Bradley J. Shively

My Wordpress Ritual: Plug-Ins Edition

// February 22nd, 2010 // Comments // design

Over the past few years, I’ve done more than my fair share of tinkering with Wordpress. Early on in my college career, I became involved with the student government at Penn State, as well as the student government for my college. The result of being “plugged in” and making it known that you have some knowledge regarding web design and technology in general has been numerous e-mails and phone calls out of the blue from old contacts for help with random software, gadgets, and the all-too-often “I need a website…”

It hasn’t been all bad, though; I’ve learned some valuable skills through my endeavoring for others. It has even yielded a couple of paying gigs, which I hope to gradually turn into a more steady stream of client work in the next few months. However, it’s gotten my thinking about what exactly I do when I setup a Wordpress installation, and how much of it could be streamlined for productivity’s sake.

While I really enjoy the plug-in installer built directly into the Wordpress dashboard, it isn’t terribly efficient. It requires that I manually search for each plug-in, and then click two or three boxes to download, install, and activate each that I select. There isn’t even any sort of queuing feature (which would be awesome), where I can compile a list of 5+ plug-ins that I want to install, and apply bulk actions to them. There may be some sort of plug-in that provides this functionality (irony), but I like the out-of-the-box features because I can rely on them not to break when I update the WP core.

So, since I plan on seeking out and working with more clients in the future, it makes sense to come up with a streamlined process for my Wordpress work. If I’m flat quoting projects, the less time I spend doing menial tasks, the more money I’m making per hour, and the more money I can reasonably dedicate to making a client’s site awesome rather than just functional. Therefore, I think I’m going to take a new approach starting now.

Certain plug-ins are present by default when I setup a Wordpress page. For example, Google XML Sitemaps improves the ability of search engines to map content on your page. What’s the point of publishing for the web if no one can find your work? This goes in every single site, every single time. Similarly, All-in-one SEO Pack gets installed on all but the most rushed of jobs, for its ability to give control over tags, meta data, page titles, and so on. For anything I build for myself, I always install Google Analyticator to track traffic sources, number of hits, most popular content, and so on.

The point is, rather than selecting all of these individually through the Wordpress interface, it seems to me that it would be much better to keep local folders based on broad categories. These categories might include “essential”, “SEO”, “comments”, and so on, with each housing plug-ins specific to that type of functionality. This would allow me to do mass uploads of my most important plug-ins using an FTP client. While I would occasionally have to update these local copies with the newest versions, I think it would be much more efficient and I would waste far fewer clicks this way.

What are your must-haves on a fresh Wordpress install, other than a spiffy theme that aligns with the message of your site?

A Critical Look at IST2U

// January 14th, 2009 // Comments // Penn State, design, news

Among my many responsibilities at the College of Information Sciences and Technology, I am the Media Director of IST2U.  In a nutshell, this means I’m the guy that gets e-mails about upcoming events from all the folks in the offices at IST, which I then condense into short blurbs that contain the essential information (date, time, location, a sentence or two summarizing the event.)  The purpose of IST2U is to be the official source of information about events and opportunities happening within the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State.

In my previous semester as the media director, I focused primarily on keeping the wheels spinning.  The transition from the previous director was a tad bumpy (due to no one’s fault in particular, just the nature of the beast), and so my main efforts were spent meeting folks around the office and processing updates as they came in.  However, towards the middle of the semester I began to get a bit more experimental.  First, I added Google Analytics tracking into the Drupal installation that runs the site.  With the help of one of the IST system administrators, the analytics results exclude any traffic from inside the IST Building (since many of the workstations there have IST2U as their homepage).  This greatly reduced the number of “false hits.”

I also setup a Twitter account for IST2U.  This was my first stab at “real” marketing for the site.  While I have given brief talks at student government meetings, in classes, and so on, I had never really actively “pushed” IST2U to people.  By integrating IST2U with the Twitter social network, I took the first steps towards giving students the opportunity to select from a variety of content delivery mechanisms.  My predecessors used e-mail campaigns, essentially carpet bombing all-student mailing lists with a weekly digest of news and events.  However, students often begrudged this approach and would create spam filters, or simply delete the messages without reading them.

The best thing about the Twitter account for IST2U (for me) is that it is fully automated.  Using the TwitterFeed service, the RSS of the page is checked every half hour and updates are automatically posted to the Twitter account.  This is a great payoff, as it takes only a few minutes to configure, and after that you can just let it do it’s thing.  My ideal marketing solution is the passive “trickling” of data to different outputs, from which the userbase can choose their preferred method of content retrieval.  This will leave me free to compose new posts, analyze traffic and advertising results and develop new campaigns based on these results, and improve the site by adding new features.

I believe that RSS is highly underutilized within the college demographic.  I know very few people that use any sort of RSS reader, and even fewer that are “up to date” on the articles they subscribe to.  Therefore, having the website and an RSS feed as the only mechanisms for content delivery is, in my opinion, a terrible strategy.  For this reason, I am trying to extend IST2U into more social networks that I know are utilized by college students.

Tonight I setup a Facebook “Page” for IST2U.  On it, I have created a discussion board where students can post feedback, feature requests, etc. that I will evaluate and hopefully implement during the re-launch of IST2U.  My goal is to have IST2U fully migrated to WordPress (I find it to be considerably less “clunky” than Drupal) by Monday, January 26th.  It is my hope that through these improvements and renovations, IST2U can finally become what it was always intended to be: a useful, viable web resource for IST and SRA students.

I am currently in the process of drafting a traffic report, in which I’m conducting an analysis of the data I currently have on IST2U, as gathered by Google Analytics over the past several months.  This will be the baseline upon which we compare the success or failure of IST2U in the future.

Getting Things Done, Making the Switch, and Interface Invention

// September 10th, 2008 // Comments // design, gtd, mac

In my ongoing approach to find better ways to “get things done“, I’ve been using CulturedCode’s Things.

Even though I’ve only just recently “switched” to Mac OS X, I’ve already found that my years of Windows shortcut-keying are starting to be replaced by the Apple accessibility shortcuts. I also don’t know how I ever lived without multitouch gestures. With the MultiClutch Preference Pane, I’ve programmed Firefox and a few other applications so that I can easily navigate them with a few simple gestures.

Coincidentally, my switching to OS X and the release of Firefox Ubiquity occurred at almost exactly the same time. I’m not only adjusting to using the Quicksilver ‘launcher’ (and so much more), but now I have Ubiquity for web surfing and all the built-in interface tweaks that are a part of OS X. I’m completely dependent upon Spaces.

I think it’s interesting how the interface (menu bars, startbar, etc.) has become so much more flexible. I can now navigate to sites without using an address bar, open programs without browsing a start menu or directory, and perform countless other tasks through automation and macros. The GUI included with Windows and Mac OS seems to be increasingly less important as developers come up with unique ways for users to index and search the resources on their computers without using the out-of-the-box utilities.