Tag: WordPress

CoPress launches hosted WordPress sites for student media

Ryan Sholin3 Comments

First, a bit of history: The first time I fiddled with a newspaper Web site, it was thespartandaily.com, after I walked into an adviser’s office at San Jose State’s School of Journalism & Mass Communications and asked something like “hey, any way to get an RSS feed off that thing?”

There was, and we did, and I spent a good chunk of time over the next two semesters redesigning the site, migrating it from one host to a second one that had purchased the first, and supporting early efforts at multimedia at the Daily.

But it wasn’t easy. And little of the code I had to muck about in to get the site to do what I wanted was code that I could learn from, or re-use, or maintain in any sort of extensible way.

Since then, more options have popped up for hosting student media Web sites, the most popular and obvious one being to launch a WordPress site on your own server.

But of course, it would be nice if there were one place to share tips, tricks, plugins, ideas, and code snippets with other students and advisers working with WordPress for student newspapers, right?

CoPress wants to be that place.

I’ve had a chance to talk, chat, and tweet with some of the students and recent graduates behind CoPress over the last few months, and I think they’re clearly the sharpest minds in online student media right now.

Here’s the short list of resources, places to start looking into CoPress, if you’re serious about getting your news site off that big popular hosted solution and thinking about giving students, staff, and advisers a chance to learn more than how to paste from Word into a WYSIWYG editor:

  • CoPress.org: Subscribe to the blog’s feed, read more about the budding organization, and contact the team.
  • CoPress Hosting: Not planning to deal with development, design, or server hosting on your own?  Talk with the CoPress team about what they can do for you.
  • CoPress on Twitter: Follow the team on Twitter.
  • CoPress on iTunes: Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.  The CoPress team has done an amazing job of staying transparent, posting recordings of their conference calls as a regular podcast.

If it sounds like I’m excited about this, I am.  This blog started out life in 2005 as “Ryan Sholin’s J-School Blog,” and as far as I’m concerned, working in student media is the best way to build your skillset, on deadline, with real stories, photos, video, readers, comments, and every other element live and in play.  If CoPress makes it easier for students to expand that skillset to cover development, design, and site management for online news, that’s fantastic.

Minor redesign of this here blog

Ryan Sholin9 Comments

I’ve been whittling away at this at random hours in between 642 other small projects, so feel free to click through and have a look at my handiwork.

Major goals of this minor redesign included:

  • Play with the header graphic. (Done.)
  • Fix the FriendFeed stream and make it useful. (Done.)
  • Clean things up, remove some widget bloat, figure out a better way to present that sort of thing. (Sort of done.)
  • Do all this in Django for fun and sport. (Not even close. Still WordPress, which I still enjoy, and built on the Sandbox theme as it has been for years now.)

There’s also a bit of BIGness to everything, much of which I advise you to blame on Wilson Miner, though I haven’t a fraction of his skill at this sort of thing.

I’m sure I’ll continue to fiddle with the sidebar and bottom bits for days to come, so don’t grow accustomed to any of this if you’re some sort of person who often reads this thing in a manner that doesn’t involve your RSS reader or phone.  No idea who you people are.

IdeaLab: Microblogging tools for your newsroom

Ryan SholinLeave a comment

Over at IdeaLab, I’ve posted a rundown of some of the internal Twitter for Enterprise type services that are out there at the moment, from the Prologue theme for WordPress (free!) to Backpack Journal from 37signals (not free!).

Plus, there’s a bit about the feature inspiration I picked up yesterday at blip.fm.

The evolving list of features I intend to add to ReportingOn is over on at blog.reportingon.com.  Check it out and let me know what you want to see happen there next.

Terms of Service « WordPress.com

Ryan SholinLeave a comment

The Automattic TOS has a creative commons licnse on it, and this note: “Note, we’ve decided to make the below Terms of Service available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license, which means you’re more than welcome to steal it and repurpose it for your own use, just make sure to replace references to us with ones to you, and if you want we’d appreciate a link to WordPress.com somewhere on your site. We spent a lot of money and time on the below, and other people shouldn’t need to do the same.” Thanks, Matt!

Terms of Service « WordPress.com