Xampping it up
After a couple of meetings and numerous e-mails, I convinced the new EIC and the advisor for the Pleiad to let me move the newspaper’s Web site to WordPress last week. YAY! Huge improvement over FrontPage. The only downside is that I am the only one who can create the template for the site, and I’m still learning the ins and outs of magazine themes.
In order to give myself a “safe” space to experiment with my vision for the site, as well as various plugins and whatnot, I’ve downloaded XamppLite onto my laptop and am running a version of WordPress 2.7 on a localhost server. It’s my first experiment with this, and I have to say I’m liking it. A lot. My mistakes aren’t made public and I have access to all template and application files for WordPress–something that will change when the site goes live on Albion’s servers.
I’ve opted to modify the Structure theme to fit the paper’s needs–mostly because the site needs to be ready to go live quickly, and between work and classes and interviews I don’t have time to try to do something from scratch. With my novice abilities, that would probably take a long while even if I were working on it full-time.
After a couple days of playing around; this is what the “above the fold” of the site looks like (keeping in mind I’m using placeholder articles, not real ones):
The header graphic needs work, and the colors will likely be tweaked… but overall, I’m pretty happy with how far I’ve come as quickly as I’ve done it.
Anyone have any tips or suggestions for me as I continue to try to make this better?
Filed under: Journalism, School | 3 Comments
Tags: LinkedIn, online journalism, Pleiad, webwork, WordPress
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"It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write." ~Sinclair Lewis
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Three cheers for a Pleiad with an RSS feed. Have you thought about how you will manage the whole RSS thing? Will there be one feed for everything, or would the different departments have their own feeds, or both?
Also, I think the “comment” feature (web 2.0 ‘n’ all) will be great for opinions and features, but I don’t think it should be available for news stories, or those pages will quickly turn into opinions.
Is the Pleiad online going to simply replicate the weekly Pleiad or are there plans for more frequent updates or for material that will only appear in the online version?
Will there be video? Say yes!
Given the fact that lots of people don’t know how to use RSS, could the Pleiad have a Facebook group or identity that receives updates from WordPress? That way if someone was a “friend” of the Pleiad, they’d get a notice when the Pleiad website was updated.
I’m glad that someone is as excited about this as I am!
First, although comment features will be available on all stories, they will be moderated by the online editor… so any comments that are inappropriate won’t be posted.
The online Pleiad is going to have original content, most of which I hope to make interactive–polls, graphics, video. I want to get it to where the online content is available as soon as it is edited, but I’m not sure how well I’ll succeed in that endeavor.
Finally, I’ve thought about adding the Pleiad to both facebook and TwitterFeed, so that the stories are available in a number of different feeds/venues.