Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Homage to three of my favorite bloggers (web wonkish)
I’m ripping off Paul Krugman and Steve Gillmor in one shot.
Krugman is much more than just a blogger—he’s also a Nobel prize-winning economist, Princeton professor, columnist, textbook author, valiant spokesman for what remains of the New Deal liberal clan, and a personal heartthrob of mine in a geeky old-lady way. But he is what Dave Winer would call a ”natural-born blogger.” (And Dave, as a pioneer of blogging and its tools, should know. A lot of what I know and believe about blogging and the web in general has been influenced by Dave.)
Krugman established a convention of warning non-economist readers when a post’s content gets into the technical weeds by appending ”(wonkish)”, in the headline, in parentheses.
Gillmor—whose columns I haven’t seen on Techcrunch on recent Sundays and hope that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped—also introduced a blogging convention I like. He’s a proponent of what he calls the @Mention Cloud, and reinforces his mission by referring to people by their Twitter handles and sometimes placing the handles at the bottom of blog posts.
I’m going to adopt the practice of listing Twitter handles, and wanted to get wonkish and explain how I automated it in about 15 minutes with my favorite CMS in all the world, Expression Engine. You could probably do something similar in WordPress if you self-host and know your way around templates. Really easy. In fact it will take me longer to write this post than it did to implement the feature.
First, I made five custom fields. This is the first one, the rest are copied from it. Note it’s set to no formatting so EE doesn’t put in P tags.
Then I used conditionals to tell my template to output the handles with links to the Twitter profile pages if I’ve entered any handles in the new fields on my post entry or edit form:
That’s it. Now off to work to wrestle with Sharepoint. I’d much rather live in LAMPland.
