wordpress

DFID starts blogging

DFID have launched a new blogging platform, with various members of the department who are based abroad telling their stories through a group blog.

The site looks beautiful, which is perhaps to be expected when you consider that it was put together by arch government wordpresser Simon Dickson. Simon writes about the site:

I can’t say how pleased I am with the results. I’ve been collaborating with a couple of new contacts – my near-neighbour Tony Parsons on the design side, and Simon Wheatley (who I met at WordCamp) on the technical stuff that was beyond me. Both have been truly brilliant. And I have to say, the DFID guys have been fabulous too – giving me all the freedom I could ask for. It’s been a perfect combination, and I think it shows in the site.

It’s not just about the tech side though. Shane McCracken has been working with DFID to provide training to the bloggers, in collaboration with Griff Wigley. I helped out too, taking a bit of time out to show the DIFD web team in London how the WordPress administration interface works. This combination of training and support, should mean the quality of the content will match that of the site. Top marks to DFID for identifying and committing resource to this side of things.

Shane writes:

We’re very lucky in that our blogging volunteers are superb writers with extremely interesting lives and situations with enormous scope for great photography. They are going to provide a fine insight into the work that DFID do and the effect they have on the people of the countries in which and with which they work.

The coaching programme has had its challenges. As you can imagine the budget to fly us to Tanzania was not made available, so coaching is happening online is the same manner as we did with CivicSurf. The DFID bloggers are in full-time positions working seven days a week and in time zones and work patterns that don’t necessarily coincide with our 9 – 5 UK life. Thankfully Griff, who has been leading the coaching, works flexible hours.

Finally, Owen Barder, who used to work at DFID, notes approvingly:

DfID has a very good reputation abroad, but hardly anybody in the UK knows anything about it, or appreciates how much DfID contributes to positive perceptions of Britain. I hope this blog will help tell the story in a very direct and personal way.

Good work, all.

UK Parliament Launches Blog

The team behind the UK Parliament‘s website – which also includes accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others – have launched a WordPress blog. The Purpose of the blog seems to be focusing on the development of the Parliament website, including the development of a number of social web services.

I’m subscribed to the feed, and have added it to Public Sector Bloggers too.

Sticky posts in WordPress

Recently it was announced over at WordPress.com that a new feature had arrived – the ability to have ‘sticky’ posts on your blog homepage.

Regular updates are what blogging’s all about, but sometimes you want to keep hot topics or other static info at the top of your posts. This feature has existed as Sticky Topics in the forums, but hasn’t been available on blogs. Until now.

These are posts that exist outside the normal chronology of your blogging, and stay at the top no matter what.

There are a number of uses this feature could be put to – from introducing your blog to new readers, to highlighting important information to your readers.

However, people who manage their own WordPress installs needn’t be dismayed as there is a plugin which provides this functionality to self hosted blogs, which you can find here, courtesy of Lester Chan.

Re-order posts in WordPress

One of the features of a blog is that the posts appear in reverse-chronological order – that is to say, with the latest content first. But there are times when that might not always be appropriate. Let me give you an example.

I’m planning a series of blog posts on a certain topic. Current subscribers and regular readers will spot them as they come in, but what about comers to the party? One way of grouping all the posts would of course be to stick them all in the same category. But all the posts will be displayed in traditional reverse-chronological order, meaning folk have to work their way from the end to the beginning, or dig around for the first post in the set.

There is a way around this though, which can be achieved by fiddling around with the URLs you use. Let’s take the posts on DavePress within the blogging category as an example. The traditional view of the posts can be found at http://davepress.net/category/blogging/ which has the latest at the top. Compare that with the results of http://davepress.net/category/blogging/?order=asc (note the ?order=asc at the end). This view of the posts put them in chronological order, starting at the beginning.

You can apply this to any view of your posts, including the home page, and tag and author views. There are other options too, including sorting posts or pages alphabetically. If you really wanted to, you could also incorporate it into your theme, making such presentation an integrated part of your blog.

I’ll be using it to help promote the blog series I’m planning. By circulating the URL including the extra bit to reverse the post order, people will be able to find themselves at the beginning and work their way through without excessive scrolling just to get started.

Am sure there are other uses this could be put to – any thoughts?

Social networks, or beefed-up blogs?

I have been looking around recently at social networkings systems, focusing on freely available ones, such as Elgg (which powers the rather lovely UnLtdWorld, and which has its proper v1.0 release out soon) and PeopleAggregator. The other option I had thought of would be to fashion something out of Drupal.

A post at Read/WriteWeb, however, has made me step back and think a little:

Platforms like WordPress and Movable Type democratized the process of self-publishing. With these tools, everyone could be a publisher and it didn’t require advanced technical expertise to do so. Now, the next revolution for publishing is to bring that same ease of creation to the process of building social networks. With Six Apart’s recent release of Movable Type 4.2, that revolution has begun. The new release provides DIY tools for building your own social networking platform which includes member profiles, forums, friending capabilities, rating of content, and more. WordPress isn’t too far behind, either – a new platform called BuddyPress, is being built on the WordPress core. Is this the future of blogging? Or is this the future of web publishing altogether?

I had been aware of BuddyPress for a while, but whilst I have noted Moveable Type’s development, I’ve never really go into that platform, for some reason. I think the Buddy/WordPress approach is sound, though, not building up the core functionality of the platform, but adding the social networking features as add-ons. If you want it, it’s there to use, otherwise you don’t need to be troubled with it.

BuddyPress is sadly some way from being production ready, so for now I’ll stick with the dedicated social network platforms. But in the future, rather than learn a new system, it will be a lot easier to use one I am familiar with to develop exactly what I need.

What are other folks’ views?

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