PS: What's up?: Stories by Christina Wodtke

New! Add RSS feeds to your Publication

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 03:28:22 GMT

Erstwhile Matt Pelletier of EastMedia has just added the ability to add rss feeds as a way of populating content to the pages of your publication. It's a easy way to tie in blogs, or any outside ap with an RSS feed. For example, let's say you wanted to show the latest blog posts form friends using typepad, or say you wanted to pull in job listings from a job board... Just this!

   
   {% feedreader url: 'http://digg.com/', max: 15 as link %}
     {{ link.description }} 
     {{ link.extended }}
   {% endfeedreader %}

EM and EN

Christina Wodtke — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 07:00:00 GMT

The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters) by Peter K Sheerin is the best article I've found on the En dash and the Em dash, and how to render them easily.

The em dash (—) is used to indicate a sudden break in thought (“I was thinking about writing a—what time did you say the movie started?”), a parenthetical statement that deserves more attention than parentheses indicate, or instead of a colon or semicolon to link clauses. It is also used to indicate an open range, such as from a given date with no end yet (as in “Peter Sheerin [1969—] authored this document.”), or vague dates (as a stand-in for the last two digits of a four-digit year).

The en dash (–) is used to indicate a range of just about anything with numbers, including dates, numbers, game scores, and pages in any sort of document.

These characters are used so often by publishers — why don't WYSIWYG pay them more attention?

2.0 for everyone

Christina Wodtke — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:00:08 GMT

Great article The WCM Renaissance(pdf), and particularly gratifying is this quote:

Web 2.0 is also exposing cracks in WCM space. Much the same way that WCM specialists accuse ECM vendors of "not getting it," many WCM tools that only recently added blog and wiki functionality suffer from complicated interfaces, unfriendly URLs, and other un-Web 2.0 shortcomings. In particular, the prevalence of sexy Ajax interfaces on the public web makes traditional WCM contributor interfaces seem very outdated. Vendors point out that re-engineering their product UIs is not a trivial matter. Growing interest in user-generated content (UGC) has also created architectural challenges for integrated WCM packages the same way that the rise of the web caught many document management vendors flat-footed. In enterprise settings, most web-content management services and repositories live in a protected zone behind the firewall, and don't naturally lend themselves to authors coming in from the public web. To be sure, most enterprise customers don't know yet what it means to "manage" user-generated content, and important questions are stalling some initiatives. Should we put UGC through an approval workflow? Do we need to archive it? Do we expose our internal classification scheme so we can cross-reference internal and user content? And so on.

I couldn't have paid someone to better explain the PublicSquare approach. USG is a gruesome acronym, mind you, but the idea is crucial: publish with your audience, not at them.

Five Thoughts on Publishing

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:32:00 GMT

Publishing does not belong to publishers. It's a fundamental activity that belongs to human life; it's communication. One-to-many has irreplaceable value. Blogs are published diaries, newspapers are there to tell you what's happening in the world, magazines to distract, entertain, educate. But in between those extremes we have a rich, fertile land full of publishing.
- Businesses publish. They have to buy coffee, and they have to publish. Newsletters, company reports, status updates, brochures. You have to communicate to your customers and unless you plan to call each one up by phone, you are going to publish.
- Professional organizations publish. You gather with other nurses, or IAs, or engineers, or accountants to get better at your job, and the way you do that is to share what you've learned. From peer-reviewed papers to emailing lists, the professional organization exists most to exchange knowledge.
- Hobbyists publish. There is no delight on this earth that is as good as when its shared. Do you love fishing, knitting, lawn bowling, origami... doesn't matter, your love is always better when you share it. Like the professional organization, everyone strives to get better but now you are broadcasting out of personal pride.
- Enthusiasts Publish. From spec miatas to organic produce, everyone has some funny little thing that lights them up inside. And those people can't stop looking to read more about it, and eventually when they run out, they start sharing what they know. Because its that great. And everyone should know its that great.
- Schools- all school publish, from 'zines to newspapers. It's good for the kids.
- Localities- The Mountain View Voice is a newspaper, but still rooted in its 'hood more than the world, the Barron Neighborhood Association is a jumped up newsletter and every coop seems to have their own "what's happening" publication.
Blogging is less satisfying *and* less effective than being with a group. I had coffee with It would be silly of me to even bother mapping a mommyblogger to maya's mom or babycenter. Groups do better. Every member is also a writer, a fan, a marketeer, a copyeditor, a bugtracker -- there is power in the people, and more people more power.
Digg? Take a look at yesterday's headlines: money making scams and insults. Is this the shining future of citizen journalism? There is a rising backlash against the lack of trustworthiness found in current citizen journalism; i.e. bloggers. Previous posts capture some of the frustration against un-fact-checked, biased, half-truthed corporate shills and the rest of the rubble that makes ordinary peoples' lives actually worse. I've also blogged about the mess anonymous comments and posts can create from spam to trolls to actual cyberstalking. It's time for responsibility and reputation. What if there is a middle group? What if we can combine editorial insight with the collective wisdom of the crowds? Do these two really have to be opposed? I think the future will take the best of old media and new, and create a far more participatory and engaging BUT trustworthy generation of publication, and in the best scenario that will also include Karl's Printshop down the street allowing his customers to give each other advice on how to make chapbooks and posters.
Finally, and this is the most difficult for me to articulate, I believe the economy must evolve to support these folks. Maybe Karl the printer is good for awhile longer yet, and small businesses like him can consider their publishing a cost of doing business or even a loyalty play. But the bloggers are begging for a way to make a buck doing the thing they love, the thing that eats up their every waking hour. The enthusiasts, the hobbyists, the schools, and all the rest may not have much hope for making a living doing this anymore than folks who held a garage sale once a year thought they'd go pro before eBay showed up. They deserve to make a living doing the thing they love best. I think we all deserve that.

That's why we built PublicSquare, and the other products that will come on its heels such as the job board and the events calendar. Publishing is changing, and we'd like to help.

Big Release: Something for everyone

Christina Wodtke, Jim Meyer, Fleur Dragan — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 04:18:19 GMT

Hello true believers in independent publishing everywhere! We’ve got goodies for you this week!

_We’ve added image manipulation._ Wherever there are image links there are edit links now. Take a test drive, and resize, reformat and play! We do want to recommend though, that you create a copy *first* before you crop or resize. Those buttons apply immediately, so if you are a bit unsure about what you are doing, better to play with a copy (Christina found out the hard way!) Also, when a file is uploaded, a caption can now be specified along with the keywords. To see the caption used with a dropcap, the liquid template for a story will have to be modified. In liquid, the story image tag is

{{story.image.url}}

and there is now a

{{story.image.caption}}

tag available as well.

Finally, we’ve also changed the alt tag to show the caption rather than the keywords. However, if no caption is present, we’ll still show the keywords so your old stories will continue to work the same.

We now let you autopublish!

You notice now we’ve got two fields, one for internal deadlines (behaves the same way as the old deadline field but now also a “publish date” which will actually publish your story with or wihtout you! But don’t panic.. once you set that deadline, the story is marked publishable, just to warn you it’s on it’s way.

Never be seen without your makeup again!

And another much-requested feature: template staging. Planning a makeover? Don’t want to get caught wearing your curlers? Well now you can specify a theme to be “staged” that will show up as the theme on your own personal staging site. There is a link to the staging site available from the themes editing page (the “design” tab) on the theme designated as the staging site theme.

BTW, we've turned on the "forums" feature (another new and nifty feature, activated by clicking on "forums" under configuration) so you can tell us about bugs, issues, improvements and blow us kisses when we finally get it right....

We’ve got a few other little surprises planned… Watch this space!

User Guide: Community Tools

Christina Wodtke — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:22:18 GMT

PublicSquare is based on the core concept that communities set their own standards, and it is the job of the software to hand communities the tools to manage their communities their own way. We believe in being yourself, and taking responsibility for your words. That said we also believe that Editorial is what keeps a publication from being a self-perpetuating suck-hole, and gets new ideas and concepts into the fray AS WELL AS cleaning up spelling and encouraging folks to have complete thoughts. Editors make better content. This means * Everyone must log in to comment, rate or participate in any way * Participants have a reputation that is affected by everything they do on the site. * The community can rate comments, stories and ideas AND that affects the generator of their comment types reputation. * The community can flag any comment as offensive, and three flags means it disappears. BUT an editor/publisher (see PsRoles) can mark it as worth living on even if the community doesn't care for it. * Sometimes the audience is smarter than the writer-- any comment can be nominated by a reader to the "Ideas":IdeasGuide slushpile.

User Guide: Ideas

Christina Wodtke — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:26:59 GMT

In traditional publishing, unsolicited manuscripts were often thrown out. Sometimes, they were set aside to pile up until the summer intern could go through them. In small webzines, they are often lost in email, misplaced in basecamp to-do lists, or thrown in a wiki (maybe...) \PublicSquare provides a clean management system for all story idea submissions. A story is entered into the system on the public face of the publication. The story can them be voted for (requests) voted against (passes) and commented on. Why is this useful? * see what ideas are interesting to your userbase * see what ideas are controversial * let your userbase tell you if the idea is plagiarized * let your userbase help refine the idea! For example ** ask interview questions ** add more facts ** bring up the hard issues When you evaluate an idea, we highly recommend you look at comments as well as rating... sometimes it pays to run a controversial article! Length of idea submission is unlimited by default, if you want people to submit complete articles.

Keyboard Shortcuts for WYSIWYG

Christina Wodtke — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:02:22 GMT

<img src="/files/blog/keyboard-shortcuts/PS-WYSIWYG-2.png" width="245" height="215" alt="WYSIWYG new functionality" title="WYSIWYG new functionality" align="right" />You may have noticed WYSIWYG has gone on a diet and started working out… and she's looking (and acting!) better than ever before. What you don't know is Jim, which exploring the depths of the FCKEditor documentation, found some awesome keyboard shortcuts for you! If you've never used them before, go ahead a play a bit. The secret is to hold these keys down together... or in order. So, for example, hold down the CTRL key (on window's machines, on Mac's it's usually the apple) and while holding it down, push the letter A.

Keyboard Shortcuts

enter gets you a

shift-enter gets you a

Accelerator keys:

CTRL + A, select all
CTRL + C, copy
CTRL + F, Launches find
CTRL + S, Saves (currently to disk, we're planning to return to it and get it to save to PS)
CTRL + X, Cut
CTRL + V, 'Paste'
SHIFT + INS, 'Paste'
CTRL + X, 'Cut'
SHIFT + DEL, 'Cut'
CTRL + Z, 'Undo'
CTRL + Y 'Redo'
CTRL + SHIFT + Z, 'Redo'
CTRL + L, 'Link'
CTRL + B, 'Bold'
CTRL + I, 'Italic'
CTRL + U, 'Underline'
CTRL + SHIFT + S, 'Save'
CTRL + ALT + ENTER, 'FitWindow'
CTRL + TAB, 'Source'

BTW, FitWindow is a feature we're very excited to discover. We know you've been begging for more room to edit! The only problem is we haven't figured out how to get out of full-screen mode. I'll keep you updated for when we do...

Anonymous Comments

Christina Wodtke, Jim Meyer — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:48:55 GMT

Due to popular request, we've added the ability for you to allow your visitors to comment without having to register. Just remember, without the enticement of building reputation (or the deterrent of losing it) you may see a drop in quality of comments as well as an increase of quantity. Please let us know your experience with anonymous comments! How to turn them on: If you're using one of our pre-packaged themes:

Dashboard → Configuration → Click the "Allow anonymous comments" checkbox

If you're using a custom theme, you've got a little more to do:

Add conditional display of the anonymous poster info fields: Find this in your _comment_form.liquid:


{{ form.body }}

...and paste something like this above it:

{% if comment.show_anonymous_poster_fields? %}
  Name 
(required)


  {{ form.poster_name }}

  Email 
(required and never shared)

  {{ form.poster_email }}

  Website 
(optional)


  {{ form.poster_url }}


{% endif %}

{{ form.body }}

Only show voting controls on signed comments: Because anonymous users can not (and should not) gain reputation, you don't want to show the voting controls. You'll find something like this either in your _feedback.liquid or _comment.liquid:



[...]


or 
Flag as Offensive/Spam

[...]
{% if on.poster %}
  ·         
  Ban
{% endif %}

... and make it look like this:

{% unless on.anonymous_poster? %}


[...]

{% endunless %}

{% unless on.anonymous_poster? %}

or

{% endunless %}

Flag as Offensive/Spam

[...]

{% unless on.anonymous_poster? %}

  ·         
  
Ban

{% endunless %}

Show your comment form when it's okay to comment: Find this in your story.liquid:

...and replace it with:

{% if story.show_comment_form? %}
  {% include 'comment_form' %}
{% else %}

{% endif %}

Stylize the new bits: Add these styles to your screen.css:


.AnonymousCommentLabel {
  font-style: italic;
}

.comment_poster_name {
  width: 255px;	
}

.comment_poster_email {
  width: 255px;	
}

.comment_poster_url {
  width: 255px;	
}

.comment_body {
  width: 510px;	
}

.comments {
	font-weight: bold;
	padding-bottom: 2em !important;
}

.CommentInputErrorMsg {
  font-size: 1.1em;
  color: #c00;
  font-weight: bold;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
}