Category: Support

Sit back and watch WordPress TV

Joss Winn / / Support

If you prefer to learn by watching, there are lots of useful videos on the WordPress.TV site, like the one above. This is an official channel run by the WordPress community and contains video tutorials on every aspect of managing a WordPress site. For beginners, I’d recommend you start on the ‘How to‘ section of the site.

Don’t forget there’s also the University of Lincoln Get Satisfaction service where you can ask and answer questions relating to the WordPress blogs, as well as documentation and videos here on this site.

Contextual Help

Joss Winn / / Announcements, Support

With the recent upgrade to WordPress version 3.0, you will now find a Help button in the top right corner of any screen in the WordPress admin area. If you click on the Help button, it will display helpful information about the screen you are on. So, for example, if you’re in the Posts -> Add New screen, click on the Help button and you’ll see this.

Click to enlarge

Embedding video and other media

Joss Winn / / Announcements, Support

A recent upgrade to WordPress introduced oEmbed, a new and easier way to embed video and some other media in your blog post.Whereas before, You needed to either copy the raw HTML embed code and paste it in the WordPress HTML editor, or activate Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin, you can now simply copy and paste the URL of the video you wish to embed.

It only works for services that support oEmbed, but the number of those services is growing. Today, the following services will allow you to use the oEmbed method of embedding a video:

To embed media using one of these services, the tutorial is simple:

  1. Copy the URL of the video/image/audio i.e. 
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFsCFUCzwf0
  2. Paste it into your WordPress editor.
  3. That’s it!

How can I learn more about using WordPress?

Joss Winn / / Support

If you’re new to WordPress or the University blogs, there are a few ways that you can find help and support.

  1. For a good overview of how to understand and use the WordPress Dashboard, watch these short video tutorials
  2. For documentation on using WordPress, browse through the official documentation, which we’ve recycled from wordpress.org
  3. Ask questions on the university Get Satisfaction site.
  4. Ask Google 😉
  5. Drop into our monthly lunch-time ‘interest group‘ – open to all staff and students
  6. Look out for the ‘Working better on the web‘ staff training, offered by CERD, LLR and the Research Office.
  7. Ask Joss to join your class, team or department meeting or faculty away day. I can provide training in an hour or just an overview in 20 mins.
  8. Call Joss on 01522-886759 (but try the above first!)

New themes added

/ / Announcements, Support

Over 100 new themes have been added for you to choose from. There’s quite a variety of styles and colours, from simple to crazy, from black to pink to white. As always, if you don’t find a theme that you like, you can browse through over 1000 themes on wordpress.org and let us know which ones you’d like to see installed. To preview and choose a theme that’s already installed, just go to the Appearance menu and click on Themes. You can browse through several pages of themes and preview each one by clicking on the thumbnails.

Themes

Follow the robot and get updates on FriendFeed and Twitter

/ / Announcements, Support

University of Lincoln blogs robot

As you may know, all University of Lincoln blogs, whose owners set them to be publicly searchable, are archived in the Community Posts site. One way of getting updates whenever someone updates their blog is by subscribing to the Community Posts RSS feed. However, some people prefer to get their updates via their social networks, so with the help of the University of Lincoln blogs robot, you can now subscribe to updates on Twitter and FriendFeed. Both of these social networks provide ways for you to receive updates, such as via email, RSS, SMS or Instant Messaging. Follow the robot and stay updated with what people are blogging about on blogs.lincoln

Realtime conversation on your blog

/ / Announcements, Support

Prologue, the WordPress theme which transforms a blog into a hub of discussion, has been updated and is now called P2. Here’s a video which explains how it can be used for realtime conversation. Use it for project members to stay in touch, for students to discuss their course or as your department’s noticeboard. As always, your site can be private, public or anywhere in between.

Browsing, searching and reading university blogs

Joss Winn / / Announcements, Support

Did you know that every time you write a blog post, it’s also archived on a ‘Community Posts‘ site? If the privacy settings for your blog allow it to be searched by Google and other search engines (look under the Settings-Privacy menu), your writing is automatically collected on the Community posts site so that people can more easily find your work.

You can browse by tag, category and date as well as search across every post. In addition, each search, tag, combination of tags and each category has an RSS feed which you can subscribe to and get updates whenever there’s a new posts relating to your chosen topic.

For example, if you click on the ‘RefWorks‘ tag, you’ll be shown all posts tagged with ‘RefWorks’. You’ll also be shown an ‘Extra Feeds’ link on the right-hand sidebar with the RSS feed for that tag. Likewise, if you search for ‘blackboard‘ you’ll see every post that includes the word ‘blackboard’ as well as being shown the ‘Extra Feeds’ link to the RSS feed of the search. This way, by using RSS, you’ll get updates whenever anyone mentions ‘blackboard’ in their blog posts.

Mobile blogging

/ / Announcements, Support

You can make your blog more easily viewable on a mobile device by activating two plugins. The process is simple:

  1. Go to your Dashboard and click on Plugins, on the right of the screen.
  2. Look for the WPTouch plugin and Activate it.
  3. That’s it. Do NOT change your Theme. The plugin will automatically optimise the display of your blog when viewed on a mobile phone, iPhone or iPod Touch. WPTouch has various Settings which you can experiment with if you wish.
  4. If you use an iPhone, Android or Blackberry phone, you can download the WordPress app from the respective app stores and update your blog from your phone. Nice! 🙂