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by Joss Winn

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How can I learn more about using WordPress?

January 27, 2010 in Announcements, Help, Support

If you’re new to WordPress or the University blogs, there are a few ways that you can find help and support.

  1. Read First Steps With WordPress
  2. For a good overview of how to understand and use the WordPress Dashboard, watch these short video tutorials
  3. Read the WordPress community documentation about each of the administration panels.
  4. There is a contextual ‘Help’ button in the top-right corner of every WordPress administration page.
  5. Watch WordPressTV
  6. For documentation on using WordPress, browse through the official documentation, which we’ve recycled from wordpress.org
  7. Browse the official documentation for WordPress.com. In most cases, it will apply to your site, too.
  8. Ask Google ;-)
  9. Ask Joss to join your class, team or department meeting or faculty away day. I can provide training in an hour or just an overview in 20 mins.
  10. Look out for the ‘Working with WordPress’ workshops for staff, announced on the daily alerts.
  11. Call Joss on 01522-886759 (but try the above first!)

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Avatar of Joss Winn

by Joss Winn

Using the university blogs on your mobile

October 21, 2010 in Announcements, Support

We’ve just added a mobile theme to the university blogs social network. This means that all of the social networking features, such as member profiles, the activity stream, groups and messaging are now automatically formatted for the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android phones. Unfortunately, other phones are not yet supported when using the social network.

We’ve also made improvements to the default ‘CWD’ blog theme. Similarly, this will now reformat for the Apple and Android devices.

If you use a different theme for your blog, you can activate the WPtouch plugin. This will reformat your blog for a number of mobile phones devices. Just activate WPtouch from the plugins panel in your Dashboard.

Finally, there are iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps available for WordPress. Search for them in the respective apps store. To use these apps, you also need to allow them access to your blog. You can do this by going to your blog’s Settings > Writing and checking the XML-RPC box next to ‘Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.’

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Avatar of Joss Winn

by Joss Winn

New public profiles

March 27, 2010 in Announcements

The social networking layer of the university blogs, is now public. This follows a recent email to all staff and students who are using the university blogs, which recommended that you update your profile and choose which information you wish to make public.

It was always our intention to provide a basic public-facing social network for the university community, but until recently, BuddyPress, the software that provides the social networking features for WordPress, didn’t offer granular enough privacy controls.

Now, each member of the community can choose which information they may public, make visible to only the community or make private.

You’ll also notice that your profile page is simply http://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/username and when you go to that address, you land directly on your profile page. Currently, there are just a few profile fields for you to complete. If you think it would be useful to add more, send a note to @jwinn. Thanks.

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Avatar of Joss Winn

by Joss Winn

New Group features

March 8, 2010 in Announcements

Did you know that anyone can create an online group on the university blogs? Groups can be private/hidden, invite only or open to the university community. A new update now allows group admins to invite anyone registered on the university blogs, rather than just your friends. You can also auto-post updates from different blogs into the group’s activity stream as well as posting updates directly to the group from your personal ‘status update’ text box.

Updates to group activity can be automatically sent out by email or followed by RSS news feed.

This means that the university blogs can now be used as a Twitter-like way to keep in touch with group members, discuss the interests that you share and follow blog posts that related to the group’s interests. To create a group, simply click on ‘Create a group’ on the Group directory page.

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by Joss Winn

Embedding video is now much easier

March 4, 2010 in Announcements

A recent upgrade to WordPress introduced oEmbed, a new and easier way to embed video and some other media in your blog post.Whereas before, You needed to either copy the raw HTML embed code and paste it in the WordPress HTML editor, or activate Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin, you can now simply copy and paste the URL of the video you wish to embed.

It only works for services that support oEmbed, but the number of those services is growing. Today, the following services will allow you to use the oEmbed method of embedding a video:

To embed media using one of these services, the tutorial is simple:

  1. Copy the URL of the video/image/audio i.e. 
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFsCFUCzwf0
  2. Paste it into your WordPress editor.
  3. That’s it!

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Avatar of Joss Winn

by Joss Winn

New activity stream

February 17, 2010 in Announcements

The upgrade to BuddyPress, the social networking layer for WordPress, there’s a new default theme and a much improved ‘activity stream‘. It works a bit like Twitter and you can post to different groups as well as mention people (i.e. @dyoung ) Please bear in mind that while access to the main site is restricted to the university community and guests, the RSS web feed is publicly accessible. We hope to provide more granular privacy controls quite soon.

Joss' activity stream

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