Category Archives: CMS

MiniCard Review

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I have been looking at the WP Theme, MiniCard. It is really cool. The design follows a Tim van Damme style layout.

Tim van Damme's Famous business card layout

I have been playing around with Minicard for some time. I have used it as my splash page for about a year. (I have been using K2 since 2005 so any change in theme is a big step). There are some things I really like and some things I think could be improved upon. (Granted I am using and looking at the free version.) I really like the minimalist business card design. However, one of the things that I find difficult is separating what is too much info from what is just enough. Right now I have quite a few social networks loaded on my front page so, even though it is Minimalist, it is almost not business card.

TheJourneyler.org as I had from 2010-2011

Most of my suggestions have to do with the options page, but a few have to do with layout.

Options:

  1. A place to store a Child Theme.
    K2 has a really cool way of selecting where the author wants to store their child theme so that when the theme is upgraded the child theme is not written over. Because the Code is GPL’d, I think this code could be copied from K2 into the GPL’d version of MiniCard. Being that the whole Tim Van Damme (TVD) idea is to be unique with style, it seems that Minicard would benefit from embracing child themes by providing a user the option to not just use a child theme, but also facilitate where to store that child theme.
  2. More Networks.
    It seems that it would be really easy for users of MiniCard to use more or some Social networks which are not on the list provided on the options page. I think it is crazy for any user to expect a developer to have anticipated all the possible social networks out there. I went through TVD’s wall of fame just to get some inspiration and noticed a few networks that minicard does not offer out of the box:

    • iusethis.com
    • ffffound.com
    • vi.sualize.us
    • corkd.com
    • wikipedia.org
    • www.colourlovers.com
    • soundcloud.com
    • filmreviewfriday.com
    • github.com
    • pandora.com
    • themeforest.net

    In one of the past revisions to the Minicard theme there was released, an easy way to add a custom social network. This is much improved over earlier versions of this theme. (I think this is still the case in the current 2011 release.)

    The Plug-in Find Me On has an interesting interface for adding new network. It is sort of Drag and Drop. I use this plugin on hugh.thejourneyler.org.

  3. A Contact Info page separate from my social networks page.
    One thing that might be helpful too is separating Messaging and Contact from social networks. “Messaging and Contact info” is usually treated differently from “social networks”. That is social network info like skype, aol, google chat, IRC, etc. are not really conceptualized in the minds of the people on the TVD wall of fame as “social networks”. If this information is provided then it most often falls under the “contact” section rather than “my social networks” section. Out of the box MiniCard does not have a contact section, so I can understand how this info is lumped together with the users social networks.

    Perhaps one solution to this is add an optional (included in the theme by default but not active by default) template page that could be added to MiniCard for contact info and pull data from the hCard data as well.

    This contact info page might also display Online Status of Messaging information. One caveat suggestion pertains to aim v.s. iChat. That is the syntax to open these protocols is a little different if the website admin wants ichat to open… it just aint going to work on a windows machine… I am wondering if a little javascript magic might be able to sniff out a OS X machine visiting the site as apposed to a Windows OS and put in the proper syntax for opening up iChat.
    Interesting enough Themeforest had a theme much like MiniCard.

    MiniCard like Theme displaying Contact info

  • Add direct color and background pattern.
    There are more color options “out of the Box” on the pro version of the theme. However, the color options are not as user selectable as they could be. I have seen color wheels and a palates for suggesting associated colors as option panels for selecting css values. A color selector for the background, and the various parts of the theme would be nice.
  • More hCard options:
    MiniCard does support hCard, but as I was looking over the format of hCard I think that more can be embedded in hCard content than what MiniCard allows for out of the box. That is I think that MiniCard could be improved with more fields in the admin section for the site admin to input their data. There is an hCard creator on the Microformats website. It shows the supported values in the hCard speck.

    • Importing Youtube Comments to WordPress

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    When I uploaded my first YouTube video, I got some comments and I wanted to reflect them on my blog where I was also displaying my video. Traffic to my blog is important as well as is the permanent record in my database of these comments. However, I need a two way solution. If someone comments on the video on my blog I want those to appear on my YouTube account. I need to Sync comments between my blog and Youtube.

    The Genki YouTube Comments plug-in works well (I use it on my site now.) for pulling comments from YouTube to a WordPress blog:
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/genki-youtube-comments/

    However, this is only half the sync. I have yet to find a solution for when someone comments on a WordPress blog that the comment is then sync’d over to YouTube. If someone knows a solution for this then please share.

    Interoperability of online dictionary data: 
 A test case using WordPress as a CMS

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    Linked data is an effort to enhance applications and thereby lives with structured knowledge. This structure at its core is developed by human interaction. The challenge to consumers of linked data is to convince holders of unstructured data to structure it into actionable, manipulatable knowledge. Continue reading →

    Social Meta-data collection

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    As part of my job I work with materials created by the company I work for, that is the archived materials. We have several collections of photos by people from around the world. In fact we might have as many as 40,000 photos, slides, and Negatives. Unfortunately most of these images have no Meta-data associated with them. It just happens to be the case that many of the retirees from our company still live around or volunteer in the offices. Much of the meta-data for these images lives in the minds of these retirees. Each image tells a story. As an archivist I want to be able to tell that story to many people. I do not know what that story is. I need to be able to sit down and listen to that story and make the notes on each photo. This is time consuming. More time consuming than I have.

    Here is the Data I need to minimally collect:

    Photo ID Number: ______________________________
    Who (photographer): ____________________________
    Who (subject): ________________________________
    People group:_________________________________
    When (was the photo taken): _______________________
    Where (Country): _______________________________
    Where (City): _________________________________
    Where (Place): ________________________________
    What is in the Photo: ____________________________
    Why was the photo taken (At what event):_________________________
    Photo Description:__short story or caption___
    Who (provided the Meta-data): _________________________

    Here is my idea: Have 2 volunteers with iPads sit down with the retirees and show these pictures on the iPads to the retirees and then start collecting the data. The iPad app needs to be able to display the photos and then be able to allow the user to answer the above questions quickly and easily.

    One app which has a really nice UI for editing photos is PhotoForge. [Review].

    The iPad is only the first step though. The iPad works in one-on-one sessions working with one person at a time. Part of the overall strategy needs to be a cloud sourcing effort of meta-data collection. To implement this there needs to be central point of access where interested parties can have a many to one relationship with the content. This community added meta-data may have to be kept in a separate taxonomy until it can be verified by a curator, but there should be no reason that this community added meta-data can not be expected to be valid.

    Meta-data Collection Model

    However, what the app needs to do is more inline with MetaEditor 3.0. MetaEditor actually edits the IPTC tags in the photos – Allowing the meta-data to travel with the images.In one sense adding meta-data to an image is annotating an image. But this is something completely different than what Photo Annotate does to images.

    Photo Annotate

    Photosmith seems to be a move in the right direction, but it is focused on working with Lightroom. Not with a social media platform like Gallery2 & Gallery3, Flickr or CopperMine.While looking at open source photo CMS’s one of the things we have to be aware of is that meta-data needs to come back to the archive in a doublin core “markup”. That is it needs to be mapped and integrated with our current DC aware meta-data scehma. So I looked into modules that make Gallery and Drupal “DC aware”. One of the challenges is that there are many photo management modules for drupal. None of them will do all we want and some of them will do what we want more elegantly (in a Code is Poetry sense). In drupal it is possible that several modules might do what we want. But what is still needed is a theme which elegantly, and intuitively pulls together the users, the content, the questions and the answers. No theme will do what we want out of the box. This is where Form, Function, Design and Development all come together – and each case, especially ours is unique.

    1. Adding Dublin Core Metadata to Drupal
    2. Dublin Core to Gallery2 Image Mapping
    3. Galleries in Drupal
    4. A Potential Gallery module for drupal – Node Gallery
    5. Embedding Gallery 3 into Drupal
    6. Embedding Gallery 2 into Drupal

    This, cloud sourcing of meta-data model has been implemented by the Library of Congress in the Chronicling America project. Where the Library of Congress is putting images out on Flickr and the public is annotating (or “enriching” or “tagging” ) them. Flickr has something called Machine Tags, which are also used to enrich the content.

    There are two challenges though which still remain:

    1. How do we sync offline iPad enriched photos with online hosted images?
    2. How do we sync the public face of the hosted images to the authoritative source for the images in the archive’s files?

    Network Language Documentation File Management

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    This post is a open draft! It might be updated at any time… But was last updated on at .

    Meta-data is not just for Archives

    Bringing the usefulness of meta-data to the language project workflow
    It has recently come to my attention that there is a challenge when considering the need for a network accessible file management solution during a language documentation project. This comes with my first introduction to linguistic field experience and my first field setting for a language documentation project.The project I was involved with was documenting 4 Languages in the same language family. The Location was in Mexico. We had high-speed Internet, and a Local Area Network. Stable electric (more than not). The heart of the language communities were a 2-3 hour drive from where we were staying, so we could make trips to different villages in the language community, and there were language consultants coming to us from various villages. Those consultants who came to us were computer literate and were capable of writing in their language. The methods of the documentation project was motivated along the lines of: “we want to know ‘xyz’ so we can write a paper about ‘xyz’ so lets elicit things about ‘xyz'”. In a sense, the project was product oriented rather than (anthropological) framework oriented. We had a recording booth. Our consultants could log into a Google-doc and fill out a paradigm, we could run the list of words given to us through the Google-doc to a word processor and create a list to be recorded. Give that list to the recording technician and then produce a recorded list. Our consultants could also create a story, and often did and then we would help them to revise it and record it. We had Geo-Social data from the Mexican government census. We had Geo-spacial data from our own GPS units. During the corse of the project massive amounts of data were created in a wide variety of formats. Additionally, in the case of this project language description is happening concurrently with language documentation. The result is that additional data is desired and generated. That is, language documentation and language description feed each other in a symbiotic relationship. Description helps us understand why this language is so important to document and which data to get, documenting it gives us the data for doing analysis to describe the language. The challenge has been how do we organize the data in meaningful and useful ways for current work and future work (archiving)?People are evidently doing it, all over the world… maybe I just need to know how they are doing it. In our project there were two opposing needs for the data:

    • Data organization for archiving.
    • Data organization for current use in analysis and evaluation of what else to document.It could be argued that a well planned corpus would eliminate, or reduce the need for flexibility to decide what else there is to document. This line of thought does have its merits. But flexibility is needed by those people who do not try to implement detailed plans.

    Continue reading →

    Meꞌphaa Bibliography

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    This is an experimental use of Mendeley's API to present a bibliography of materials used in the Meꞌphaa language documentation project.There are are several limitations to the WordPress plugin because it does not bring over all the reference types. This is partly a limitation of Mendeley's API and partly a limitation of the reference types they support in their application. The WordPress plugin ignores that some references do not have the same parts in their citations. Some form of CSL should be used in the plugin. More about Citation Style Language. One other thing that I have noticed is that when there is a URL which ends in a .pdf the plugin re-codes the link name to "pdf". This is the advertised behavior. However, when there is more than one URL, they all say "url" rather than what is the last part of the URI. Look at this example from above:
    Steven Egland, Doris Bartholomew, Saúl Cruz Ramos (1978) La inteligibilidad interdialectal de las lenguas indígenas de México: Resultado de algunos sondeos, Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, p. 58-59, Mexico City: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, url, url
    Languages of Western Central Mexico

    Languages of Western Central Mexico

    [mendeley type="groups" id="899061" groupby="year" grouporder="desc"]

    Notes and a Bibliography

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    I have been looking for a way to create Posts with both Footnotes and a Bibliography section. I have wanted to make my post a little more professional looking, and let the information flow more easily with the way I write. What I have come to realize, is that Footnotes and Endnotes are different and function differently in respect to information processing. Traditionally, in print media Endnotes have occurred at the end of the article, whereas Footnotes have occurred at the end of the page on which the footnote is mentioned. This leads to a three way breakdown:

    1. Footnotes
    2. Endnotes
    3. Bibliography

    The purpose of footnotes is to facilitate quick information processing without breaking the flow of reading or information processing of the consumer of information. On web-based media, the end of the article and the end of the page is the same if pagination is not enabled. So this creates a sort of syncretism between Endnotes and Footnotes. However, the greater principal of quick reference to additional information still applies on the web. There are several strategies which have tried to fill this information processing nitch, these include things like:

    • Tooltips (The pop-up text which appears when your mouse cursor hovers over a link or some other text.)
    • Lightbox (The darker shading of the background and the high-lighting of the content in focus.)
    • Pop-up windows (which have been phased out of popular "good web design").
    • Information (Text) balloons (an example of this is Wikipop Wikipop is really a combination of the above mentioned effects above to create an inline experience for the user. But some web-sites have a similar effect which is dependent on the mouse hovering over the "trigger".).

    With strategies for conveying information like Tooltips it is possible to meet the same information communication and information processing goals which were formerly achieved through footnotes. For Web-based information, which is intended to be consumed through a web medium Wiki-pop makes a lot of sense. However, if the goal is a good print out of content then footnotes are still needed, that is why I am using footnotes on this particular web presentationA solution which does both, tooltips or solutions like Wikipop, and footnotes when the content is printed, would be ideal. .

    So here is a quick post on how I am doing it.
    I am using two different "endnotes" plugins. One for the Bibliography section and the other for the Notes section.

    Creating the Footnotes section:
    To create the notes section I have elected to use a plugin called FootnotesEven though there are other options for Footnote Plugins. One other option I know about is FD-Footnotes. by Rob Miller. (Big surprise on the name of the plugin...) Footnotes allows for me to put what I want to show up as footnotes in <ref>something</ref>In order to get these tags to display inside of <code> and </code> tags I had to use HTML codes for the greater than sign, less than sign and slash. There is some additional good information about character encoding in HTML on Wikipedia. tags.
    Additionally I can set a tag <reference /> anywhere in the post and produce a list of footnotes.

    Creating the Bibliography:
    To create the Bibliography Section I am using WP-Footnotes (in the WP plugins repository) by Simon Elvery. More information can be read about his plugin here. What this plugin allows me to do is to craft the citation of the item I want to cite. I have to figure out how I want to "code" the citation and then present the citation.

    [1]Hand Code the contents of the citation as it is to appear in the bibliography here, between a set of double parentheses.
    Do not forget a space after the citation text and the double closing parentheses.

    This will produce a citation marker (a number) as a super script inline with the text. Like this [2]Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 1998. Documentary and Descriptive Linguistics. Linguistics vol. 36:161-195. [PDF] [Accessed 24 Dec. 2010] :
    And that will produce a citation in the bibliography section like the following:

    Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 1998. Documentary and Descriptive Linguistics. Linguistics vol. 36:161-195. [PDF] [Accessed 24 Dec. 2010]

    One interesting thing that occurs on the admin side of WordPress is that the plugin WP-Footnotes has an options page which shows up in the Settings menu, however what is interesting is that in that in the menu it is called Footnotes, not WP-Footnotes.
    The options for WP-Footnotes really make it flexible, it is these setting which have allowed me to rename the section from Notes to Bibliography.

    WP-Footnote Options

    WP-Footnote Options

    Final solution?
    Is this my final solution? No. One thing I really don't like is that the bibliography is not orderd in alphabetical order of the last names, and then in order of the year of publication. Rather, citations are ordered in the order of appearance (as footnotes generally are). The plugin does not have any options for changing the order that thing appear in (though the headings on the ordered list can be changed). There is also no way to structure the data in the bibliography for reuse (even if it is just within this site), so each use of each citation must be hand-crafted with love. There are some other solutions which I am looking at integrating with this one but have not had time to really explore. One options is to integrate with Mendeley and aggregate bibliography data from a Mendeley collection. Another option is to create bibliographies as bibtex files and then use those to display the bibliography.

    References

    References
    ↑1 Hand Code the contents of the citation as it is to appear in the bibliography here, between a set of double parentheses.
    ↑2 Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 1998. Documentary and Descriptive Linguistics. Linguistics vol. 36:161-195. [PDF] [Accessed 24 Dec. 2010]

    Leadership in an OpenSource Project

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    In the past week have been confronted with several issues related to project planning, task & time management and project execution. Just defining the “deliverables” has been a real challenge. Given that the workforce of the company I work for is largely constituted of people who consider themselves to be volunteers, it makes for an interesting work environment. I naturally gravitate towards planning for tactical success and wanting to view things from the “big picture” perspective – knowing how the parts fit together. Project planning and project execution involves a lot of decision making and a lot of communicating about decisions.

    Over the last year I have been watching with some interest the UI development of WordPress. UI design is an area that I really enjoy. So when I saw Jane presenting on this issue of “How decisions get made at WordPress” (on the Open Source part of the project), I thought I would watch it. I thought that I would be watching how a company does UI decision making. But the focus of the talk was broader than that. It was generally good to see a model at work in a company where there is a successful product. As I listened to the discussion I was struck at how their project deals with:

    • Decision Making
    • Community Involvement
    • Consensus Building
    • Project Planning
    • Leadership
    • Sustainability

    In many respects the company I work with deals with these same issues. It was good to see how another company/project deals with these issues, and sees these kinds of issues as important to the success of their product.

    Better Extended Live Archives

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    A long time a go, when WordPress was young (like version 1.5), And K2 was young. There was a plugin called Extended Live Archive (ELA).

    I love the organization that this plugin gave to a bolg’s entries. It is still my preferred presentation of posts on a blog. Over the years all the software has developed K2 is now in version 1.0.3, WordPress is in version 3.0 and ELA has become Better Extended Live Archive (BELA) thanks to Charles

    Here is a series of links – in no particular order – which talk about the development of ELA.

    .

    I have had a problem with how BELA Presents the entries by Date:

    Better Live Archives by Date

    Better Live Archives By Date

    Notice how all the blog entires at the bottom are displayed on top of each other.
    I can not figure out how to un-do that.

    Notice also in the following two pictures of the sort by Tags and sort by Category list the entries are not displayed on top of each other.

    Better Live Archives By Tag

    Better Live Archives By Tag

    Better Live Archives By Category

    Better Live Archives By Category

    For checking this live: you can look at the archive. This has been checked in several browsers:

    • Safari
    • Flock
    • Firefox
    • Cruz

    All to no avail. (That is it does not appear to be a Browser based issue.)

    The Offending Element:

    bugs

    Things to Change per Charles.

    Selected Works™ & BePress

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    Bepress is an internet based service from Berkeley Electronic Press. They basically allow a user to display their work. i.e. a Professor’s CV which has a list of publications, those publications are then displayed by Selected Works™ & BePress as downloadable PDFs. These works can then also be described, downloaded, their bibliographic references can be downloaded, etc. Berkeley Electronic Press archives the Documents and presents them in an understandable, accessible, usable format. They have integrated Google search. Seems like lots of Love all around.
    This kind of thing would be really good for an organization like the one I work with.


    This is a picture of a page. See this page live.


    This is a picture of a page. See this page live.

    BePress has a lot of features, it integrates with a lot of other services too. One service which looked really cool was their service for working with the editorial process used in working papers.