Before late August 2012, users could create sites that weren’t connected to a project.  In the process of improving the overall organization of the OpenLab, and to keep all the wonderful work everyone is doing here visible to everyone (when the creator chooses, that is), that had to change:  at this point all sites must  be connected to a project.

(Image by petesimon via Creative Commons)

Twitter Tools is a way of integrating Twitter and your OpenLab site (or any WordPress site), so that your posts can be tweeted automatically as soon as you publish them.  It also gives you a great deal of flexibility:  you can set it to exclude certain categories, and our present installation comes with url shortening and a hashtag creator (if you don’t know what those are or why you’d need them, you’ll want first to brush up on ‘What’s Twitter?’

Twitter Tools is a way of integrating Twitter and your OpenLab site (or any WordPress site), so that your posts can be tweeted automatically as soon as you publish them.  It also gives you a great deal of flexibility:  you can set it to exclude certain categories, and our present installation comes with url shortening and a hashtag creator (if you don’t know what those are or why you’d need them, you’ll want first to brush up on ‘What’s Twitter?’

Embedding YouTube Videos on the OpenLab is about as simple as it comes.  Just a couple steps, and you’re done.  The only thing to note is that this might be a little different than what you’re used to if you’ve used other wordpress systems, including wordpress.com.

If you’re a faculty member, you might be wondering what to do with your courses when we want to move them to the next term.  There’s admittedly a lot to think about when it comes to this issue, and depends on how you set up your course, whether you’re teaching the same course, how many sections of a course you teach.

As so often with these tutorials, you can skip the first few minutes, because the plug-in is already installed on the OpenLab.  As always, contact us with any questions, or to set up a demonstration.

A few weeks back we created a tutorial to use the WordPress LaTeX plug-in, which allows users to use a set of commands to turn this:

\sqrt{x^2+1}

Into this:

$latex \sqrt{x^2+1}$

Our tutorial was designed for faculty and students who already know LaTeX.

As I remembered just this morning as I accidentally deleted a post, WordPress has a convenient way to recover revisions and older drafts of a page or post.  In newer versions of WordPress, however, that feature is hidden in the default setting. 

PLEASE NOTE:  CUSTOM GOOGLE MAPS WERE RECENTLY CHANGED AND CANNOT BE EMBEDDED USING THE TUTORIAL BELOW.  WORDPRESS IS WORKING ON THE PROBLEM AND WE’LL UPDATE THE TUTORIAL AS SOON AS THEY DO.  STANDARD, UNCUSTOMIZED GOOGLE MAPS CAN STILL BE EMBEDDED.

Our Google Maps plug-in allows users to embed google maps into posts and pages.