Video Tutorial - Writing & Linking

Our second video tutorial is now up, this one dealing with how to use the interface to write, create links, add tags and categories and write excerpts. (Run time: 4:34)

Video Tutorial - Logging In

The first video tutorial is now online for The Grady Journal - learn how to log in and adjust your user profile. (Run time: 2:21)

More Tweaking

I wasn't happy with the way the front and category pages have been displaying (with a headline and a "Read More" link. Went poking through the code again and have figured out something called an "excerpt," which is now configured to appear as a subhead. When creating posts, there's a field for a subhead - filling that out will now get it to appear on the main page and category pages. 

Not all of the posts have an excerpt in them yet, but we'll gradually build them in.

It's Alive!!

Earlier today, with the help of our friend Janet Sharik, The Grady Journal officially went live. Stories are starting to flow in, too.

It lives.

(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 ...