Sillybean

Arkansas Regional HighEdWeb

Last Friday, I spoke at the Arkansas Regional HighEdWeb conference. I had a great time! The organizers did a fantastic job — no one could tell it was their first year. I really enjoyed the other speakers’ presentations, too. Drew Stephens had some great ideas on using grid layouts to accommodate many campus departments in a single web template. Aaron Baker schooled me on using Analytics properly. Shari Erwin spoke about content strategy, and how delegating responsibility via a CMS often puts content in the hands of people who don’t have a vested interest in getting the content right. Good stuff!

My slides are up on Slideshare, if you want a copy. The fonts are screwy, but I’ve just accepted that I can’t fix them. Apparently Slideshare doesn’t do Clarendon. There’s also a Ustream video of my talk. (Oh, you guys. Have I mentioned how much I hate having my picture taken? Video is SO MUCH WORSE.) I’ll extract the audio later and add it to the Slideshare file.

This was my first keynote speech, and I didn’t get tweckled, so I suppose it went well! It was also the only event all summer where I wasn’t talking about WordPress. (In fact, stay tuned later today for my complete schedule of August WordPress events.) I can’t make it to the national HighEdWeb conference this year, and I’m going to miss those folks something fierce, so it was great to get my annual dose of higher-ed camaraderie a little early. It was also great to see the friends I made in May at WordCamp Fayetteville. I hope this group does it again next year!

Call a navigation menu using a shortcode

Today I came across a weird situation: I needed to place a navigation menu in the content of a page. A shortcode was the obvious solution, but there doesn’t appear to be one built in for menus. I created this one very quickly:

function print_menu_shortcode($atts, $content = null) {
	extract(shortcode_atts(array( 'name' => null, ), $atts));
	return wp_nav_menu( array( 'menu' => $name, 'echo' => false ) );
}
add_shortcode('menu', 'print_menu_shortcode');

Place this in functions.php, then use [menu name="main-menu"] to call the menu in your content (replacing "main-menu" with your menu’s slug, of course).

You could adapt this to accept any of the other arguments available for wp_nav_menu(), but this served my purposes.

New plugin: Convert Post Types

I’m moving some old posts over to a new post type now that I’ve upgraded the sites at work to WordPress 3.0, and I needed a way to convert hundreds of posts in a category. The Post Type Switcher plugin does a nice job, but only on one post at a time. So, I wrote my own: Convert Post Types.

This is a utility for converting lots of posts or pages to a custom post type (or vice versa). You can limit the conversion to posts in a single category or children of specific page. You can also assign new taxonomy terms, which will be added to the posts’ existing terms.

Download Convert Post Types wordpress.org »

Convert Post Types options

the metaphor of the skellytum

I reread a lot of Lois McMaster Bujold’s books while I was sick, first the Sharing Knife books and then the Vorkosigan series — all of it, this time, not just my favorites. I adore these books. Well, Cetaganda is boring as all get out, and this time through I realized it’s because the supporting cast is boring. The plot is fine, and Miles is Miles, but the rest of the players have very little to do. The Cetagandans, especially the haut women, are inscrutable by design. The ambassador and the local ImpSec guy are being deliberately kept in the dark. Ivan spends half his time seducing ghem women offstage, and the other half unconscious. It’s just not much fun, being stuck alone in a mystery with Miles. He needs a proper foil.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about Komarr and A Civil Campaign, not Cetaganda. I notice something new every time I read these (as it should be, with good books). This time, one of the things that struck me was the clever way Bujold uses Ekaterin’s skellytum plant as a metaphor for her emotional state. (more…)

Twitter Archive, WordPress Importer

I’ve finally managed to create a complete archive of my Twitter account — and none too soon, as I’m quickly approaching the 3200-tweet limit for exports. I’ll probably mess with the theme later, but for now I’ve followed Theme Lab’s tutorial more or less exactly. My only problem was that I had a hard time getting all the tweets! I tried several of the backup services, but Twitter was constantly having issues, and the backups would only go back four months or so. Finally, I found Brad Touesnard’s Twitter RSS Importer for WordPress. That worked a treat, once I updated it for WordPress 3.0. (I’ve sent Brad the updated version; he says he’ll post it soon.) It kept cutting me off after 71 pages every time, but I tweaked the code to change the starting page to 71, and then 142, and after a few tries I finally got everything. If you need to do the same, look for these lines:

$url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/'.$this->username.'.rss?page=';
$i = 1;

… and just change the 1 to whatever page number you need. (Check how many tweets were imported and divide by 20.)

HOORAY. Finally, a complete backup!