Version 0.5 of Edit Flow was released into the wild today. The improvements almost make me wish I was in a newsroom to implement them. There’s a lot of power now packaged into the plugin.
A collection of links and pointers to what I talked about with Suzi Steffen’s Reporting One class last Thursday.
I mentioned a couple of things that may come in handy, including all the support pages for WordPress.com. Those are a great place to find out how specific features work and can help you get going again if you’re stuck on something.
There’s also a handy series of How-To videos at WordPress.tv. These cover everything from the basics to more advanced editing options. There are also a series of videos on the WordPress.tv homepage if you’re interested in watching talks given at WordCamps around the world.
Great spell, style, and grammar checker that is baked into all WordPress.com blogs. You can also find extensions for Firefox, Google Chrome, and OpenOffice on ATD’s download page.
I mentioned a couple of podcasts and wanted to add some specific recommendations for those interested.
5by5 is a studio run by Dan Benjamin that produces a great series of technology and web-focused podcasts. Many of the guests are not your typical developers as well. Some are in the editing, design, or usability fields as well. The Pipeline is particularly good and the show with Liz Danzico may be interesting to those wanting to improve their writing or find out a bit how professional editors work.
I also highly recommend anything from Merlin Mann. I mentioned his Time & Attention talk in class and that’s really worth watching if you’re wondering the forces that come into play when envisioning how to get people consuming your content.
Danah Boyd is also someone worth following if you’re interested in how information flows around the web. She gave a talk at the Web 2.0 Conference that is about 20 minutes long and well worth listening to.
There was a lot more mentioned too so if you have any questions just shoot me an email. It’s andrewspittle at automattic.com.
An interesting project is underway that seeks to create a model for book publishing that can thrive on the web and across devices. More intriguing, though, is that the founders are taking WordPress as their starting point and developing the software through plugins. There’s even been a prototype book release.
Yesterday I had a spare couple hours and decided to follow Doug Bowman’s example and set up a self-hosted archive of my Twitter stream with WordPress. You can see the finished product of that here.
There was some interest expressed on Twitter of others wanting to do something similar so I thought I’d help out by making what I did available for download. You can grab a copy of the theme and required plugins which will provide pretty close to a turn key solution for getting this running.
I highly suggest following Bowman’s tutorial for downloading and importing the initial archive of previous tweets. Once you have that done and the plugins and theme are installed there’s a couple things you’ll want to do:
/(^|\s)@(\w+)/ into the Search Pattern field and then enter \1@<a href="http://twitter.com/\2">\2</a> into the Replace pattern field. Check the Regex box./(^|\s)#(\w+)/ into the Search pattern field and then enter \1#<a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23\2">\2</a> into the Replace pattern field. Check the Regex box.That’s it. After doing those steps you should have a searchable, self-hosted archive of everything you’ve posted on Twitter. If you run into questions or problems feel free to fire away in the comments.
Update 3/23: Emily Ingram pointed me to a plugin that will achieve the same auto-linking of @replies and #hashtags that the regex calls do. It’s a super simple solution and can be downloaded from the WordPress directory. Sounds like it works quite well.
The technological capacity of individuals to publish information online expanded tremendously over the last decade. Free platforms for public expression and publication of ideas proliferated, most recently through services like WordPress and Twitter. There are now an incredible variety of tools available to people that allow any individual writer to potentially have global reach.
Many of these tools for publication have an inherently social aspect. More than simply tools for publication and the broadcasting of information they have conversation at the heart of their technology. Communication online necessitates more than just publication. With modern communication tools there as much emphasis is placed upon what happens with the information once put online.
The last few years have seen the astounding expansion of three key technologies: near real-time communication, relatively easy self-publishing, and powerful data aggregation. The rise of Twitter and related technologies of the real-time web, such as the Tornado Web Server, allow for messages to be sent, received, and replied to in mere seconds. Blogging, and self-publishing in general, has developed remarkably powerful tools as well. What started with tools like Blogger and LiveJournal has now exploded with software such as WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous, and Movable Type. Finally, with all of this information being published at a more rapid rate our tools for aggregation have improved immensely. RSS readers such as Google Reader and Fever present the ability to categorize, filter, and rank information from many sources. Furthermore, software developers have begun to leverage algorithms to analyze, sort, and rank news items in a way that allows the software to filter the important items out of the noise.1
The internet and its associated technologies have been around for decades and seen a vast array of literature devoted to their political potential. What is it that makes the current moment different? What about the political potential of these specific technologies lacks precedence?