Author: yuq

3 Fantastic WordPress Plugins for Your Online Journal

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Say, you’re in the middle of publishing your favorite paper to a WordPress website. You are stuck because creating all those footnotes links, formatting the pull quotes and inserting that complicated-looking table seems a daunting task. But don’t give up! Here are three plugins that will help you out!

Footnotes

Plugin: Easy Footnotes

It not only lets you add footnotes throughout your WordPress post, but also compiles a corresponding ordered list of the footnotes at the bottom of your article. 

Nice features:

  • Shortcode enabled. A footnote can be inserted as easily as typing [note]Footnote content.[/note] where you want it to be.
  • Automatic numbering. It would have been a huge pain having to number a few hundreds of footnotes manually, especially when you realize that you’ve skipped number 7 somehow after entering the first 90 footnotes. The good news is that this plugin automatically add the number of the footnote where the shortcode is entered. 

Pull Quotes

Plugin: Easy Pull Quotes

The plugin name is pretty self-explanatory. It helps you create pull quotes in WordPress posts. After installing and activating this plugin, you’ll see an “Easy Pull Quotes” tab in your editing toolbar. By clicking it you’ll be directed to a text box where you can enter your quote and choose its alignment. 

Nice features:

  • The pull quotes can be easily shared to Twitter by the end user by clicking the Twitter icon.
  • If you’re familiar with CSS, you can easily create your own pull quote style by manipulating the code. (Here‘s how you can add pull quotes to WordPress posts without using any plugins. It’d probably be more time-consuming, but it’ll be fun to learn some HTML and CSS!)

Tables

Plugin: TablePress

After installing this plugin, you’ll be able to generate beautiful tables and embed them in your posts. You can learn more about this plugin from this website, where you’ll find a cool demo too. 

Nice features:

  • Shortcode enabled.
  • Tables can be imported and exported from/to Excel, CSV files.
  • With the help of additional Java libraries, it’s possible to allow your readers to sort or filter your tables.

I hope these plugins help! Have fun online publishing!

Testing the Guide to Set Up WordPress Locally with WAMP

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A local server environment will make testing themes and plugins of WordPress much easier. One of the ways to achieve this to install WAMP on your PC. I found this great blog post titled How to Set Up WordPress Locally for PC/Windows with WampServer by Raelene Morey. I installed WAMP on my PC and set up WordPress following this guide. Here is a summary of what I did and found, including a few details which are emitted from the guide.

Install WAMP on your PC

  • Go to http://www.wampserver.com/en/
  • Choose the version that matches up with your system
    • You may be unsure about downloading the 64 bits or the 32 bits version. You can check your system type by typing “System” in the search box. Look for the “System Type” field which tell you if your system is x64 or x32.
  • Click “download directly”
  • Follow the installation instructions

Set-up Wordpress on WAMP (things emitted from the guide)

  1. Before downloading WordPress, you need to set up a database first. This requires you to login to phpMyAdmin. You don’t actually need to enter the username nor password in order to login. If clicking “Go” button doesn’t lead you to a new page, try entering “root” as the username and leave the password field blank. 
  2. When you’ve downloaded WordPress following the guide, you’ll need to tweak the wp-config-sample.php file. To edit the .php file, you’ll need a text editor. The one I used was notepad++. You can also try TextWrangler, Brackets and other text editors. (Here is a list of options.) After downloading notepad++ from here, you can right click the .php file and choose “Edit with notepad++”. Here’s how the .php file looked in notepad++ before and after edited.  (before)  (after)

 

Test WordPress Plugin (Juxtapose) on WAMP

  1. Go to http://localhost/wordpress/ in your WAMP server. Login to your WordPress account.
  2. Search for plugins that you’d like to test.  I chose Juxtapose for this experiment.
  3. Upload images to be juxtaposed to “Media” first. Then in your blog post or wherever you’d like to use this feature, paste in this shortcode –  [juxtapose]<image1><image2>[/juxtapose]. Replace “<image1><image2>” by inserting the images you’d like to be juxtaposed.
  4. Results: now you can compare the two images by sliding the vertical bar. Images of different dimensions may not work as expected. This plugin also works for pairs of images of any size, except thumbnails.

 

Something to Think about When You Work on DH Remotely

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The past winter break I was in China where some websites and web services are not available. My days were a little bleak without Youtube and Facebook. The worst part was that I had no access to my Carleton Gmail account or Google drive. This made my task of uploading articles to Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (JHNA) particularly challenging – it was hard to contact my supervisor and the authors, and it was impossible to view the JHNA articles, figures and upload guide since they are all stored on Google drive. I was glad that I realized this problem before I left campus. I tried to resolve this issue by giving my supervisor an alternative email address and installing Carleton GlobalProtect VPN. However, the VPN didn’t work for the first few weeks of my break. Here’s a rundown of the problems I faced, and how I solved them:

 

(the ones marked with [FAILED] have failed and thus not recommended):

First 2 days of my break

  1. [FAILED] Sat and cried

Week 2

Using my personal email account, 

  1. contacted my supervisor, explained the situation
  2. [FAILED] filed an ITS report, which was automatically rejected because it was not sent from a carleton account
  3. given that (2) had failed, reached out to all my friends who work for ITS for help

Week 3 – 4

  1. VPN troubleshooting with tremendous help from ITS
  2. [FAILED] Experimented some random free VPNs found using Baidu (a Chinese search engine), which brought my laptop some virus problems
  3. Switched to Yahoo (relatively more reliable than Baidu) and found a few highly ranked VPNs in IOS app store
  4. Tried one of the VPNs, “Betternet VPN”. It’s free, and though slow, it works! *Note: This app can only be found in the American app store. An American Apple ID is required.
  5. ITS made some backend updates and GlobalProtect started to work for me!

 

To summarize, if you are traveling outside of the United States and are likely to have similar problems, consider doing these in advance:

  1. Install Carleton GlobalProtect VPN (or other trusted VPN software)
  2. Friend and bribe ITS workers
  3. Give people you need to contact an alternative email address that you have access to in any network environment
  4. Save as many things you might need from Google drive to….your hard drive?…as possible
  5. Download other reliable VPNs to your tablets just in case GlobalProtect fails you

And lastly when you are on your trip and find out that none of above helps, please be patient and stay positive – there’s always going to be a way out; otherwise, enjoy your days free of digital distractions!

 

Qimeng’s introduction

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I’m Qimeng, a junior math major at Carleton. As opposed to what you may assume about math majors – was how I wanted to start my second sentence, but I have to confess that I fit pretty much into all the common stereotypes. I like working with data, programming and writing (poking holes in others’) proofs. I also enjoy Hitchcock movies, Stephen King short stories and Sudoku.

It’s my second year working as a Digital Humanities Associate. Last year I worked mainly on two projects – JHNA (formatting articles to be published on Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art) and Image Management (exploring the world of metadata of graphical materials and testing various managing tools). I got the opportunity of working with students from different academic fields, ranging from Computer Science to Studio Art, which opens my mind to new ways of approaching problems.

My favorite part of our DH training is wandering on Lynda.com. Going through lists of tutorials for so many amazing software exhilarates me more than online shopping. Not only a wonderful source of knowledge, Lynda is also a reminder to me of the importance of consistently educating and bettering myself.