There are a couple of earlier posts about e-mail integration with Wordpress, but this note is an attempt to capture recent thoughts.

1. E-mail posting to Wordpress
This would be useful for setting up a gateway from the alerts@ncwu.org e-mail list to the WP system.
See http://www.economysizegeek.com/?page_id=395 for a plugin that appears to do this.

2. Wordpress posting to e-mail
While I can hope that everyone will convert to RSS toot sweet, realistically, there are folks who will depend on e-mail to receive information. It appears there is a Wordpress > e-mail plugin
http://watershedstudio.com/portfolio/software/wp-email-notification.html

The WordPress Theme Contest gives some indication of what can be done to vary the look and layout of a Wordpress site. I started with the Blue Radiant theme, version 0.4 - see HP Nadig’s site — and changed the background color to “NCWU Green”.

Now whether we go this route or not will depend on someone else coming up with something more striking.

I did a full upgrade here (saving just the content folder and config file). Haven’t done much testing yet, but baseline things seem to be working. Watch the comments for other notes.

The article on OpenCRS used Javascript generated at http://p3k.org/rss/ to create the box with the list of recent publications. It should change as new papers are added.

Brian reports that this technology is worth investigating. Audio Activism » Gizmo makes good VOIP recordings for recording audio files.

I’ll put it on the list, but the Onebox.com toll-free line that translates voice mail to e-mail is probably easier for our community to understand.

Some WordPress blogs have a list of recent comments in the sidebar. Particularly when (as in bbvx.org/wp) there are comments on old posts, this may be helpful.

It appears there’s a Template Tag for recent posts (Codex is down, so I can’t find it right away) but to get the recent comments, something else is needed.

The Wiki has a recent comments hack.

There are also references to recent comments plugins - one, another one. Both of those can be installed by the WordPress Plugin Manager but that seems to be offline for now. The second plugin referenced describes a manual install that doesn’t seem too bad.

Figuring out more about plugins and such may get me to the blogtogether.com Chapel Hill Blog Teach In on the 23rd.

So if we were going to use this and change the default WordPress theme, there are hundreds of choices out there that we could start with.

See the WordPress Theme Viewer for perhaps the largest collections. After checking out a few, here are some ones that I like -

Scattered - would probably lose most of the goodies in the right column, and the unordered list style needs work, but appealing

Grubby Slipcovers - drop downs for archive and categories. Colors work well.

Redbar - looks as if it might not be hard to switch to a separate color scheme.

Any others that folks think stand out?

After the experience of doing a (rather thin, but still) blog for the AAUW convention, I’m starting to get the point of “writing” a blog, but the “reading” part was still problematic.

While each blog can stand alone as a web site to visit, the whole point is that all these messages are “syndicated” in a standard way. Software is available that brings them all together into something like a customized newspaper, but I’d never been able to get that software to work correctly.
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An article on Brian Russell’s blog has a reference to a handout for a presentation by Marnie Webb’s presentation on about digital media - including links to intros on blogging and such.

[Note that I’ve added Brian’s blog, Audio Activism, to the “blogroll” to the right.]

Not quite sure what this “podcasting” stuff means? Here’s an article about it:
The Battle for Eardrums Begins With Podcasts - New York Times

Note that we’re not really “podcasting” from here — i.e. uploading audio content on a regular schedule for folks to download as they would a scheduled radio “broadcast” — so you may not need any extra software.