Lafayette College on WordPress

Published on August 27, 2010 in WordPress, wp30 and wpmu. 7 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Ken Knewquist just announced that the Lafayette College redesigned website recently launched as a WordPress multi-site. And I have to say, that did it exactly right. It was created and designed by Viget Labs, which has a kinda markety innocuous post about the site launch, framing brand and all that compromised terminology. But what I’d love to hear about, and what is apparent from just navigating around their site is how they are using various separate subdomain sites (or sites within sites) to allow for various users in different blogs.

For example all the department sites seem to be subdomain sites (not sure if they are separate sites, or simply running this in subdomains) allow for various authors, their own space, and basically the power and convenience of WordPress, while the architecture off the main page treats lafayette.edu as a regular single site. It is similar to some of the thoughts I had here, though seeing their work, I am increasingly thinking we need the whole instance subdomain blogs by department. That is mint!

Kudos to the Lafayette College and Vigent Labs folks, I do believe this is a very intelligent conception and design, and this will indeed “be a vital source of information and will play a new, enhanced role in communicating what is exciting and special about Lafayette to all our audiences.” And this is exactly the example we need to frame ours off of. Now the next step to consider, and Lafayette College is already there given they have faculty and students blogging for courses, is to integrate the teaching and learning going on around that campus through the site. Department sites as aggregation hubs of content, etc. A nice design, bully for Lafayette. And who was it that said WordPress is just a blog again?

Now, Ken, I want to know more about the architecture!!! :)

Summer of Love: Marvel Comics

Published on August 25, 2010 in bava Summer of Love 2010. 20 Comments Tags: , , .

While chatting Zach Davis the other day, and he pointed out he took a new tact to parenting with his daughter. No more boring ass kids’ books that pander to everyone’s cheapened sense of narrative, and generally mistake plot with lifeless exercises about talking animals. It’s time to cut through the veil and get some god-damned 70s and 80s Marvel comics for the kids. Enough is enough. And you know what, he couldn’t have been more right about anything in this world.

Image of Marvel Poster from the 1970s

I mean just look at the poster? What the hell have I been doing for the past five years? And you know what, comics are cheaper than ya think. So, i am gonna focus on The Hulk, Avengers, anything Vision, and Scarlet Witch. And, I’ve been scouring for recommendations, and I like this list of 10 Marvel one-shots from the 80s. Liking the Silver Surfer love. And while I was never a major Thor fan as a kid, I think I could get into some Nordic, viking golden hammer beatings before my kids go to bed.

That’s it, this weekend I get in my car and drive to this comic shop in Richmond—and Tessy, Miles and me are gonna start scouring the boxes together.


View Larger Map

So who’s got some specific recommendations for me?

Summer of Love: Infocult

Published on August 25, 2010 in bava Summer of Love 2010. 5 Comments Tags: , , .

Culled from the ever great Infocult, which has been an almost daily reminder for the last five years that the internet has always been undead. And that’s why I love the Infocult, Bryan Alexander has consistently posted about, commented on, and perversely enjoyed the insanity around the mediated horror of love, life, and death on the internet. There are few, if any, better bloggers at framing a research interest which is at once a horrifying and entertaining stream of mediated thoughts, And as the bava poster above atests, he continues to doggedly pursue the madness of the web right to the end. Straight down the line, no matter where it may lead. Even if it’s that storied trolley ride to the cemetery….

Infocult, the bava salutes you! You remain everything good and right about the web.

Given the web is dead….

Published on August 25, 2010 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

…I figured I’d wait a bit for all the money drenched scum to clear out on their smart phones and tethered providers before I came back home. Frankly, the web was beginning to smell a bit, kind of a brand cheerleading, twitter giveaway social media marketing mephitisis. A general breakdown in the necessary perversity, chaos, and irreverence that made it interesting in the first place. A space with little sense of humor, and even less attractive.  And then, just like that, it was all gone, it died, and became interesting again. In fact, it only makes sense. There was really no other way, for a zombie must first die to be reborn. Like a body I could still use, especially given the state of my own.

It’s good to be back, home, in this dead town on the edge of nowhere. The bava rides. Nobody.

And now, with no more ado, I bleed….

Best tutorial for adding Custom Menus to WP Themes

Published on August 17, 2010 in WordPress and wp30. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve been slowly trying to update as many themes as possible in UMW Blogs for the custom menus feature, and a Google search can be hit or miss in terms of howtos. In my experience thus far this tutorial is the best in terms of simplicity. And you can add to that a 100% success rate on the ten themes I’ve updated so far, which is a relief.

Enjoy those custom menus!

Some Plugin Bugs in WP 3.0 on UMW Blogs

Published on August 10, 2010 in Uncategorized. 8 Comments Tags: , , , .
  • Sitewide Comment Tracking Revisited: I’ve had to deactivate a personal favorite plugin “Sitewide Comment Tracking Revisited” (my-comments.php) by dsader. A plugin that allowed you to track all your comments across the install from the comments field. Deleted it from the mu-plugins folder because it was causing ugly PHP errors when folks tried to comment on any blog. And while I’d like to look into an updated version, it’s nowhere to be found thanks to the vampires at wpmudev PREMIUM.
  • Akismet: Another small bug I had was with Akismet. I keep akismet.php in the mu-plugins directory, as a result I hadn’t upgraded that plugin for a little bit—which in turn caused some issues with php error messages when people tried to comment. So a small tip to anyone doing this: upgrade Akismet to latest version ASAP if you keep it in mu-plugins and are using WP 3.0.
  • Role Scoper: Got rid of it, no one really used it, and while I liked it for one project we are working on, overall it is ugly, runs very slow, and there seemed to be some compatibility issues with 3.0.

That’s it for now, but I am sure there will be many more :) I’ll try and update this post with them as a running tally.

Update:

  • Google XML Sitemaps: This one’s a no-go. From the WP repository page for this plugin:

    This latest release is not compatible with the new multisite feature of WordPress 3.0 yet. The plugin will remain inactive as long as this feature is enabled.

  • Advanced Category Excluder: This is a definite no-no, and it gets rid of all your pages. I’d deactivate this until there is an upgrade. We learned this thanks to the great LibGuides blog work of Paul Boger.

Alejandro Piscitelli – The Facebook Project

Published on August 9, 2010 in edupunk. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I really dig Alejandro Piscitelli. And his project with Facebook, and the passion in which he frames the experiment makes it clear that popular learning can happen within the strangest places, and the very idea of students learning from and within a social application that was experiencing such explosive growth that everyone becomes spectator, participator, and documentarian all at once is simply brilliant. It’s a class of a very particular moment.

Summer of Love: 21 Great Stories

Published on August 8, 2010 in bava Summer of Love 2010, books and literature. 11 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Image of 21 Great Stories book coverThe Summer of Love has been sporadic since I’m giving most of my love off the internet this Summer. That noted, I wanted to follow-up my post about Frederick Wiseman’s High School with something a little less “SCHOOL IS DEATH!!!” Not that it isn’t, but I can’t say all my associations with school are necessarily bad. In fact, I have a lot of good ones. And one in particular from my own high school experience focuses around a book that looms quite large in my imagination: 21 Great Stories. This book may very well have been one of the most important “things” in my high school life.

You see, it was a book of great short stories (the title is very descriptive in this regard), but it was more than that to me. It was a book I saw around my house for years before I actually started reading it. I remember at least three of my older siblings reading it while they were in high school, and it seemed afterwards they couldn’t help themselves from talking about Edgar Allen Poe‘s “The Cask of Amontillado,” or my brother Kevin (who I shared a room with) explaining the understated cannibalism of “The Two Bottles of Relish” by Lord Dunsany (a story truly worthy of the Infocult). This selection of short stories almost became mythical for me, my siblings typically never talked about books, but this one seemed to spark their imaginations. In fact, it sparked mine, and led me to actually read the book before I even saw high school (one of my siblings kept this school-issued book in our home indefinitely). I got caught immediately with Carl Stephenson‘s “Leiningen Versus the Ants,” and soon after was wondering what the hell I had just read in Ambrose Bierce‘s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

Fact is, it’s unassuming cover, and rather hyperbolic title doesn’t really separate it from any other book at first. The fact that I was watching my siblings get hooked in, and listening to my brothers and sisters talk about it made me want to know, and for me that was what sucked me in, the tales themselves simply sealed the deal. I mean look at the line-up below, which is deliciously macabre when you look close enough. Add to that a series of both great and little known authors that cover the genre gamut from action to western to detective story to straight-up horror.

So I began to think, hey, will the web produce the same thing?

Table of Contents

I found and linked above to 20 out of the 21 Great Stories available online “freely,” and the search and discover process was rather interesting. For the public domain works like Poe’s stories, Arthur Conan Doyle Jack London, and Ambrose Bierce it was fairly straightforward—a link to the Gutenberg or Virginia University etext projects. And then there were a few pdf files I discovered on obscure edu domains for Bradbury, Bryan and Brand’s stories (all of which I believe are still under copyright). For other copyrighted texts like Steinbeck’s The Pearl or James Joyce’s “Eveline,” it was much harder to find anything, most of the first 20 or 30 links on a google search were Cliff’s Notes-like cheats or paper writing services, which a few scholarly critiques thrown in, often hidden behind the JSTOR paywall. I could only find these two on Scribd, and they are rather Google adlink infested, but the best I could do. The only story I couldn’t find in any way shape or form was Kaatje Hurlburt’s “Eve in Darkness,” a rather obscure, but excellent, story by an African-American woman writer from NYC. The only traces were interrupted excerpts from Google Books—which did provide a few of these works as well.

In the end, it became rather apparent that very few publishing platforms at colleges, universities, or even high schools were providing much in the way of critical discussion, analysis, interpretation, or general thoughts and notes. And in the end, this is the anecdotally apparent tragedy of the closed web, a simple anthology of Great Stories that are part of a larger cultural inheritance are left to the online dogs to spam, paywall, adlink, and generally commercialize while the commentary, consciousness, and collective understanding of these works that should ideally be happening at educational institutions and beyond seems all but absent. Can;t help but think we’ve grossly overstated the good Google has done for books online, and wonder if we haven’t generally conceded our mission to the link mongers and spam whores. Anyway, I figured this would be an interesting test, and while I like the idea, I wonder if simply buying a used copy of the original 1969 original for as little as $0.65 on Amazon.com may be a far better and more convenient bet. Sometimes the open web doesn’t seem so open, and I can’t help but think universities and colleges are in many ways to blame for this—seems like we can get the content for just about anything—even if with some copyright/spam-driven difficulty, but what’s much harder to find is actual authentic thinking and learning around these works out on the open web for all to see. Isn’t that were the education comes alive on the web? Don’t we have the tools to make this possible already? Do we really need Apple and/or Google to fix the web for us at an ever increasing financial and spiritual fee? Cheap essay writing service sites have already figured this out, why can’t we?

Odd, this started out as a Summer of Love post, and even an attempt to trump up the power of school and education, but look where I have landed….again. But if you want to see my pain, do a Google Search for James Joyce Eveline (arguably the best story of the collection), and look at the horror that awaits you—so much crap (save Wikipedia) before you get a useful and/or thoughtful resource whether inspired by an institution or not. Depressing.

UMW Blogs Upgraded to WP 3.0 (a play-by-play)

Published on August 8, 2010 in UMW Blogs, WordPress, wordpress multi-user, wp30 and wpmu. 7 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I’m glad (and relieved) to finally say UMW Blogs has been upgraded to the WP 3.0 merged core files without a hitch. Whew! This was a burner for me, a bit more fear and trembling going into this one than usual, but alas all is good in the UMW Blogs hood. In no small part thanks to Ron Rennick who recently upgraded his SharDB plugin to 3.0.1, which did the trick in terms of making sure all was smooth with the multiple-database setup upgrade. You rule Ron!

As for the rest, it was pretty standard, and only one pretty minor hiccup in regards to the Atalhuapa theme which I will outline below (and the fix below comes care of the inestimable Luke Waltzer).

Basics before upgrade
You know the drill by now: Always back up all files and the database (or in my case databases), and make sure not to copy over wp-config.php as well as the wp-content directory.

OK, done with disclaimers, now for some preliminary steps before copying over the WP 3.0.1 core files, make sure you
delete the wp-content/blogs.php file for those upgrading from WPMu (which is whom this tutorial is for).

You will also need to change the .htaccess file, particularly the line pointing to wp-content/blogs.php, which now needs to point to: wp-includes/ms-files.php

This line in our .htaccess file now looks like this:

RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/(.*) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]

You should also delete your wpmu-settings.php file located in the root install directory.

If you are like me and you are using SharDB to spread your sites/blogs across several databases, you need to update to Ron’s Rennick’s latest version of SharDB.

And where ever Ron is, Andrea is not far behind (or is that vice versa?). In order to ensure that all the blogs using the default theme (which was Kubrick) are changed to TwentyTen, include the following call in your wp-config.php file (a tip you can find thanks to Andrea here):

Our default theme define in the wp-config.php file looks like this:

define(‘WP_DEFAULT_THEME’, ‘default’);

And to contextualize this a bit more, we changed the twentyten theme folder name to default, and moved the old default theme files for Kubrick into a folder called Kubrick for any of the faithful who still want to pursue it (be sure to make it available in Super Admin). Now, all sites on UMW Blogs that once had the default Kubrick theme now have TwentyTen automatically–which also means Menus will work for all those sites, and there are a good number.

Finally, I was sure to upgrade DSader’s More Privacy Options plugin before upgrading given it was throwing errors in the bavatuesdays WP 3.0 setup, I keep the new version of this plugin in the wp-content/mu-plugins directory.

The Actual Upgrade
Now run the upgrade by simply copying all the core files and directories, except wp-content and wp-config.php, into your WordPress install.

After that, go to http://yourinstall.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php and upgrade the database, cross your fingers!

If that works, go to Super Admin–> Update and updates all the individual blogs, this will take a while if you have a lot.

Finally, in the Dashboard you’ll be asked to add a Nonce Salt to your wp-config.php file. Something like:

define( ‘NONCE_SALT’, ‘yoursuppersecretkey’ ); to your wp-config.php file

The Ongoing Aftermath
The upgrade should then be done, but there may be some cleanup. For example, Luke Waltzer pointed me to this fix If you were using Ataluapa in WPMu, you’ll find none of your customized header images in Ataluapa are there, it returns to the default. This is because the theme is looking for the file wpmu-settings.php (now deprecated) instead of wp-settings.php. A quick find and replace of wpmu-settings with wp-settings on the following three files in the Atalhuapa theme did the trick for me:
functions.php
functions/bfa_header_config
functions/bfa_rotating_headers.php

And, that’s about it thus far, it was all rather smooth in the end. Though I am sure many more issues will emerge over time, I’m sure they will prove resolvable and I am quite relieved—especially given 3 sites within sites (what would now be called multi-networks?) http://greenwoodlibrary.org, http://facultyacademy.org, and http://hamptondigitalhumanities.org all survived unharmed. Saying that, I was also relieved to see that mapped domains were also left intact.

And what’s more, Ken Newquist at Lafayette College sent out the following email to the wp-edu mailing list, and it provides an excellent list of issues and updates on their road to an upgrade to WP 3.0. I’ll reproduce it in it’s entirety below, and it is very good to know new activations of Next-Gen Gallery may have issues:

Everyone,

Back in June there was some talk about WordPress 3.0 and its compatibility (or lack there of) with popular plugins and themes. We’ve recently upgraded our production instances of WordPress to 3.0, and I thought I’d give a rundown of the the problems we encountered.

==More Privacy Options==
The plugin continues to work, but it generates a PHP fatal error when you edit a site’s properties as an admin, making it impossible to save configuration changes. The latest version of the plugin fixes this problem.

==nextGen Gallery: Ignoring MultiSite directory options==
nextGen Gallery has issues with WordPress 3.0 multisite. While existing installations are working ok, folks who add the plugin after the upgrade get this error message:

“Directory wp-content/gallery/ didn’t exist. Please create first the main gallery folder !”

The problem is that Blog Directory Path, which is a network-wide option set under the super admin menu, is no longer being respected at the per site level by nextGen. If you manually set the site’s directory path using the site’s ID (available from the main site directory list in the super admin view), then things work properly, but the default setting is now incorrect.

The plugin author is aware of the problem, and is working on this and other MultiSite-specific issues for the next release.
 http://wordpress.org/support/topic/41200…

 http://code.google.com/p/nextgen-gallery…

==nextGen Gallery: Slideshow links don’t work on a static home page==
If you insert a nextGen Gallery into a page, and then make that page your home page, the link to the slideshow will not work.

==Anarchy Media Player==
Anarchy’s settings page no longer loads under WordPress 3.0.

==Mandigo (theme)==
The Mandigo setting page doesn’t load if you’re using Mandigo 1.40.1. It works properly with the current version.

==Mandigo + nextGen + WordPress 3.0==
Here’s a very specific bug — Mandigo uses an older version of JQuery in its theme, one that doesn’t include a particular method that nextGen needs. This causes a fatal error in NextGen, which then causes the JavaScript portions of the Mandigo theme to stop working.

That’s about it, and I’ll be sure to blog any and all issues, problems, or fixes we come across, and I am sure there will be more than a few. In fact, I have to do this fix for Userthemes, thank you Boone.

High School (1968)

Published on July 31, 2010 in movies. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Frederick Wiseman‘s fly-on-the-wall documentary style is, at its best, some of the most powerful documentary filmmaking of the last fifty years. Titicut Follies (1967) is a masterpiece, and few films so efficiently capture the absurdity of reality so thoroughly in the first ten minutes.

Add to that madness it’s unique distinction of having been the only American film banned from release for reasons other than obscenity or national security—in this case the privacy of the various inmates he filmed—and you have something special.

I am also a huge fan of his 1997 documentary Public Housing, which is a painstaking look at the day-to-day life in a public housing project on the South Side of Chicago (and it very well could have been the inspiration for a large part of the first season of The Wire).

So while I was searching around for stuff on Wiseman recently, I noticed that his second film made the year after Titicut Follies is a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a lower middle class high school in Philadelphia titled High School. Below is a scene I found from the film thanks to MOMA (nice to see MOMA giving out embed code), and it is scary how quickly it becomes apparent that the role of school seems to be designed to crush the spirit of the student, and teach them to fall in line.

“We are out to establish that you can be a man, and that you can take orders.”

And what’s remarkable to me, is that in this scene the kid is vehemently arguing his case, trying to communicate his position to the Dean. But, alas, like most of us, he finally concedes principles to institutional authority and decides to accept his unjust punishment.

I really wanna get my hands on this one, I think a few mashups would be in order :)