Finer Things

Stick with a plugin for submissions or allow “contributors” to register?

Posted on Jan 24, 2010 in Featured, Finer Things | 3 comments

I run a series of sites about the Finer Things in Tech. They contain short tips about handy features, clever UI polish, and other perks. I use WordPress MU (note: not WordPress.org) to power the sites, and I accept user-submitted posts via the TDO Mini Forms plugin. This way, anyone can visit a page at the site with a form, like this one, to submit a post. It’s convenient, and users don’t have to register with my WordPress install just to share something awesome. Unfortunately, TDO Mini Forms has some quirks, and since I switched from regular self-hosted WordPress to WordPress MU, it has even more.

I am now considering just allowing readers to register with my WordPress MU install as “Contributors” so they can draft their own posts in the WordPress UI. This way I figure they can add legitimate profiles, use much better blogging tools, and the WooTheme I use should “just work” in terms of displaying the proper author attribution.

But I have a few questions about going this route: As I understand it, “Contributor” is very low on the WordPress user permissions scale, but I could still allow them to upload media for their posts. Is there any danger to allowing people to register as Contributors? I use extremely complicated and secure passwords for my admin and author accounts (generated by 1Password, natch), so I’m not too worried about those.

I’m more wondering about things like how many users WordPress (and WordPress MU) can competently handle, and other management and performance issues. I don’t expect hundreds of signups, but you never know.

Finer Things in iPhone gets the new shiny

Posted on Nov 15, 2009 in Featured, Finer Things | 0 comments

This morning I finished applying the new site design to Finer Things in iPhone. I’m using the same theme as Finer/Mac, which is called Headlines from Woo Themes (affiliate link – click and buy a WordPress theme or membership and I get a pat on the back). I’ve settled on Headlines as the overall site layout for all sites in the Finer Things network, as it looks professional, stylish, and is quite flexible.

Finer/iPhone is now also mobile friendly, like Finer/Mac, thanks to the fantastic WPtouch plugin. It should render in a nice, stripped-down-but-surprisingly-functional mobile version on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and generic mobile devices.

Just registered finerthings.in, guess what it’s for

Posted on Nov 12, 2009 in Featured, Finer Things, General | 0 comments

Once I install YOURLS, FinerThings.in will be the URL shortener for all the sites in my little side projects. Pushing forward, choo choo.

Finer Things in Mac is now mobile friendly

Posted on Nov 1, 2009 in Featured, Finer Things | 0 comments

I just finished installing WPtouch, an impressive WordPress plugin that serves an optimized version of a site. I enabled most features of the site, including Disqus-powered comments and the submission form. The unique author is displayed on every post (this is a crowd-sourced site, remember), and you have access to all tags, categories, and pages from the top menu. If you don’t want this device-optimized version of the site, you can always flip the switch at the bottom of the page to view the full version.

There are some kinks to work out yet between this plugin and the site organization that I am experimenting with. For example: right now I have multiple “Finder” and “UI” sub-categories that live under the top-level Leopard and Snow Leopard categories. This way, users can read posts just about Leopard UI tips and bugs, or just Snow Leopard UI tips and bugs. But WPtouch uses the iPhone OS’ rolodex list tool to display all categories in a flat, alphabetized list, instead of organizing sub-categories under their proper parent categories. Like I said, I’m still experimenting, so I’m working on this.

WPtouch allows for a fair amount of design customization, which I will add once I get a real theme in place for the full version of the site. The layout won’t change much, but I eventually aim to match the overall color scheme between the full and mobile-optimized versions of this site.

Other than that, let me know what you think, if you would like to see any other WPtouch-specific features, or if you find bugs on devices that I can’t test on like Android, BlackBerry, generic mobile phones.

Work is progressing on Finer Things migration to WordPress

Posted on Oct 30, 2009 in Featured, Finer Things, General | 3 comments

For reasons I have yet to explain in greater detail, I’ve begun moving the Finer Things sites from Tumblr to WordPress. I began the effort this week with /Mac, and things have gone well so far. But there’s a bit of work to be done yet.

I’ve pretty much nailed down what I figure is the 1.0 feature set and functionality of the site, thanks to a few plugins and experimeting with WordPress categories and tags. In fact, the actual process of moving the site to WordPress is the easy part.

The rest of it is manual work like re-tagging and categorizing posts to fit into my vision of making Finer Things sites not just a blog, but a resource; a directory and a community. This will simply take time.

The other big step, finding a functional, well-designed theme for each site, is almost finished as well.

I’m aiming to get this all finished by next weekend. Don’t hold me to it, but that’s my goal. In the meantime, I will continue to solicit, write, and publish Finer Things posts about tips, UI polish, and bugs. Thanks for reading and participation.