Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

Using a group WordPress magazine site in online journalism teaching

Last semester on the Journalism BA course at UCA in Farnham saw an experiment in teaching first-year Online Journalism students. We created a group news site in WordPress that aims to replicate the processes and set-up of real-world online news publishing. Needless to say, this has not gone as smoothly as it might. The background
We […]

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Six Laws of CMS: lessons from a web site launch

As regular visitors may be aware, I spend a lot of time with web content management systems (CMS). Having spent some time involved in a biggish web site relaunch this year, I can now reliably draft some of the Laws of CMS that anyone in this field should expect to apply. Law 1: It only exists […]

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

My tangled web of analytics

Warning: intense WordPress stats geekery ahead We’re coming up to the annual WordPress geekery blowout that is my full year web stats report. Freelance Unbound’s half-yearly web stats geekery report came when the site was hosted on WordPress.com. This had its ups and downs. The upside was that it was simple to understand – WordPress […]

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Typekit experiment: conclusion

It’s time to turn my Typekit code off. Typekit offers an online library of fonts you can use in your blog or web site without relying on it being installed on your visitor’s computer. Though it’s been exciting to see Freelance Unbound with a headline font that isn’t either Georgia or Verdana (the web’s two […]

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

WordPress/Facebook integration fail

I’ve been wittering on about social networks to students at Solent University recently, so I thought I ought to put my money where my mouth is and link Freelance Unbound to Facebook. Apart from being a useful technical exercise, it should be interesting to see if it encourages some of my Facebook network – a […]

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

My experiment with Typekit

Which, if you’re reading this on Freelance Unbound and not an RSS feed, you’ll see working in the headline above. That whole new typographic look is thanks to Typekit – a service that allows web users to access a font library online and so expand the typography available to web designers. Normally, the drawback with […]

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Create your own WordPress theme

Despite the wealth of tutorial information on the WordPress Codex, the idea of creating your own WordPress theme can be a bit daunting. So here’s a great tutorial on Web Designer magazine that strips the process down to its essentials and gives them to you in a logical order. Given that I’m planning to create a […]

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

WordPress plugins I use

A few months ago, when I moved Freelance Unbound to its own host, I wrote that I had got a bit excited about the world of plugins and had, temporarily, broken the site. It’s all settled down now. And finally the vast universe of plugins is starting to make sense. Here are the ones I’m […]

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

How to solve WordPress 2.9's schedule post bug

Like many WordPress users, I’ve recently had a couple of scheduled posts fail to go live. It seems this is a WordPress 2.9 problem. If anyone else has had the same issue, here’s what I did to solve it. Upgrade to WP 2.9.1. It seems WordPress has been stung into action by the bad feedback […]

Monday, December 28th, 2009

The importance of scheduled backups

The Online Journalism Blog seems to have gone into meltdown. Publisher Paul Bradshaw says it’s up, but that all content seems to have vanished. “Could be bad.” It’s a timely reminder that online is not permanent. In fact, online content is particularly vulnerable to simply vanishing into the ether if you fail to pay your […]