All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

I’ve been tweaking, finally updating plugins, removing unused plugins, and testing everything out for the past hour or so. As far as I can tell, things seem fine. Thanks to K2, I even have a better archives page. At one point in time, I used categories as tags, so I need to cut down on the categories and make them more general.

Until someone tells me otherwise, I guess my blog works with WordPress 2.1 - hurray! I’m done tinkering for now.

I’ve finally setup FeedBurner here utilizing the FeedBurner plugin. If you want, please change the main feed URL to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AllNarfedUp

For comments:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AllNarfedUpComments

The old feed still works, but can anyone tell me the .htaccess code to redirect the old feed? Thanks! (And thanks to Steve Smith!)

If you’re using WordPress, you might want to check out Feed Validator. My feed had a slight “CommentRSS” error that takes a few seconds to fix. If you didn’t touch your default wp-rss2.php file, it’s probably there.

In January 2005, I wrote “Why teachers should blog“. I still think that stands.

My good friend, Andy, has been teaching now for four years. Two years ago, he wanted a website for students to refer to. Instead of manually creating webpages from Dreamweaver, I got him to use WordPress and he’s been using it ever since. In fact, I’ll be wiping it out and updating it to the latest version since the new school year started today.

Since Andy started the class site, he doesn’t upload photos to the server. I got him hooked on Flickr, and he now has a Pro account for both the class and himself; he just links to the photos. (An alternative to Flickr is Zooomr; notice the three o’s, not two.) He also bought his own domain name, so he’s not using a subdomain from me. (I’ll link to his new site once I update WordPress.)

If that sounds too scary, there’s also WordPress.com. You don’t need a webhost to set one up, and it’s free. (Cons: You can’t install your own themes or plugins.)

Aside from the blog, I suggest having a few pages that have links to good learning resources, MLA reference, etc. Andy has a contact page, upcoming events, and reading minutes for each student.

If you do install your own blog, look for WordPress plugins that’ll help protect and enhance your it. For starters:

• Bad Behavior
• Akismet
• Email Immunizer
• Spam Karma 2
• intouch

Oh yeah, know your audience. If the majority of your parents and students use dialup, use a minimalistic theme and keep the images small to speed up loading time. (Enough said.)

For support, WordPress has their own forums. If you’d like to hire me, let me know! I feel I know enough to get by pretty well. However, FreshlyPressed has a solid group of people that might interest you if you want a more professional route. (Perhaps I should ask if I can join them?)

If you have a blog for your class, please link to them in the comments so others can see some examples and gather ideas. Thanks, and happy blogging!

Related articles elsewhere on the web:

• Top WordPress plugins (The Blog Joint)
• What is “Using WordPress as CMS”? (blogHelper)

Update: Andy’s site has been up - I just forgot to update this post. See mrandychang.com. It uses K2, which I’m liking a lot.

Thanks to the suggestion by James, I’m using iFeedReaders to make subscribing to All Narfed Up easier. There’s so many online feed readers that it’s hard to have a link for each one.

Add to Any was okay, but I think iFeedReaders simply looks and feels more comfortable. I also implemented the iFeedReaders social bookmark link creator, using the WordPress plugin, for each individual post. I figure that if you like one of these posts, I should take the small extra step to make it easier for you to bookmark or Digg it. *cough*

Lastly, since iFeedReaders links to FeedBlitz for people who still prefer email newsletters, it’s only logical since every little bit helps. I’ve signed up with them and setup the code here as well.

If you’ve got a blog, you need to look into these two services to help expand your audience that much more.

iFeedReaders is in beta mode, but is totally free (and looks really good). FeedBlitz is free, but there’s premium services, too.

Can I customize the look and feel of the emails? I want my logo in the mail and not FeedBlitz orange. - Yes. The “Pro” premium service lets you customize the look of your emails and the subscriber sign up landing page. It costs USD $4.95 per feed per month. Publishers with multiple feeds can sign up for the flat-fee “Pro Plus” service which lets you customize as many feeds as you like for USD $24.95 per month.

Have you heard of Add to Any? I just did, and I’m really excited about implementing it here.

I initially wrote a quick plea for someone to develop a WordPress plugin that’s a dropdown box for multiple feed reader services. You know, I’d hate to turn you away because I didn’t have a button to add my feed to your feed reader. Fortunately, I didn’t post that question because I wouldn’t have used it after finding Add to Any.

Basically, I want you to be able to:

• subscribe to my feed with whatever feed reader you use, or
• submit a post (or the whole site!) to your favorite bookmarking service

If you’ve got a site or blog, integrate this. I’ll be doing this soon. If a site doesn’t use Add to Any, you’re in luck - there’s a bookmarklet! Man, great job, MicroPat!

Update: Thanks to James, I’ll be using iFeedReaders.

I haven’t been myself lately, so that’s why I’m lacking recent quality posts.

I’ve installed two WordPress plugins yesterday that I think deserves your consideration:

• WP-Print
• Flickr Post Bar

WP-Print is great because it “displays a printable version of your WordPress weblog post”. It removes all formatting except for the most relevant content: post title, post content, and the full URLs contained in the post, kind of like the ones in SitePoint plaintext newsletters (example). It’s great when links displayed like this for print because normal links on printed paper mean nothing.

Lately, I’ve been printing articles to read later (or maybe things my mom or friends might find interesting). If blogs would use this plugin, it would be much easier to follow up on the links.

As for Flickr Post Bar, it’s much easier not having to navigate through Flickr to get the code for a post. You can insert the latest photos from your photostream, or search tags - all within the post page.

It’s finding gems like these that make me wonder if I should just stick to just blogging here rather than splitting myself also at Bryan Off Topic…

I’m not getting a reply in my post in the WordPress.org forums, so I’m bumping it by posting here as well.

When I try to delete empty categories, Firefox [1.5.0.1] will hang for a few seconds before displaying a warning:

“A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.”

I’m running WordPress 2.0.2.

Thanks!

I just installed Performancing for Firefox. Pretty cool!

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.

I have my two blogs setup, and all the categories and post history show up just fine.

Gripes?

• Any bold text is enclosed in “b” HTML tags rather than “strong” HTML tags. (I don’t know how to write the actual tag here - oops.)
• Any italicized text is enclosed in “i” HTML tags rather than “em” HTML tags.
• Categories/tags are listed in some random order. With lots of tags, it made it hard to find the one(s) I wanted to check off for this post.

I’ve gotten used to writing from the WordPress interface, using the keyboard shortcuts for the different tags and whatnot. I’ve gotten used to not having to take my hands off the keyboard, so that’s been really efficient for me. So basically, I’m not sure if I’d completely switch over to using this plugin 100% of the time (especially if a post had to do with a lot of linking and lists). For the short quicker posts, I think this is very handy.

I’m not sure what else there is, but I’m pretty impressed, especially since it supports Blogger.com, Typepad.com, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, WordPress custom, and MoveableType custom. Isn’t this plugin part of what Flock was all about?

Golf clap: Weblog Tools Collection

Thanks to Donncha for pointing out FAlbum! I’m definitely watching this, too, especially for Andy’s class site. (He wants it to be as simple as possible for the kids to see their pictures.)

FAlbum - This is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to display your Flickr photos and photosets on your site.

This plugin uses the Flickr API.