Review: WordPress: The Missing Manual

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[Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for this review. Opinions are my own. Links to Amazon are affiliate links. Here is my review policy.]

WordPress: The Missing Manual Cover Image
WordPress: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals) is by Matthew MacDonald from O’Reilly (2012). It provides complete coverage of everything that WordPress can do. You’ll learn how to set up a blog from scratch, all about plugins, widgets, themes, hosting and more. I’ve been using WordPress for years and I learned several new things that I didn’t even know WordPress could do.

Topic by topic, the writer leads you through each section of the book with clear instructions, lots of good screen shots, and plenty of tips about how to make it all work perfectly. I like the fact that this book deals with everything from starting the simplest blog on WordPress.com to the most advanced and specialized uses you can create with a self-hosted blog.

Downloadable code examples are included with the book.

The table of contents is huge. I will give you a fast glance of some of the topics included. I’m skipping a lot – if it’s about WordPress and you don’t see it in my list, it’s probably here, because everything is here. My fast list of topics: getting started, writing posts, URLs, themes, media, pages, menus, comments, plug-ins, mobile sites, authors, SEO, feeds, stats, child themes, fonts, custom category pages, custom fields, e-commerce and more.

I’m scheduled to teach some WordPress classes soon, and I’ve been looking for a book to help me organize the topics that need to be included in that class. This book is perfect for that.

O’Reilly has a whole series of Missing Manual books. This book is representative of the entire series, which are generally a great resource for complete information about software.

Summary: Positively everything you might ever want to know about using WordPress is in this book.

You can buy the book from O’Reilly, as well as Amazon.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of WordPress: the Missing Manual (rating: 5 stars)

Millennial Quiz gives you a score based on how open you are to change

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The Pew Research Center has done a study on millennials and the millennial generation. As they put it, this generation is “confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and receptive to new ideas and ways of living.”

Pew developed a millennial quiz, using the results of their study called How Millennial Are You? By birth, I am as far from a millennial as I can get, but on the quiz I come out somewhere between a Gen Xer and a millennial.

My results:

millinneal quiz results

The study breaks the data down into all sorts of categories and looks at the information in many different ways. There’s much more to the study than the quiz.

I found the quiz particularly interesting, however. I never fit any of the measures of my generation, and this is just one more example of the kind of oddball I am. I am an elder in a world full of young techies and often feel like a time traveler.

Is there some thing about education that can make people open to new experiences and willing to change with technology as it develops? Or is it strictly a matter of personality? Is it nature or nurture? Because if education can be used to train people to be open and willing to consider new ideas, I would like to know how it’s done!

If you take the quiz, I’d love to know your score and how that compares with where you sit on the generation spectrum in terms of actual years.

Useful links: CS Edu, Flexbox, Digital Learners

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From The Female Perspective of Computer Science comes this video for educators: A Forty Minute Tour of CS Education With Mark Guzdial.

Here’s a good flexbox tutorial from Stian Karlsen. Look at the tutorial with a compliant browser, Chrome, for example.

Tomorrow.org published a study on the new digital learners of 2013, and about the way schools are helping or hindering education with technology. The study is published as a PDF: The Emergence of the K-12 Digital Learner.

Binge Viewing, the Second Screen, and the Future

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This is how I watch TV

I read an excellent article by Neicole Crepeau called Re-thinking the future of TV in the Age of Binge. The article made some interesting points about binge viewing and also about the increasing use of a second screen.

Since the readers of this blog are the people who make the web sites and apps that constitute the second screen, I think this topic is of importance to web educators and web developers.

My Binge Watching Habits

I love binge watching. I do it all the time via Netflix or On Demand. Recently I’ve watched season one of The Fall – twice. I also watched season one of Orphan Black – twice.

In case you aren’t familiar with either of these series, The Fall is a mystery drama starring Gillian Anderson as a police detective and Jamie Dornan as a serial killer. It’s subtle and nuanced and rich with detail. It’s like reading a good mystery instead of watching a TV series. The two main characters are mirror images of one another – one good, one evil – both meticulously obsessed with what they are doing. The performances are brilliant, the characters fascinating.

Orphan Black is a sci fi story about clones, with an underlying theme of nature vs. nurture. Tatiana Maslany plays the clones – 7 of them so far in season one – in an amazing performance that is truly a master work. She should get every acting award for her performance(s) as the various clones. The technical trickery that goes on so that she can be on screen as two or three different characters at one time is pretty impressive, too.

So I’m loving the characters, I’m loving the story lines, I’m loving the fact that I can watch every episode of a series in a matter of hours or days. I love binge watching.

What else am I doing while watching?

With these two particular programs I’m looking at imdb.com for more information about the actors and writers and directors. I’m pursuing lines of thought like – Matt Frewer, bet he’s the bad guy, and hmmm, he was just in Eureka, and, yeah, he was Max Headroom. This division of attention probably explains why I’ve watched both these series twice. I miss things while I’m off interacting with the second screen.

Not all the second screen action happens during an episode. Between episodes, I might go to YouTube and look for interviews with the actors. I might read reviews of the shows. I might go to the web site of the network hosting the show and look for behind the scenes video or photos or interviews.

The App Connection

I mentioned the SyFy app a few days back. I use it when watching shows on the SyFy channel. One of the shows (Defiance) that the app syncs with also has an online game that ties in with the show.

I’ve seen other shows advertising their apps and urging viewers to download the app and sync in for more behind the scenes info while watching. I think this is going to be more and more common to the point where every network is going to feel the need for an app that lets viewers interact in real time with what’s on the screen.

Second Screen Conversation

Twitter, of course, has always been the go-to spot for sharing comments about what you’re watching. Now the apps are providing access to this kind of interaction built-in. It might include Twitter and other sources. The app might filter for specific parts of a conversation, such as tweets from the actors. The point is, a conversation is encouraged and there’s an attempt to keep it in the silo of the app or the game or the website.

The Future of Web Education

All this change in the way we experience TV means a huge job market for anyone who can develop apps, or games, or auxiliary materials on a web site to complement a TV program. And that means web education needs to be on-the-spot with instructions for building apps, building connections, building all the complementary information that can help promote a TV show.

And what about the people making the ads and producing the ad content? What about the marketing people who need to be able to talk intelligently with app makers or web developers about how to make ads work in this new environment? What about all those social media experts who will be needed? That sounds like a whole lot of new job opportunities.

Yes, things are changing. Are web educators preparing students for the future? I hope we are.

Useful links: Web Design Chemistry, Deliverables, Shared Streaming, Jobs vs. Cook

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Atomic Web Design takes an interesting metaphorical look at how the bits and pieces (or atoms and molecules) of a web design work together.

The Big Think: Breaking the Deliverables Habit is from Robert Hoekman at Smashing Magazine and is definitely worth thinking about.

Not so long ago I wrote Shared Streaming: Good or Bad? Netflix has decided that shared streaming is happening whether they like it or not and is catering to it with Multiple User Profiles for Accounts.

Is it just me, or does it seem that now that Steve Jobs is gone the Apple fanboys (and fangirls, may I add) feel free to poke jabs and complaints at Apple for various decisions regarding new products? It’s as if they are challenging Tim Cook to earn their affections all over again regardless of the quality of the products. The tweets during the recent announcements about iOS7 were often critical and bitchy – where has the unquestioned glowing enthusiasm gone? Was it all about Steve Jobs and not about Apple technology at all?