Grady Journal

Spam

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:15:00 +0000

If anyone's still reading, this is what I deal with daily ...

Map Tape,signal contrast liability link marry current century prison on front battle physical kill sight accompany generally floor feeling these step good store national strike duty weekend dead down reveal union plan education talk stand initial commitment release figure material injury he channel acid event interview link meanwhile be god clear offer photograph fear onto combination play insurance complete contain crisis rare response late past right probably block pool equal essential establishment address require count pound necessarily both off call inform above critical important modern brief concern shake close good initial

Thank goodness for Akismet ...

More numbers

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:10:00 +0000

As of this evening, we've passed 150 registered contributors and have 135 posts published. We had a small meeting of students who are interested in contributing outside of class this week, their work will start showing up in a week or so.

Including some very cool ideas for local podcasts ...

Numbers Roll In

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:29:00 +0000

As of this morning, we now have more than 50 registered contributors to The Grady Journal. Five classes are now participating at some level, some are posting already and some are ramping up their efforts.

Video Tutorial - Writing & Linking

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:49:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:37:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:30:00 +0000

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!!

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:56:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:23:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:44:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:57:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:43:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:46:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:08:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:26:00 +0000

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.

Widgets

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:32:00 +0000

Added the Twitter widget to a WordPress blog ... and it slowed loading to a crawl. Killing that for now ...

Practice, Practice

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:10:00 +0000

As I wait for the final bits to be coded on the new Xserve, I've been practicing my WordPress installation skills on my new personal blog. (Yeah, shameless plug.)

There are a number of ways to go about a WordPress install. The software is free to download and has tons of user support available, one of the reasons we ended up going this route. If you're doing your own and don't have a hosting company already, there are lots of places that specialize in WP installs, some with one-click processes.

That isn't the case for us with the new site, and it isn't the case on the new personal blog, either. So I've been wading into Plesk to set permissions, reconfiguring Akismet spam filters and other such things for the last few hours, trying to get everything just right. Lots of notes on the second screen, things to do, things not to do ...

Behind the Front, Part III

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:41:00 +0000

Added FriendFeed to the every growing list of things we may someday find a use for.

Behind the Front, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:37:00 +0000

Added Flickr and MySpace, as well.

Behind the Front

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:18:00 +0000

Part of the decision process in naming the new site involved making sure we could get every social media or technology outlet available. Aside from the domain, I also snapped up the following associated IDs:

Gmail
AIM
Twitter
Facebook
Pownce
Plurk
YouTube
Blip.tv
Vimeo

Did I miss any?

Grady Journal

noreply@blogger.com (Mark E. Johnson) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:43:00 +0000

It's coming ... gradyjournal.com

(Stop clicking or pasting, there's nothing there yet.)