Topic outline
- General
- How to follow webinars in this course
How to follow webinars in this course
This course is made up of (not so) many units. Each of these units contains a webinar. Each webinar must be completed to get the final certificate.
To complete a webinar we have to do actions required by the webinar, mainly clicking and typing. You have a couple of attempt for each action. If both goes wrong you fail that action. You can fail up to 20% of all actions in each webinar. It
is quite difficult not to pass a webinar at the first try but, if this happens, you can redo the webinar from the very beginning. Furthermore, actually clicking and typing is neither interesting nor profitable. You are supposed to try
the actions you see in the webinar in a parallel, real, environment on your computer. So, if you cannot understand how to follow a webinar, after following this webinar, you will be able to follow a webinar.
- Setup Wordpress on a free shared server
Setup Wordpress on a free shared server
WordPress is a de-facto standard for putting your ideas on the Internet. At the time of writing (2020) we quote "WordPress is used by 63.2% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 35.9% of all websites". WordPress is basically an OpenSource PHP script like Moodle and its implementation comes in different flavours. You may take a free hosted (managed) WP. In a managed solution. someone loaded the PHP code for you and is offering you some webspace on a PHP server that runs WP. Among sites offering managed WP we find the name holder Wordpress.com. All these managed WP offer free and paid plans. Obviously the paid version offer more than a bare open source version and the free version offer something in between, So using a managed WP you will never know exactly if you are using added features that are not in the open source version. So we suggest to build on a better known platform. Therefore, in this webinar, we take the open source distribution and install it onto a free shared PHP+SQL server. Free servers may not be exactly standardized and yet the WP open source code is built to comply with this (to some extent...). Before attempting this webinar you have to get some web space. Here is a webinar about this.
- A plugin to create nice WP posts, automatically, using RSS feeds
A plugin to create nice WP posts, automatically, using RSS feeds
In this webinar we show how to install and configure a plugin named RSS multi importer (RSSMI) by Allen Weiss. This plugin takes a stream of news from the web (a.k.a. a RSS Feed) and, for every post in the RSS feed, creates a post in WP. The created WP post contains a summary of the incoming RSS post plus some images and a reference to the original source. In the plugin configuration there is a part about how and when scan the RSS feed and how take a summary of the RSS post for the WP post. To test this plugin we will take an RSS Feed coming out of a Moodle course. If you are interested in knowing how you can add a RSS in Moodle you find a webinar about this here. All this can be the basis for a simple SEO.
- A plugin to create nice WP posts, automatically, using RSS feeds (cont)
A plugin to create nice WP posts, automatically, using RSS feeds (cont)
This webinar is the second part of this other webinar. Please proceed to this one after the webinar in the link. When you will complete the two webinars you will be able to advertise your online activity. The idea is this. We all have several online activities. Not all are so meaningful. However, sometimes we do something that could be of general interest. E.g. maintain some class material in Moodle or fix a bug in GitHub. Sometimes we also put on the net something that could be interesting. For instance, sometimes, we upload digital artifacts to the web e.g. a 3D model onto some repository like Thingverse, TurboSquid or the usual video uploaded to YouTube. Then, we want to tell the world this happened. Still we want to skip the hassle of going to several socials networks to post this to the world. Now, all these platforms (GitHub, YouTube etc) offers RSS feeds of news about our activities. In this webinar we will turn each Moodle RSS feed into a nice WP post with a link to the original site.
- How to automatically generate and autopost a Tweet from your Wordpress post
How to automatically generate and autopost a Tweet from your Wordpress post
In this webinar we learn how to Auto-post to social networks to advertise each of our WP post. In this webinar we introduce the WP to Twitter plugin for WordPress. This plugin posts to Twitter just requiring a Twitter login. Following this scheme we will have nice posts to Twitter every time we upload a video to YouTube or modify a resource in Moodle. Whenever we do something on a site with a RSS logging this could go to social networks. The plugin also creates hashtags from WP categories tags. Our solution using WP to Twitter plugin works on a AMP shared stack, is free and Open Source. Another possible option for auto-posting to socials from WP is to use Jetpack and host your WP site on Wordpress.com. This, somehow will lead to a paid solution and therefore we do not follow this option in this course. At the end of the installation of this plugin you probably will get automatically generated Tweets with no images. This will be fixed in forthcoming webinars. If you want to stop here and yet want to have nice Tweets you can give a try to this plugin that will buidl a Tweet card. Alternatively you can add this code to your theme in the header.php file just before the
</head>tag. (Source: Ryan Cullen @artesea)If you do not have access to your theme files you can try with the plugin Add to all archived here. The free version of Yoast SEO also offer Twitter Card Formatting features.<?php#twitter cards hackif(is_single() || is_page()) {$twitter_url= get_permalink();$twitter_title= get_the_title();$twitter_desc= get_the_excerpt();$twitter_thumbs= wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id($post->ID), full );$twitter_thumb=$twitter_thumbs[0];if(!$twitter_thumb) {$twitter_thumb='http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/8eb9ee80d39f13cbbad56da88ef3a6ee?rating=PG&size=75';}$twitter_name=str_replace('@','', get_the_author_meta('twitter'));?><meta name="twitter:card"value="summary"/><meta name="twitter:url"value="<?php echo $twitter_url; ?>"/><meta name="twitter:title"value="<?php echo $twitter_title; ?>"/><meta name="twitter:description"value="<?php echo $twitter_desc; ?>"/><meta name="twitter:image"value="<?php echo $twitter_thumb; ?>"/><meta name="twitter:site"value="@libdemvoice"/><?if($twitter_name) {?><meta name="twitter:creator"value="@<?php echo $twitter_name; ?>"/><?}}?>
- How to create an excerpt out of your Wordpress post and autopost it to your Facebook page
How to create an excerpt out of your Wordpress post and autopost it to your Facebook page
In this webinar we learn how to Autopost to Facebook (FB) to advertise on FB our WP posts. In this webinar we introduce Social Networks
Auto Poster (SNAP) plugin for WordPress. Following this scheme we will have a nice posts to FB every time we upload a video to YouTube or modify a resource in Moodle. The solution presented here do not use proprietary
services like Zapier or IFTT. The solution with SNAP works on a plain AMP
shared stack, it is free and it is Open Source.
- How to autmatically generate an autopost to your Linkedin profile from Wordpress.
How to autmatically generate an autopost to your Linkedin profile from Wordpress.
We assume that you have completed the previous webinar on RSS multi importer for WP. Then you must have a WP installation with a RSS multi importer (RSSMI) plugin. This RSSMI plugin creates a WP post for each new RSS entry. In this webinar we introduce the WP LinkedIn Auto Publish plugin for WordPress.This plugin Auto-posts an excerpt of your activity to LinkedIn just requiring a new Linkedin login on every 60 days. Following this scheme we will have nice posts to LinkedIn every time we
upload a video to YouTube or modify a resource in Moodle or do something on a GitHub repo.Whenever we do something on a site with a RSS logging this plugin can be used to advertise to LinkedIn. In this plugin one can also configure the form of the content that must go to LinkedIn.
In this webinar we use a personal LinkedIn profile for a user called Twingsister. Following the webinar you are supposed to create your own LinkedIn profile and set up your auto-post. When you have completed this installation you can test if the whole loop works from some RSS thru WP down to LikedIn. If you have some site generating RSS feeds, when you have completed this webinar, you can do that.Please consider that this propagation can take from 15 to 30 minutes.
This solution for posting to LinkedIn works on a AMP shared server, is free and Open Source. This autopost runs smoothly with no human intervention. Just remember to refresh the plugin credentials to LinkedIn on every 60 days.
- How to generate a RSS for a YouTube playlist and autopost to Wordpress
How to generate a RSS for a YouTube playlist and autopost to Wordpress
Each YouTube playlist has a RSS feed associated with. In this webinar we first show how to get the URL of the RSS feed that YouTube maintains for each playlist. Then we will connect this RSS to Wordpress using the RSSMI plugin and generate a post for each video we add to the playlist. In the framework of this course this will generate ads for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for every video we add to the playlist. This could be useful to perform a SEO for your videos.
- How to Pin to Pinterest via IFTTT
How to Pin to Pinterest via IFTTT
In
this webinar we show how to Pin a Picture
of some Interest from a
Tweet to Pinterest. We
show how to automatically pin to our Pinterest board the images coming
from our Tweets. We
will use IFTTT to get this with unattended operations. To
follow this webinar you need a Twitter (TW) accont and a Pinterest (P)
account and
sign up for IFTTT. We will create in IFTTT
an automated unattended procedure for this. They call this sort of procedure an "Applet". IFTTT is not the only platform that offer this service. Zapier in another option and possibly you can install a FOSS called Huginn on a free Docker enabled server like Heroku and have similar facilities. Zapier
calls them a Zap Huginn calls them an actor. Actually
these are all procedures stealing CPU time from a commercial server that you do not control at all. May be
one day free plan will go and break your chain. Huginn could be a longer lasting solution but it is by far mere complex to set up.
- Hot to place a masonry image gallery in each WP post header
Hot to place a masonry image gallery in each WP post header
In this webinar we define a customization that gives a satisfactory look both to posts in WP and to the generated posts to FB, TW and IN. In this webinar a working custom solution is provided for download. This solution works well for a post generated by a RSS coming out of Moodle. Possibly this works nicely for other RSS but not for all. For other RSS Your WP site will produce some post but some more work will be necessary to have nice posts.
For a generic RSS you need to introduce your own customization programming in PHP. Indeed, there are some hooks for the PHP programmer and you can define your customization modifying the provided examples. The file multichannel.php that came with the RSS importer plugin (seen in this webinar) gives an example of a possible implementation of the PHP hooks. This sort of PHP programming is not out of your reach and is quite amusing. You just have to use PHP for string manipulation.
The hooks can be used to shape the WP post generated out of the RSS feed. Using these hooks one can control the shape of the post coming out of the RSS. The reader can try to adapt this to for other RSS feeds not coming out of Moodle. We will do that, in another webinar, for YouTube RSS feeds.
In this webinar we will also install a sample that provides a masonry image gallery banner for a Wordpress theme. The images for this masonry are taken from a set of generic Pinterest boards. So we will assume you can locate a Pinterest profile with some boards This could be yours or not.
The banner is made up of a random shuffled selection of up to 40 pins from all the boards you give. Pinterest gives access to the last 25 pins from each board so you need at least two boards because the banner uses 40 pins into four rows of ten. Using more boards from all your interests will make the banner much more interesting. The 40 pins are randomly selected from all your boards every time a user consults a WP post.
This banner is generated in real time. This can slow down WP if you give many pins to select from.In this webinar we assume that you have an installed a working copy of WP with the Twenty Seventeen theme
and we will provide a modified Twenty Seventeen child theme for download. The modified theme puts the
masonry banner in all the posts. You can place this in pages using a provided shortcode.When choosing your images consider that, very often often, socials do not accept the images you supply. Images larger than 300x300 are often required,
- Update regularly your posts with Cron
Update regularly your posts with Cron
In
this webinar we learn how to start bookkeeping procedures in web application using
Cron. In most web sites there is a page that will trigger bookkeeping activities for the site. This page do not have a meaningful content, possibly showing a messy log of bookkeeping activities. Nevertheless webmaster needs to have this page visited on regular basis to keep the site up to date.
There are (few) web services that can trigger this for free. They are usually called cron services. They just need to know when (how often) and where (i.e. the URL of the triggering page the so called Cron URL).
In this webinar we will fetch a free Cron service and link it to the our WP cron URL. To be fail safe one can use multiple cron services triggering each one once a day. Note that your cron page may return a success/failure status. Upon multiple failures some cron service reports with an email and goes off duty.
To inspect cron activities coming from outside, in this webinar, we also install in WP a cron logging plugin.
The final part of the webinar shows a working instance of the automation built in the course. We start with some modification in Moodle and witness the generation of a new entry in WP RSS firing WP posts ending into posts to FB, TW and IN.