Something up with your site? Here’s the fix …

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Lance Grigsby

A couple of weeks ago, the Edublogs staff made some changes to its suite of WordPress themes. Unfortunately, these changes had an unintentional effect on our WordPress instance at blogs.baylor.edu: All sites using the Twenty Eleven theme were accidentally switched to the Edu Campus theme. The problem is easily fixed by logging in at blogs.baylor.edu/wp-login.php, clicking Appearance > Themes, and reactivating the Twenty Eleven theme (you might find it useful to search for Twenty Eleven by using the Search Installed Themes field on that page). All the customizations you applied to Twenty Eleven should be present when you revert back–if not, please let us know so we can help you restore your theme settings. NOTE: Any custom headers you uploaded should be present in your media library.

Very sorry for the inconvenience! While Edublogs will be looking into why this happened, they will be removing the Edu Campus theme, which will cause all “broken” sites to revert back to the Twenty Eleven default theme.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Change the default size of video embeds, images, and thumbnails

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Lance Grigsby

If you’ve been working with WordPress for awhile, you know how easy it is to embed a YouTube video in a page or post. Simply paste the video URL on it’s own line, publish the post, and you’re done. Occasionally, however, the size of the resulting video may not fit the main content area of the theme you’re using–the result can be a video that’s only partially visible in the player.

If you’re having this problem, here’s how to fix it: Visit the Dashboard and click Settings > Media and scroll to the Embeds section of the page as shown here:

spacer Change the width attribute to a dimension that fits the width of the main content area on your site, which might require a little experimentation to determine, and leave the height attribute blank (this will cause the height of the video player to scale appropriately).

Likewise, you can do the same for images and thumbnails at the top of the page by changing the default sizes for those. This can be very helpful when you’re using WordPress galleries and need the thumbnails to be something other than 150px by 150 px. If you would like to change the thumbnail sizes in your galleries, however, make sure to do that in the Settings > Media before you create the gallery.

Posted in Galleries, Images, Media, Video | Tagged embeds, thumbnails, youtube | Leave a comment

How to geotag your posts via WordPress for iOS

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Lance Grigsby

My previous post about the WordPress for iOS app explains how you can start posting to your WordPress blog from remote locations using your iPhone or iPad. We’ve since installed Geolocation Plugin for WordPress, which will allow you to add geolocation information to your posts in the form of Google Maps from the iOS app. If you’re planning to participate in one of Baylor’s study abroad programs any time soon, using this app and plugin combo might be a great way to keep up a photo blog of your travels, particularly if you plan to use a theme like AutoFocus.

Adding geolocation information to your posts is easy. The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that geotagging has been turned on for the blogs you’ve set up in iOS:

spacer (If you’re not sure how to do this for a blog you’ve already set up, go back to your lists of blogs and click the Edit button and then tap the title of the blog you want to edit–when you do this, you’ll get the screen shown above. This is where you turn Geotagging on or off.) When you write a post, you’ll see a blue icon in the title field of the edit post screen as shown here:

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Tap that blue icon, and then you can see the location information for that post:

spacer This is the map that will be shown in the post when you publish it. If you wish to configure how that information appears in the published post, you can visit the full dashboard and click Settings > Geolocation to change how the geolocation information appears. By default, it will appear as a link at the bottom of the post, which will display a Google map of your location when you hover over it:

spacer Finally, if you need to fine tune your location information after the fact, you may do so in the full version of the dashboard, where you will see all the custom field information for your location and the Geolocation module showing the map in your post.

Posted in Google Maps, Mobile Devices, Photoblogging, Posts, WordPress apps | Tagged geotagging, iOS, ipad, iphone, WordPress for iOS | Leave a comment