Internet @ Schools West 2010 & Internet Librarian 2010 October 25, 2010, Monterey, CA.
Presented by Buffy J. Hamilton & Polly-Alida Farrington
http://www.pafa.net/ and www.theunquietlibrarian.wikispaces.com
2. “…having a web presence, no–
that having a really good and
really useful web presence–is
[no longer] optional.
Joyce Valenza, “Things I think teacher
librarians should unlearn (20 & counting)”,
August 24th, 2010
3. “The new blog format is much more
interactive”
Prianka Ghoshal, Westlake High student, Austin Texas
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tinavega/3353051874/
30. Commercial Services
• Around $10/month
• Easy install
• Tech support
• Unlimited possibilities!
For more hosts: http://wordpress.org/hosting/
31. Self Hosting In House
• Cost of server
• Maintenance
• IT support
• Unlimited possibilities
32. Technical Requirements
• Current WordPress Version 3.0.1
• PHP version 4.3 or greater *
• MySQL version 4.1.2 or greater
• Linux & Apache
* Might find some plugins require more recent version of
PHP.
34. Ways to Use a Wordpress
Blog for a School Library
• Announcements and celebrations
• Showcase collaborative projects with
teachers and students
• Positive publicity for library events and
learning experiences in the library
• Space for inviting participation
35. Ways to Use a Wordpress
Blog for a School Library
• Students and teachers can create blog
posts
• Showcase library created videos or other
educational videos from YouTube
• Integrate book widgets
• Integrate RSS feeds of interest to students
• Integrate your other library program social
media stream
36. Advantages
• Free
• No special technical knowledge required
• Themes provide a professional
appearance with minimal effort
• Easy to embed many kinds of HMTL code
as sidebar widgets and/or into blog posts
• Excellent spam filter
37. Disadvantages
• Ads
• Themes limited in options for
customization
• Can’t add plug-ins
• Can’t embed javascript widgets
61. Back it up!
1. Backup your database:
– Via web host control panel
– Or wp-db-backup plugin
(wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/)
2. FTP to server and copy:
• wp-content/themes
• wp-content/plugins
• wp-content/uploads (images, files, etc.)
75. … features – similar to Facebook, Twitter, etc – will probably seem
familiar to many.
My philosophy of teaching includes instilling in my students a sense of
exploration and play. And dealing with change.
The Buddypress site is an extension of that. In my email to my classes
as school starts, I asked them to configure their blogs, get an RSS
aggregator and explore the site. Explore is the keyword.
Dr. Michael Stephens on his
BuddyPress enabled course
76.
77.
78.
79. Selected WP Books
(There are tons more great ones!)
• Digging into
WordPress by Jeff
Starr & Chris Coyier
(digwp.com)
• Beginning WordPress
3 by Stephanie Leary
• Smashing WordPress
by Thord Hedengren
80. More Help!
• WordPress Codex -
http://codex.wordpress.org/
• WordPress Forums -
http://wordpress.org/support/
• WordPress FAQ’s -
http://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ
• New to WordPress? –tips
http://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_New_To
_WordPress
Open Source, Content MGMT System, Free
Makes it easy to maintain a website or blog
Helps you organize all the information about your library and manage it easily
Tool for creating & managing a website
Web-based interface
Contributors can focus on CONTENT!
Update “look & feel” easily
Flexible
Source code is open and available to modify
You make changes, you share them
Modify it & develop tools to enhance it!
Other familiar open source software:
Firefox
Open Office
Community working together to create better software and help each other out.
Why WordPress?
Lots of ways to create web sites – html, Dreamweaver, frontpage, express web, etc.
WordPress is really just another option
BUT with big advantages…
Lots and lots of users! Huge community.
About 14 million at .com
And 14 million independent installs
Very easy to do - Web based interface for writing and publishing your content.
Not HTML experience needed – though it can’t hurt!
Can do it from anywhere you have access to the web.
No software to install on your computer.
Because it’s easy to do, your site will be more up to date and have more interesting content
More visitors to the site
Hopefully your web site will go from static and deserted to ….
Creates a friendly, attractive website that is easy for students, staff, parents to use.
We’ll quickly cover some basic blogging terms and look at some examples of blogs
And then look at examples of some libraries are using blogging tools to create a complete website.
Anne Robinson – Dixie Grammar School – UK
Attractive custom graphics
Double navigation bar
http://thegrovelibrary.net/
http://stillwater.sals.edu/
This was done with wordpress too and looks more like a magazine than a blog.
http://tamworthlibrary.org/
Nice website – put together by Lichen Rancourt
Free hosted versions at:
-- Wordpress.com
-- Edublogs.org
Limited themes, plugins
Charge $15/year for access to CSS
$15 a year to redirect your URL to the blog.
Still this could be a great way to get started and to work with the ideas.
Just don’t let the limits put you off the whole WordPress idea.
When you’re ready, you can move to a self-hosted version.
Wordpress has a page of suggested hosting companies.
http://wordpress.org/hosting/
Very easy to do - Web based interface for writing and publishing your content.
Can do it from anywhere you have access to the web.
No software to install on your computer.
With the click of a button, the look changes.
From the APPEARANCE panel
-- Themes
Browse through them.
Click on the image to popup a preview and the ACTIVATE button
Boxes of content
Lists of pages
Lists of categories for news items
Links to other resource
And much more
Lots of prebuilt widgets
Just drag and drop to the sidebar
Click to open and change settings
Some plugins will include new widgets – like the newgen gallery manager
Use the text widget to add content from other websites to the sidebar.
Some familiar 3rd party content includes: Librarything book feed, meebo chat widget, flickr photobadge and much more.
Plugins can add tools to help you administer your blog
And add features to the public side of your blog
Accessories!
Lists the plugins that are available on your install of WP
Click on Activate to use them.
Install and activate one at a time to test for possible conflicts.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/
Need to sign up for an account with wordpress.com to activate this and Akismet
Both were created by the wordpress folks and make use of resources on the .com server.
You don’t need to blog on wordpress.com, you just need the account
Getting stats to load can be VERY slow sometimes.
For stats – you might also want to try google analytics – more detail.
Requires API code from wordpress.com
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/
More on essential Plugins later!
http://johnmiedema.ca/portfolio/openbook-wordpress-plugin/
Simply add code to your page/post with the ISBN of a book in it.
[openbook booknumber="184195828X"]
Book cover will appear
WP Contact Form http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-contact-form/
Just one of many form plugins
CformsII – has tons of options, but is a bit more complicated to set up.
http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin
That goes for plugins & themes too
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mobilepress/
Mick Jacobsen – Skokie IL PL
Main site is NOT WP
Mick Jacobsen of Skokie PL, Illinois is writing a section for the LTR
Separate sites for each topic.
Each blog has it’s own look and feel
Contributors have access to their blogs
Found it very easy to add content, images, videos.
Top menu bar takes users back to the main library website
There a sense of fragmentation at this point.
With changes in wordpress, the whole site could now be brought together under WP, instead of having a main stie and a bunch of blogs.
Suggests that the blog content in separate WP MU sites could be reintegrated into one site with CATEGORIES to distinguish the content.