Transferring the Computer Helpers to WordPress, part 1

I decided first to document my attempt/effort/project to move my ever-changing web pages for the Library’s “Computer Helpers” pages to a blog format. Among other things. Maybe it will help somebody else. Those of you with more knowledge or capabilities, please be kind if you comment. This is, in large part, trial and error. Sometimes more of the latter than the former, but I get things done.

“Computer Helpers” were my pages to cover all the things that came up in my various readings, my email newsletters from various sources, and the details that students needed to have in user-friendly form, that weren’t necessarily covered in one place anywhere else. It’s definitely idiosyncratic and not intended to be definitive, just helpful.

Having just redone all the pages for our first major revision for our catalog web pages since we went to Innovative Interfaces at the end of 1999, I was increasingly aware that it took a lot of time to update and revise these pages, keep the links functional, etc., and it would take more time in the future. Was there a way to use a blog or a wiki for this instead?

Since I was posting new items to this fairly often (at least 1 or 2 a week, sometimes more), it looked like a blog might be the more appropriate choice of the two.

Since I’d already chosen WordPress for the host (it was free, it had the features, it was a likely candidate for campus software if/when we get some, it exports if we don’t get it) for the Boreham Library blog “Literary Lions“, I decided to try to use that.

WordPress will host multiple free blogs. Great – I can log in and work with several of them at once.

I wanted a format that would allow me to have fixed text at the top of the page, and then show the blog posts below. That way, I could just add a new blog post under the correct category whenever I wanted to add something. There would be fixed text, any standing explanations or instructions I wanted to have, and then the link to the posts.

There is a way to do that, using a widget — provided you have the WordPress software on your own server. Nuts. I was using the freebie service. Okay, workaround time. I created pages for my broad areas (Software, Internet and Email, Security, etc.) and put the text in. Then I put a link to the posts under that: “Click here for the latest posts on this topic.” Not ideal, perhaps, but still workable, I hoped. I’ll have to get some feedback on that – constructive comments are encouraged.

I choose Digg 3 column for the format. It allows me to import a graphic or picture for the header– should I ever find one — and it allows widgets. WordPress allows a limited but reasonable number of possible formats for the free blogs. Digg 3 column is a nice setup for what I’m doing with this. It’s by Small Potato and seems like a good fit. It has 3 columns (hence the name) and that gives me a useful arrangement. And it’s free, which fits my budget for all this.

The catch seems to be that it has some behavior rather different from the format I choose for the Literary Lions blog. The Categories don’t have RSS. Also, when I click on the categories links, the resulting display of posts doesn’t have the links working — they don’t even show up as links. That’s a nuisance. I’m compensating by putting the URLs in after the link-that-isn’t-working. I may see if the author can do anything about that, but you get what you pay for, and I don’t want to make a big deal out of it.

Enabled the Snap Preview option, which is very handy for checking links. The results are inconsistent, but for the most part it shows the page it should for that link.