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
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:
Footnotes
Endnotes
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 WikipopWikipop 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
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.
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.
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.
They run off of JQuery, which is already used by WordPress and K2. It would be nice if someone could wrap this into a WordPress Plugin with a cool way to add / manage data from the WP admin panel. Let me see if someone did….
[one] can have both wp-Table and WP-Table Reloaded installed in your WordPress! They will not interfere (as they are not using anything together). They are completely independent from each other. If WP-Table Reloaded finds the wp-Table database tables, it can import the found tables into it’s own format, so that you can completely upgrade from wp-Table to WP-Table Reloaded.
There is another jQuery plugin, called Visualize, that takes data from an HTML table and displays it as a chart. Cool. I wonder which, Visualize or Highcharts is better and why?
After we graph these data, is it possible to also make the data drive a SIMILE chart/timeline?
It looks like one can add data sets to be graphed with the WP-SIMILE plugin. Why not pull these directly from the current display table? or make SIMILE / TIMEPLOT graph time depth change. i.e. if the data displayed in the HTML table is propagated from a MySQL table then why not have several entries in the MySQL database with a time code to change? in a way tracking momentum. That is over time how much have these data changed? i.e. Display the same data set from 1945, from 1950, and 1955.
Why should we still use HTML tables instead of CSS?
ASIDE: My next question is: How do I keep track of all the jQuery plugins I use?
Is there an efficient way to do that?
FYI: There are several other Charting options currently available for WordPress. Most of these involve managing your data somewhere else and then using an API to bring that data to your WP install. The truth of the matter is that it is most likely that you are going to manage your data somewhere else anyway. However, I do not use Google docs to manage my data so I can not pull data from that source directly into my my WP install.
However, there is a plugin Easy Chart Builder. This plugin does not have “nice” admin section for creating the charts but does create an image from a data set inserted with a short code.
A mobile/phone/PDA friendly interface for your blog with progressive enhancement for advanced mobile browsers. You can see it in action by visiting this site in a mobile browser.
I have tried this on this thejourneyler.org. The plugin only works with Carrington Mobile theme 1.0.2. However, the Carrington mobile theme is currently at version 1.1, which is not compatible with this plugin (as far as I can tell). CMT 1.0.2 is not compatible with PostTabs, a plugin I use extensively to display multiple layers of content on a single page.
A nice feature of this plugin is that the user of an iPod Touch can “opt out” of the CMT. And once they have opted out they can “opt in” again with a link on the bottom of the post or page.
It uses Wapple’s advanced web services to produce perfect markup whilst at the same time maintaining the familiar look and feel of WordPress. You can write and edit posts, moderate and reply to comments as well as updating and managing pages.
I have also tried this. It is not compatible with Block-Spam-By-Math. That is not in and of itself a deal breaker. But to use this I would have to find a bot blocking plugin that does work with WordPress Mobile Admin. This plugin is great for managing the commenting process or adding new text content. There is a lack of support for controlling WP settings through the mobile interface.
iPhone Control Panel http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/iphone-control-panel/
The iPhone Control Panel Plugin allows you to easily configure how iPhones and iPod touches “see” your site. It gives you the ability to add custom css, a home screen bookmark icon, change the viewport, or even redirect iPhones and iPod touches to a different url.
Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to mobilize your blog in minutes.
Every single mobile device is detected and all aspects of your blog are tailored to the visiting handset. Sites aren’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator but instead use the features and functionality that advanced phones offer.
Devices are detected by using Wapple’s advanced web services instead of relying on inferior 3rd party tools. If you view your blog with a brand new, never before seen handset, it’ll still work perfectly!
Any theme you’ve installed and have styled for web will be carried across to mobile giving you a consistent look and feel for each and every one of your visitors.
Mobile Admin adapts the WordPress admin UI to be more friendly to mobile devices, specifically phones.
The iPhone / iPod Touch browser was the first target, but most other mobile browsers are supported at a basic level, and plugins can be used to customize for specific browsers where desired.
A plugin for the iPhone/iPod Touch devices is included, as well as a more basic plugin for Windows Mobile browsers. (Consider the latter a “beta”, but it’s mostly intended to be another sample for how to write a plugin.)
I've been looking at options for self printing books. I have a few ideas I would like to pursue. Following the indy publishing industry is really interesting. The following post was really encouraging.
In the early days of WordPress (2005) and WP-plugins there was usually only one plugin to do the job. Today there are many. So the task comes to sorting out which plugins are the right ones for the job and which ones are the best.
PDF viewing on site
I have been looking for a solution for giving my visitor the option to view PDFs I create on my site without having to download the PDF.
Third Party Services
iPaper
There is a service for this called Scribd.com. They use a technology called iPaper to present your material. As best I can tell, you upload your document and then they convert it to flash and present your content as flash in a custom flash viewer. It works great. There is also a WordPress plugin to pull your hosted content to your WordPress website. Actually there are two plugins at the time of my writing iPaper and Simpler iPaper. I found that iPaper was the easier plugin to work with.
GoogleDocs
If you are into using GoogleDocs then there is a plugin for presenting GoogleDocs in the same way as documents submitted to Scribd.com. It is called Google Doc Embedder.
embedit.in Embedit.in is another snazzy third party service. I have not tried it but it seems to work well and has some built in analytics for seeing who downloads your document.
docstoc.com Docstoc.com is yet anther third party service for serving documents.This review pits it and scribid.com against embedit.in
Zoho Zoho Apps is a rival service to Google Docs, they have a viewer for the files which users create with their online apps or add to their services. So if you are using an office document work flow which uses Zoho Apps you can embed these with ease with viewer. According to this review, Zoho Viewer lets users do three things:
view documents
share document as URLs
embed documents
.
Self-Hosted and Self-Contained
Self-Hosted SWF
However, in general, I do not like using third party services, after a while I forget what content I have in “the cloud” and I like to keep as small a digital footprint as possible. So I found a third solution. There is a plugin called WordPressPDF. This one requires that you convert your PDF files to SWF files and then presents them on your site without requiring a third party service. It did require the installation of swftools to do the PDF to SWF conversion. However this seems a small price to pay for leaving a smaller digital foot print.
A second solution that I found in use was to use http://www.fpdf.org/ which is a PHP class to view PDFs the technical skill required to implement it was beyond my current time to develop. There was also another viewer mentioned here. with it’s code on Google Code but I could not figure out how to download the whole set of files out of Google Code.
Keeping track of “To Dos”
There are so many cool things you can do with web pages and with WordPress. I needed a way to track all the things that I wanted to do. I have tried three plugins for this.
Admin Notes ajax jquery
The first, Admin Notes ajax jquery, added a blue box at the top of all my admin pages to which I could add “To Do” items however this increased the load time of my admin pages by at least 3 seconds under heavy use. So it had to go.
WordPress Admin Notepad Plugin
The second, WordPress Admin Notepad Plugin, added a single “scratch paper” spot through the settings tab. This was not accessible enough. It seems more ideal for passing notes between users on a WordPress install.
Peter’s Post Notes
The third, Peter’s Post Notes, Is the winner! is by far the best plugin for my uses because it keeps track of notes on a per page or per post basis. So I only see the notes which are relevant to the current post.
Note Pad
A long time ago, I also used Chris Davis’s Note Pad plugin it allowed me to make a note in the admin area and then easily change it to a post draft. I could not get this plugin to work with a current version of WordPress.
Stats
Stats on content downloaded from my site.
There are several plugins out there for tracking stats. I found that the best one was WordPress Download Monitor.
I compared that with Download Counter and WordPress Download Monitor simply gave me more controls and more options. I use this plugin to see how many people download content I distribute or recommend through our newsletters. I then compare this with how many people were sent an update/newsletter.
Counterize II Counterize II is an awesome plugin. I have been using since 2005. However it has dropped IP address tracking. There have been several attempts to put that back in. This was headed up by a fellow of the moniker beardedknight on the WP forums. He had a detailed description on his site on how to mod this plugin but his site has since vanished from the Internet.
WP Stats
There are other option like Google analytics and Mint which I have not investigated.
There is still the outstanding question, “Who exactly is viewing my content?” I still have not answered this question. There are several questions which need to be answered yet – like who is my target, and how do I want them to access it? i.e. log-in free browse. etc.
Get people to view your site with a browser other than Internet Explorer.
Again there are several plugins. They take two different approaches one is Pro-FireFox (from spreadfirefox.com), the others are anti-IE6.
This is a really sensitive, but serious issue. As a web-developer I do not want people using a browser that is less secure than a modern browser like Firefox 3.5.3+. However, there is another reason to encourage a browser other than IE, and that is I don’t want to have to recode each page in an IE friendly manner. This is just too much work.
Spread Firefox
The spreadfirefox plugin got annoying because it showed it’s logo all the time even when viewed in FireFox and it created a huge footer.. So I yanked it.
IE Warning
The IE Warning plugin was a bit friendlier and had a really cool custom panel where I could customize the CSS applying to the warning.
Shockingly Big IE6 Warning
But in the end I went with the Shockingly Big IE6 Warning because it had the best admin panel and the most customization options.
Anti IE6 Army Anti IE6 Army was not tested but appears to be a plugin of similar function.
How do you keep a page from showing up in the menu?
