you want with a free account.
Have fun!
Links
- PollDaddy — Sign up for a free account and try this out
- Read This! — This excellent book blog from the Peabody Institute Library in Danvers, Massachusetts, uses polls as an interactive feature in the sidebar.
[polldaddy poll="1038352"]
Blog Header Generator
May 27th, 2007
If you’re using WordPress for your blog, you’re no doubt familiar with the default theme, Kubrick, with the big blue box header:
Blog Header Generator — If you’d like to keep that theme but use one of your own photographs as a background, try this easy tool from fd’s Flickr Toys collection. You can upload a photograph from your PC, or choose one from your Flickr photostream or from another URL, click on Create, and you’ll get back the image you need, cropped, sized and ready for use.
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