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Category Archives: edtech

BuddyPress and the YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter plugin

17-Jun-11

A few weeks ago, I wrote about reclaiming short URLs using YOURLS. That post raised some interest among the CUNY Academic Commons team in having a URL shortener just for the Commons, with full integration into BuddyPress. So I emailed Ozh Richard, author of YOURLS, about the possibility of adding BuddyPress support to his official [...]

Shorten your own dang URLs

30-May-11

In my last Project Reclaim post, I talked about using WordPress as a Twitpic-like personal mobile photo service. When the ultimate goal of the photoblog is to send a tweet, it’s almost always necessary to use a URL shortener. But trusting your URL shortening to a free service is a dangerous move. If that service [...]

BuddyPress Docs 1.1: Doc History

25-May-11

I’ve just released version 1.1 of BuddyPress Docs, my collaborative editing software for BuddyPress. The big new feature in version 1.1 is the History tab. After upgrading, you’ll notice that what used to be a single Edit button has been reorganized into three tabs: Read, Edit, and History. History allows you to brows the entire [...]

Revisiting Git, Github, and the wordpress.org plugin repository

23-May-11

Some months ago, I wrote about using Git and Github with the wordpress.org plugin repository. Since that time, I’ve been refining my plugin development workflow. I now do all of my development with Git, using git-svn tools to do all svn management. Preamble: Git as primary vs secondary Before talking more about my workflow, I [...]

Purple April

03-Apr-11

For the month of April, I’ll be here, at my alma mater Cornell College in Mt Vernon, Iowa, teaching an intro to philosophy class. Available for confirmations, bat/bar mitzvahs, and events related to WordPress.

Making the Thunderbird interface more Gmail-y

21-Mar-11

As part of Project Reclaim, I’m gearing up to move my email off of Gmail and onto my own server. Email is, and long has been, central to my life online – it’s my main point of contact for so many personal and professional connections, and my email archives are the closest thing I’ve got [...]

Project Reclaim

15-Mar-11

Update: I have begun aggregating these posts at projectreclaim.net. Lately I have been feeling increasingly uneasy about the state of my digital affairs. I am a leader on a number of open source software projects that pride themselves on, among other things, their ability to enable users to “own their own data”. Moreover, I am [...]

New BuddyPress plugin: BuddyPress Docs

02-Mar-11

Today I am releasing the first public beta of a significant new BuddyPress plugin: BuddyPress Docs. BuddyPress Docs is a collaborative, front-end, rich-text, document editing tool for BuddyPress groups (individual user Docs are an upcoming feature). Read much more about the plugin’s features. This plugin has been developed for the CUNY Academic Commons (though it [...]

Group Announcements tab in BuddyPress

13-Jan-11

Cross-posted at the CUNY Academic Commons Development blog I had a request or two to explain how I built the Group Announcements feature on the CUNY Academic Commons. Here goes. Brief background: When the Commons was upgraded to BuddyPress 1.2, we got the benefit of interactive activity streams everywhere, including groups. This caused some confusion, [...]

Extending Anthologize: Part 2

29-Nov-10

In my last post, I gave a brief overview of what happens when you click the Export Project button in Anthologize, with an eye toward demonstrating the role that third party plugins (written by people Just Like You!) can play in extending the software. In this post, I’ll flesh out some of those details. Step [...]