It Takes a Village…
Village of clay huts by the students in my after school clay class
to forgive my kiln over-firing debacle from last Monday – the kids took it well. It may have helped that I promised to make them each a special “I’m sorry” cup to make amends. It was a good learning moment for them – firing a kiln is still a mystery for them – how hot is 1800ºF anyway? They don’t quite understand the whole concept of turning wet clay into permanent fired pottery since all they see is that I take their creations home with me and bring them back fired like magic! The repairs to fix some of the over firing issues with Jean’s jewelry box didn’t work. Jean took it well and I’m ready to try again. But, that will be a job for another day….
Meanwhile, I spent all day reading lazily on the sofa – the newspaper, back issues of magazines, books and yes, even a bit of internet reading. We have three lap tops in our home and all of them are starting to show their age. I’ve been reading up on other operating systems and have decided to install Ubuntu, a FREE Linux open source operating system on one of the oldest computers, and will delete Windows XP completely. If it doesn’t work, then no big deal – but if it does, it will extend the life of our computers and hopefully make them faster.
Open source software and hardware is a really cool turn of advents. Now, it’s nothing new – Linux is released under GNU or General Public License since 1994. GNU is an interesting business model – people are able to modify and even benefit financially from someone else’s intellectual work as long as attribution is defined. Wired Magazine (one of my new faves) touches on open source in quite a few issues. Companies that are closed and proprietary, like Microsoft, have quite a market share and frankly are afraid of open source because it is a threat to their long term viability. Reading about companies, such as Arduino, an Italian group that manufactures open source electronics platforms for a variety of uses. Pretty cool, don’t you think?
Anyway, it’s a little more work on my part to do the research and homework to install a Linux based system – after all Windows has @ 88% of market share. On the other hand, there are a number of free software applications that can replace everything that I currently have installed on my computer such as Open Office (replaces Microsoft Office Suite), Gimp (Photoshop), Archimedes (AutoCad) – along with a slew of any other kind of free software programming anyone could ever need. I was reading about how many open source contributers consider their efforts to be good old fashioned community barn raising. I like to think of my humble little pottery blog in the same light – I share what I learn, good bad and down right ugly because I enjoy learning from others in the field and I love receiving emails from folks who try making some of the techniques I have posted, including improvements or alternatives.
So, thanks for humoring me and for continuing to read & comment on my blog! 
~Cynthia
Colorado Art Studio Has Its Own Scannable Bar Code
Colorado Art Studio bar code courtesy of http://qrcode.kaywa.com/
Last week, the ever so talented Jafabrit, posted a few links about bar codes that caught my eye. I’m not even going to mention [oh wait I just did] that I was *oh so* jealous that she had her own scannable bar code posted on her website. I wanted one and set out to discover how to make it happen. We’re all familiar with bar codes – they’re everywhere anything is sold. I discovered, however, that information now uses bar code technology too.
It’s a weird intersection of life and technology and is mainly used for cell phone users to grab information with their camera phones and is pretty popular outside the USA. In Japan, bar codes are even being added to tomb stones for family and friends to maintain an electronic scrapbook of the deceased.
Maybe, instead of using a quaint little lotus and my initials for my signature chop, I should capture my bar code and add that instead – wait, I could make a ceramic decal of my bar code!! That would be way easier….
I went to http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ to grab my bar code. One has the option of inputing text or a url – and seconds later, a unique bar code is displayed. So, how are ya supposed to be able to scan and use a bar code? There are apps available to download to your cell phone – even Google has a reader – zxing.
So, if you’re already using bar code technology, will ya scan mine and tell me if my bar code really says Colorado Art Studio and not silly gullible twit instead. It seems to me that this is sort of like real world book marking.
~Cynthia
WordPress Plug-ins I’m Currently Using
“Plug-ins extend what WordPress can do by adding new functionality and features with minimal effort on your part” writes Scott McNulty in Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read. If you’re new to WordPress, I highly recommend picking this book up! It’s short and and gets to the meat of using WordPress effectively.
Plug-ins are basically little bits of code that developers write and distribute for others to use on their WordPress sites. I’m using quite a few on this site to make it do stuff that I want it to without having extensive knowledge of programming. Some plug-ins work right out of the box once activated; others require a bit of input from me to work. Some are intuitive; others not so much. For the latter, I move on to a different one if I can find a suitable replacement, otherwise if the competition is lean, I hash it out.
So what am I using?
| Administrative | For Posts and Pages |
| Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu – moves the WP dashboard from the left to the top and has drop down navigation. | NextGen Gallery – NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slide show option. |
| pageMash – Customize the order your pages are listed and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. | Event Calendar - Manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar. |
| WP Super Cache – This plug-in generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. | Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Button – Helps readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and over 100 more. The button comes with Add to Any’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history. |
| HeadSpace2 – Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many many other goodies. | Add to Any Subscribe Button – Helps readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader, such as Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Windows Live, and all the rest. The button comes with Add to Any’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history. |
| Robots Meta – This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused and nofollow unnecessary links. | Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. |
| TinyMCE Advanced – This plugin adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. (TinyMCE is a WYSIWYG editor that WP uses.) | WP-Print - Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page. |
| Theme Test Drive – Theme Test Drive WordPress plugin allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. | WP Ajax Edit Comments – Allows users and admin to edit their comments inline. Admin and editors can edit all comments. Very cool feature so that users don’t have to delete their comment if that make typos or want to add anything. |
| Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. | WP-Gravatar – This plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments. |
| WP-DB Manager – Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database. | cformsII – cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page! |
Wow – that’s a lot of plug-ins! Sometimes when WordPress releases new versions, plug-ins become obsolete or aren’t compatible with the new version. How do I know when this happens? Simple, something stops working. I simple deactivate the affected plug-in in my dashboard or delete it all together from my server.
Here are some screen shots of a couple of the plug-ins in action:
Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu
The drop down menu moves the default WP dashboard to the top of the screen and has drop down menus to help one easily find the page, post or application one is looking for & ultimately saves time.
pashMash
pageMash adds drag and drop functionality to your administrative functions. Users can also hide pages so that they aren’t shown in your navigation menu.
Theme Test Drive
Pretty cool feature – lets users test out a different theme without it being live.
ccforms II in action on my "Contact" page
This is pretty cool, too bad I didn’t investigate forms earlier in my WP blogging adventure. This can also be used as a comment form on posts, but I really wanted to use it for people to email me privately or to sign up for my future email newsletters. The plugin also includes image “captcha” to keep spam under control. Unfortunately, my email address is already floating around in cyber space, but since implementing the form a coupl e of weeks ago it’s significantly less than it was a month ago.
WP Ajax Edit Comments Plugin
Allows users to edit their own comments. It also allows me to edit a users comment, which is something I don’t do. I don’t censor comments, although if it’s outright spam, it is deleted if Akismet doesn’t catch it.
Print Post
Once in awhile, I write a post that someone might like to refer back to – I made it easy and installed a print plug-in so readers can click on the post and print out a copy.
Add to Any Subscribe Button
Allows users to subscribe with their favorite feed reader.
Add to Any Share Button
Allows users to share a particular post on various sites like Stumbleupon or Digg, etc.
My avatar
One note about Avatars – the little picture of me that shows up when I or others post a comment. I’ve enabled gravatars, which are “globally recognized avatars” and are linked to a users email address. Visit Gravatar to register your avatar and the next time you visit, your avatar will show up when you post a comment on my blog. Other sites that have gravatars enabled will also display your avatar.
My apologies to those of you who land here looking for pottery related information today, I promise that studio time is in my forecast this week! Meanwhile it’s snowing today which is a good thing I suppose. I can use the day to finish up the Colorado Potters Guild Website guilt free since it’s probably colder than a witches…well you get the picture. 
Later,
~Cynthia
Website Structure
website page navigation diagram
Today’s post was supposed to be about my new shopping cart that I added to my site; however, I had to disable it because it broke the visual editor in my wordpress dashboard. It’s a shame because I spent a good 6 hours the other night configuring it and another 3 hours this morning trying to fix it. Since I’m only offering parent’s of the kids enrolled in my after school clay class the option of paying by credit card, and I am not currently selling anything on my website, I need to move on. I’ve already invested too much time on the shopping cart. Double dang.
My easy solution? I added PayPal and Google Checkout buttons on my “Teaching Schedule” page for the parents who choose to pay via CC. Google Checkout was easy to set up, and I’ve never used it before. Fees are lower than PayPal, however, making this an attractive option. The only drawback is that customers have to sign up for a Google account if they don’t already have one.
| PayPal Fees for “Premier” account holders | Google Checkout Fees for non Adwords users |
| 2.9% + $0.30 USD | 2% + $0.20 per transaction |
| Fees are lower depending volume and type of account. | Fees are free if you are an AdWords user and have high volume. |
Back to the title of the post…I decided to diagram pages I think would be good to include on my site using good old fashioned pen and paper . I know several of you are currently revamping your sites and I highly recommend diagramming it and also to be thinking about what kind of functionality you want to have both on the back end and also what is available for public consumption. I did this after I started adding pages – slaps self on head – but as soon as I drew the diagram, it was so much easier to move forward. To help me decide how I wanted to structure my site, I looked at several other people’s site – mostly other clay folk, but also other artists in other media.
Thanks for the great responses to the word of the year post! I have taken some of your advice and broken my website down into small chunks to make it a less daunting task. I am using the same strategy for the Potters Guild site as well. I still have some projects on my to-do list as it relates to my site but, I feel like I have a better handle now. In the meantime, I need to finish the Guild’s site.
My next post is going to highlight some of the WordPress Plugins that I am using that are proving invaluable!
Have a great weekend,
~Cynthia
