Tag Archives: College Publisher

#nyc12: Making the Switch to WordPress

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Yesterday morning, I gave the last of three CMA NYC sessions I led this week:

Considering making the switch to WordPress? Join Daniel Bachhuber, code wrangler for Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP, to learn how to make open source work for your publication. We’ll discuss whether WordPress is the right fit for you, how to assess other options, and what steps you need to take if you’d like to make the switch.

Most of the people attending had been to at least one of my other sessions, so it was a quicker review of the slides and then more of a general Q&A session. A lot of the questions revolved around the different types of hosting, where you should go for support, etc.

Markup normalization

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A small selection of the Vim statements required to normalize every possible variant of shitty markup entered by copy and paste online editors into 35,000 articles over the last eight years:

:%s/,|||,/=nr2char(11)/g
:%s/,|||/=nr2char(11)/g
:%s/""/=nr2char(21)/g
:%s/"//g
:exe '%s/' . nr2char(11) . '/","/g'
:exe '%s/' . nr2char(21) . '/\"/g'
:exe '%s/"$//g' # add a
:%s/^/"/g
:%s/<br /><p><br />/</p><p>/g
:%s/<p></p><p>/<p>/g
:%s/<BR><br />/<br />/g
:%s/<br /><p></p><p>/<p>/g
:%s/<p><br />/<p>/g
:%s/</p></p><p>/</p><p>/g
:%s/</p><br /><p>/</p><p>/g
:%s/<br /><p>/</p><p>/g
:%s/<p><p>/<p>/g
:%s/<P>/</p><p>/g
:%s/</p></p>/</p>/g
:%s/<br /></p><p>/</p><p>/g

Two more things: 1) Anyone who’s ever tried to tell you to use find and replace in bbEdit for large files is dead wrong. 2) College Publisher, you suck ****. ‘,|||,’ is not a valid delimiting character. Quit being malicious.

Lastly, if I’ve thought ahead, I would’ve tracked invalid markup against prevalence and date range. That would’ve made for a fascinating anthropological study.

Q&A: CMN’s Rusty Lewis and Jon Beck about new advertising options for College Publisher

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Q&A: CMN’s Rusty Lewis and Jon Beck about new advertising options for College Publisher. CMN’s new managed WordPress offering is required to use their advertising software, ultimately meaning they still take a cut of the overall revenue.

Q&A: Rusty Lewis on CMN’s new business model

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Q&A: Rusty Lewis on CMN’s new business model. It just hit me: College Publisher inadvertently made it cost-effective to hire a developer and host it yourself. Student publications who don’t, and instead pay $2K/year for a terrible CMS while also donating their advertising revenue to CMN, aren’t long for this world. I can’t believe College Publisher would stick this to 80% of their clients.

Licensing Fees to Begin in 2011

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Licensing Fees to Begin in 2011. Awesome timing: College Publisher announces three new services, including managed WordPress hosting for $4,500/year, and that it will charge $2k/year for the basic Polopoly offering to those under 25,000 page views a month. Absolutely fascinating.

Interview with Rusty Lewis on sale of College Media Network

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Interview with Rusty Lewis on sale of College Media Network. Bryan Murley gets the details on the recent transfer of ownership to Access Networks. It sounds like time to delivery was a major friction point at MTVu, and this will enable them to be more nimble.

Teasing WordPress posts with YQL, jQuery, JSONP and iframes

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Teasing WordPress posts with YQL, jQuery, JSONP and iframes. In Ivar Vong’s first post for the Daily Emerald web development blog, he discusses an ingenious workaround for bringing outside content to a College Publisher homepage. Using YQL for external data could be an intriguing user experience experiment. The CUNY J-School homepage currently uses Simple Pie to pull at least six RSS feed and, when the cache is being refreshed, the page load time can spike.