That was six years ago. These days I do a lot more code samples, and trying to get characters escaped properly is becoming more and more difficult. Also, a lot of commenters have overlooked the little “Textile formatting is in effect!” message in the comment form, and their stuff has gotten screwed up six ways from Sunday.

So, with regret, I’ve just converted all the posts and comments back to regular HTML. I expect to find broken things for a while. If you notice something that doesn’t look right, please leave a comment, and I will fetch an older revision out of the database.

So, I just imported a bunch of stuff, and I’m now cleaning it up (the code from those posts really doesn’t play nicely with Textile, which might force me to abandon it at last, as much as I love it), and in a little while I’ll shut down the other site and redirect everything here.

Sorry about the mess.

Me? Well, I was sick for a while there. No, not hamthrax. Not even a virus, really; turns out the stuff I was on for back pain had some unlisted side effects. I’m better now. Except that my back hurts. Oh, and I’ve had a cold for two weeks.

Also, I was traveling a lot. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I wound up going to ArmadilloCon, FenCon, HighEdWeb, and World Fantasy all in quick succession, with side trips to San Antonio and Waco in between. One more big trip this weekend, to An Event Apart in San Francisco, and then I’m done.

And, you know, I’ve been busy. I’m frantically finishing up all my freelance projects because I have a book deal.

No, not for a novel. Don’t get too excited. Just a little excited.

I’m writing a book on WordPress! It’ll be out next summer from Apress, and I’m slanting it more toward CMS use than blogs, because, you know, WordPress is good for that sort of thing.

Look! It has a cover and it looks real and stuff! And it’s on Amazon and everything! That’s right: if you search for me on Amazon, you will find stuff.

OK, I’m a little excited.

So, you know, if you don’t see me around much for the next few months, I’m not dead… I’m just on a deadline.

HighEdWeb has an active backchannel. This year, things got interesting.

We had excellent presenters. Everyone was very positive, using Twitter to share brief insights or links to notes and slides. Our first keynote speaker, Jared Spool, did a great job. Not everyone agreed with him on all points, but his presentation was polished, his delivery was engaging, and he gave us lots to think about.

Tuesday’s keynote was a different story. Our speaker was David Galper, of the defunct Ruckus Network. He was perhaps an odd choice for a keynote speaker. My committee wasn’t part of that decision, so I can’t really speak to it, but I know the general idea was that he would offer some insights from the market research he’d done on tons and tons of college students.

The problem is, he did that research about five years ago and hasn’t updated anything since. His video interviews with students included discussions of “new” technologies like MySpace and Kazaa. (Last year, one of our presentations included data on MySpace’s declining number of users under the age of 25.) His insights included the earth-shattering revelation that students connect with one another online. You can listen to part of his presentation on Ustream, although you can’t make out the slides. They were a mess, very difficult to read from the back of the room.

What do 450 web nerds do when they’re trapped in a hotel ballroom listening to someone who’s insulting their intelligence? They get out their laptops and smartphones and start tweeting.

Jeremiah Owyang wrote How Speakers Should Integrate Social Into Their Presentation in response to what he saw on the #heweb09 Twitter stream during our Tuesday keynote. He is an expert on social media, but he wasn’t there, and he got a few things wrong.

I felt horrible for that speaker who likely didn’t even know what was happening till someone posted his phone number on Twitter and people were texting him how horrible he had done.

Did anyone actually text Galper? Several people joked about it when his phone number appeared on the screen, but doing so would have crossed the line between professional criticism and personal harassment. I haven’t heard that anyone texted the poor guy, and I sincerely hope no one did. As far as I know, the backlash was confined to Twitter. In the room, everyone was polite and discreet.

I felt horrible for him, too. Not because people were mean to him, but because he was so woefully unprepared. It hurts to watch someone faceplant like that. I’m sure that’s why so many people were checking Twitter in the first place: they wanted to look away, anywhere but at the guy displaying his ignorance onstage.

While the first audience revolt was at SXSW, a new media tech conference, where adoption of new communication tools is likely. The Higher Education conference wasn’t focused solely on technology, so this revolt has moved out of the technology scene.

Say what? It’s the HighEdWeb conference. It’s squarely in the technology scene. It’s focused exclusively on web technology. In fact, this is where the speaker screwed up: he clearly thought we were a bunch of clueless administrators who could be placated with a five-year-old, low-tech presentation. Not so. In terms of the expertise on display, this conference is frequently on par with SXSW and An Event Apart.

Did the speaker check out the conference beforehand? Did he notice that we had an entire programming track devoted to social media, and another called “Technical: Propeller Hats Required”? If he’d stopped and said to himself, “Hey, I bet people who are talking about viral videos and explaining Twitter to the boss probably know about MySpace and Kazaa and ICQ already,” he could have avoided the train wreck.

Monitor the Backchannel While Speaking.

Here I just disagree completely. Speakers should absolutely watch the listeners’ body language for signs of trouble. I also think it’s a good idea to pause periodically for feedback during the presentation rather than hurtling all the way to the end before taking questions. But checking Twitter while speaking strikes me as a terrible idea. If the speaker takes a break to read off her phone, the audience has time to lose interest. And what if she did see terrible comments? She’d have to possess superhuman poise to not only absorb the feedback but deal with it constructively while still on the stage. Pausing to ask for questions instead keeps the audience engaged and gives them the opportunity to challenge the speaker — but makes them do so in front of everyone else, where they’re less likely to get snarky.

The overwhelming backchannel response to the keynote led outside observers to conclude that HighEdWeb attendees are a terrible group of people. I really wish I could find a good Twitter transcript of the whole conference. The one at What the Hashtag picks up after the first day of presentations. Here are a few tweets from a 10-minute period on Tuesday afternoon:

“TNT10 presenter is like that relative you are glad to see at family dinners cus you know he’ll kick things up a notch” — @LucidLilith

“@kyledbowen proves great slideshow graphics aren’t a pipe dream.” – @secretrobot

“Awesome job by @kprentiss with his pechu kucha presentation.” – @markgr

“oohs and aahs in @Frommelt presentation” – @shellylbrown

I saw a lot of that throughout the conference: attendees getting excited about our regular session presenters, telling their friends about it, and congratulating the speakers on jobs well done. The worst thing I saw about a regular session? “I’m not feeling this one.”

Are HighEdWeb attendees a bunch of jackasses? I don’t think so. I think they’re smart people who don’t appreciate having their time wasted, who know what it takes to put together strong presentations and expect paid speakers to do at least as much as the volunteers, who demand excellence but are open and generous about showing their appreciation when they get it.

I love being a part of the community, and I really hope I can be there again next year.

Other responses to the keynote disaster:

• Takeaways from the Great Keynote Revolt of 2009
• The Great Keynote Meltdown of 2009 at .eduGuru
• speakers: learn from twitter hecklers
• There and Back Again, a geek girls tale of #heweb09
• HighEdWeb 2009 Wrap Up
• Twitter-heckled Key Note Speaker – Know your Audience!

This widget will list random posts from a chosen category. You can choose how many posts to display, and whether to show the excerpt or the full content in addition to the post title. You may also link the widget title to the category archive if you like.

Random Posts from Category widget screenshot

First, I had two custom plugins I’d written for clients’ sites that just needed a little work to make them useful to the general public. Just as I was finishing up, I realized that the plugin competition had a week left to run. Not only was the plugin I was working on eligible, but the one I’d released earlier in the month was, and the half-finished HTML importer would be if I could get it out the door in time. So, in between more client projects (did I mention business has been good?), I finished them up and got all three plugins entered.

Second, I made the abrupt decision to dump Drupal for the Writing Center redesign and go with WordPress instead. I’d chosen Drupal over a year ago and had been struggling with it ever since. At the time, we needed some features (most notably a robust events calendar) that WordPress couldn’t provide. However, WP has had two major updates since then, and Drupal was proving to be more trouble than it was worth. Among other things, in Drupal it takes three plugins and an act of Congress just to get a rich text editor with image uploading (never mind other forms of media). In WordPress, that just works. And since then, the university has made a centralized events calendar available, so we can enter our stuff there and just pull a feed of upcoming events onto our home page. So, after gnashing my teeth and tearing my hair out all summer, I finally said “screw it,” located a Joomla-to-WordPress importer (Joomla being our original sucktastic CMS, powering the current site), and had the new WP site more or less up to the same point it had been in Drupal — in three days instead of several months.

Suck it, Drupal. You are too complicated for your own good.

The upshot is that I’ve spent the last couple of months, and especially the last week, absolutely up to my eyeballs in WordPress code. As a result, plugins are falling out of my brain like loose change.

This one is tiny compared to the importer. I’ve been using Alex Günsche’s Headache With Pictures for ages, and it was a nice, simple way to add some private notes to the Dashboard. On one site, it holds newbie instructions for using the media uploader; on another, I keep a to-do list of posts I haven’t gotten around to writing yet.

However, the plugin had never been updated to work with the newer Dashboard widgets, so it couldn’t be moved and it didn’t match the new design. It also isn’t available anymore, or at least not that I can find — I’d long since resorted to copying it from one site to another, like smuggling it along a secret network of my own making. I got the point where I really needed to either update or replace it. I wasn’t happy with any of the alternatives, so I updated it instead.

The result is Dashboard Notepad. It is the very simplest of scratch pads for the Dashboard. The widget settings allow you to choose which roles can edit the notes, and which roles can merely read them.

The notepad

The widget options

One more, and then I’ll go back to talking about writing and watching TV. I promise.

If importing pages, the directory hierarchy will be preserved. Directories containing the specified file types will be imported as empty parent pages. Directories that do not contain the specified file types will be ignored.

As files are imported, the resulting IDs, permalinks, and titles will be displayed. On completion, the importer will provide a list of Apache redirects that can be used in your .htaccess file to seamlessly transfer visitors from the old file locations to the new WordPress posts or pages.

Options:

• import pages or posts
• specify content and title as HTML tags or Dreamweaver template regions
• remove a common phrase (such as the site name) from imported titles
• specify file extensions to import (e.g. html, htm, php)
• specify directories to exclude (e.g. images, css)
• if importing pages, specify whether your top-level files should become top-level pages or children of an existing page
• choose status, author, and timestamp
• use meta descriptions as excerpts

Requires PHP 5.

More screenshots and download info

This plugin is part of the WordPress plugin competition. Like it? Give it a rating!

Results: imported pages and rewrite rules

This should be useful for people working with magazine layouts.

I actually released it yesterday, then updated it today with the category option. Must step away from the keyboard once in a while….

Download at wordpress.org »

Fortunately, Luke is still awesome. Mere moments after I emailed him, he posted an updated version. I’ve updated my Automator script as well, adding a Growl notification and compatibility with the latest version of Automator.

I still haven’t found a better tool for dealing with Word HTML than Luke’s script. The Automator script just makes it a little easier to use if you aren’t comfortable with the command line. Enjoy!

And my new WordPress as CMS site will be a home for all kinds of tips on making WP a more robust CMS. The first two posts are up: one on Next Page, and one explaining why you don’t need to roll your own link shortener

Nothing like a holiday weekend for finishing up languished projects.