(Almost) Live

We're hours away ... maybe ... from being a real news site. Alpha and two rounds of beta testing have been completed (thanks to Rachel Bailey and the JOUR8350 class for pushing the site around and not breaking too many things).

Some last tweaks to clean out the database today, add in another group of contributors (from the JOUR3710 class) and start posting live (or evergreen) content.

Later today, the site will migrate to its primary address and won't be hidden anymore. A message will go out to faculty saying the site is ready for use and we'll sked a meeting for students to come join the fun.

OH! And Steve Smith has approached me looking to partner with NewsSource15. We aren't building just a site, we're building bridges.

Site Tweaks and Trims

A few minutes of quiet time in the office, so I gave the site some yard work ...

- The email subscriptions widget in the upper right corner now works - if you plug in your email address (and go through the verification process), you'll get a note every time something new comes up on the site.

- The "Featured Video" in the right sidebar is now an automatic feed from our blip.tv account. Whenever a new video is uploaded, it'll rotate into the space. Should probably rename that to "Newest Video" or something like that ...

- That massive, six-paned "tabber" has been pulled out. Until we have several categories worth of stories to rotate through, there's no real need for it. 

php and me are friends. Sort of.

It was an odd day in the online world. I wrestled with some php coding issues, trying to get the categories to appear in a specific order. (Below the main bar, there's a sub bar for direct links to specific areas, like news, sports, etc.) After making my eyes hurt, I discovered there was a WordPress plugin that would do it automatically ... 

Of course. Why must I always reinvent the wheel?

Downloaded that, went to move it to the server and that's when I learned our servers were under attack and our network specialist had upped the firewall level just enough to block me out. (She said one of our servers was under an irc bot attack. Which sounds dangerous, but what do I know.) 

She reset some things and I got in, but then the attack must have escalated because by this afternoon, Internet access in the building was down to a crawl. And we have a really big pipe coming in ...

Back To It

I know, I know ... long time between posts ... 

A couple of things happened in the last several weeks, the first of which was a significant upgrade to the CMS software we're using (WordPress). I had the previous version up and stable, so I didn't want to fiddle too much with it ... but I started reading about the update and saw it had some really neat new features we could use.

So I put it up and tested it on one of my other sites and ran it until I was comfortable with it. That's what's driving the site right now - v.2.6.1.

Meantime, there's been an overhaul of the theme and I'm tweaking that, should go live-ish this weekend. 

I've been fielding emails and door-visits from colleagues about how we're going to take advantage of this. And students are emailing, calling and showing up asking about it ... word is out there.

And ... we're up

After some fits and starts, we're up and relatively stable. Still have some things to work on, but you can see the site here at the moment. (I'll do the redirect later on to be off of the main URL.)

Several things are still not up and running (RSS feeds, subscription bits, and it's pulling in a generic YouTube video feed - need to kill that off soon). But you can see the basic structure of it. 

Once the last tweaks are done, I'll start building the training modules for it. I'm still playing with the CSS code - the default theme is blue, trying to decide if it all needs to go red. I did some of it in red earlier and it got hard to read.

Also need to build and upload a favicon ... open to ideas for that graphic. Should it just be the Grady version of the arch?

Progress ... stalled

I'm a little afraid of walking into the building today as Janet may shoot me ... we've been trying to get the software up and running most of the day - her in the building, me from home. We had it up for a little while, then I flipped a switch or toggle or clicked a button and it all went splat.

Not entirely sure what I did yet, but I'll probably restart from scratch. Thankfully, I hadn't gotten too far along when it went down. I don't think it was a server-side problem, I'm pretty sure it happened while I was trying to activate one of the plugins for the custom theme we'll be using.

The software, WordPress, is essentially just an intermediate piece of code. All of your data (in our case, stories, photos, videos, links, etc.) get stored in a database called MySQL. On the other side of WordPress, you have a theme - a way of controlling how that data gets presented. WordPress does the handoff from one to the other.

We'll feed info into the database on a regular basis, and that seems to be up and stable. The theme we'll be using is fairly complex, slightly more complex than the ones I use on the other blogs I maintain. It contains a few plugins to deal with popular entries and things like that, as well as a handy contact/feedback form. I was working on the feedback form when I crunched it.

I probably owe Janet lunch by now. Though if she finds out we blog about it, she may pass ...

Behind the Front, Part the Fourth

Came across another social media/microblogging site this morning - identi.ca. So I grabbed gradyjournal on that, too. It appears to mimic Twitter in its format and workings, and with Twitter being so unstable at this point ... well, let's just say David has a shot at Goliath.