Home
>
technology > Events added to nemasket.net
Events added to nemasket.net
Warning: The following post may contain techno-babble
.
Control panel entry
Since moving my blog from blogger to hosting it myself using wordpress, I’ve done a fair bit of monkeying around with the format and features. The goal of course is to have an attractive site, that’s easy to maintain, and has a lot of readers. One thing I’ve tried is sidebars on the right hand side to attract attention to events or significant changes to the site. There are numerous “widgets” that can be plugged into the site in various places depending on the theme. The widget I’ve been using is a text widget for the “What’s new” sidebar. In English that means I can put anything in there but if I want a link, image, etc, I have to manually put it in there myself writing raw html(the language web pages are written in). This is not a problem – I often write in raw html. It does however get tedious even with my super Internet mojo powers. One of my flaws is that I hate to do repetitive tasks and invariably write a program or otherwise automate something once I get bored doing it.
.
WP List Cal
New event entry
So I came across a nifty little plugin called
WPListCal. Once installed the WordPress control panel contains a new section for adding and editing events and a new entry for configuring WPListCAl it in the “Settings” section. It shows up after “Posts”, “Media”, “Links”, “Comments” and “Pages”. Basically you enter the event name, link if you have one, date/time and any text you want. That’s it. WPListCal takes care of creating the hypertext link and formats the entry in a consistent way. In the “Settings” section there is a page for customizing the format of a calendar/event entry.
.
If you’ve used WordPress, you know that there are two main constructs – Pages and Posts. Each can have attributes to aid in navigation and searching(Categories and Tags). WPListCal creates what looks like a third construct – Events. You create and edit them exactly like Posts or Pages. They have a special field for links, and date/time in addition to the normal text/images you might put into a post. The widget appears along with all the other widgets and can be placed anywhere on the page your theme supports. My “event” widget is named “Notables” and is on the right side of the page.
.
So why am I writing about this? I know of at least 4 other web sites in town that use WordPress and I’m just sharing the wealth.
I’m just venturing into learning the Google Web kit and Javascript, but I’m still intimidated by how advanced the technology has become. Working through the tutorials at a snail’s pace. But I have great hopes. Word Press seems somewhat limiting in terms of presentation and some of the “goodies” of other blog tools. But perhaps a little more experience, when I actually get into blogging, will prove me wrong. I am impressed with much of the free support software I’ve been able to find and download.
I would only partially agree with that statement. Presentation is limited somewhat due to the nature of a blog – it’s a post based thing. WordPress also has pages which give it more of a CMS feel. There are probably 10s of thousands of templates and probably thousands of plugins that extend it’s functionality so I wouldn’t call it limited in terms of functionality. Blogger on the other hand I find a lot more limiting. There are fewer templates and add-ons. I can’t think of another blog tool that has more than WordPress. Now if you want to get into non-blog tools, proper CMS systems like Joomla then I’d have to agree. Having used both, I prefer WordPress. Ruby on Rails is real hot stuff, or was. But PHP/MySQL along with DHTML, AJAX, and JavaScript seem to be the heavy lifters in the opensource world today.
I guess you might think it limiting if you look at something like Web Kit or Rails in that they give you blocks to roll your own. But for an off-the-shelf tool, WordPress is pretty dang good.
Agreed. I recommend WordPress often.
It doesn’t work for me only because I’m a super control freak.