Once Again, An Assignment is Snatched from the Jaws of Death

For the second week in a row, I had to wade into unfamiliar waters. Last week it was RSS feeds (blogging wasn't new); this week it's CMS - WordPress in particular.

I was mainly familiar with WordPress as it is used for blogging by various people who forward links to me when they think I'll be interested. I never dreamed that with a modicum of effort that it would be way more customizable than Blogspot, Salon, or Vox. That's probably because it's way more than just blogging software. It's a full-on CMS.

I created a login, and went about joining my teammates Sharon, Melanie and Brittany in forming a joint blogging team on the site that we were re-purposing. It looked like we still didn't have our Akismet Key entered to activate spam filtering, so I obtained that and entered it first. The I dove into the rest of it.

When I think about how we each had a separate profile and could blog individually, even under shared categories, something made sense to me. I thought about how I had seen teams of three or four people sharing a blog to post info on rare music. They took turns posting under the various categories on the site. It was almost like having some of the most knowledgeable people on the subject available in the same location, each adding their own flavor. I always liked that, and now I know of a way to do it.

After creating my "About Bill Davis" page and adding a picture, then editing my personal profile with a bunch of things that are absolutely untrue (hey, this is just an exercise, right?), I changed the theme on the page from Multi-color 1.7 to Arjuna X 1.3.9, then back to Multi-color. I was very impressed by how seamlessly I was able to do this. Then I added a widget to display weather information for Valdosta and moved some of the other widgets around.

I also embedded a YouTube video into a post, but it won't play. I'm guessing that since the other video on our site doesn't work either, it must be restricted by Valdosta's servers. I also tried to download and install a Tweeter plug-in which would allow you to highlight any string of text on a site post (up to 140 characters, of course), and immediately "Tweet" it to followers, and it would contain a link back to the original post. Alas, I learned after spending too much time on this that the plug-in portion of the assignment was withdrawn. I seem to remember something written (in Hieroglyphics or Cuneiform, no doubt) in my grade school report card about paying attention and following instructions...I guess I'll get that right eventually.

Overall, this has been another very instructive week, leaving me feeling both smarter for the things I did and dumber for the things I should have known but didn't.

Now if I can just get the "Global Impact of RFID" video to work, I'll be happy.