danielbachhuber » College Publisher

#nyc12: Making the Switch to WordPress

Daniel Bachhuber — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:31:09 +0000

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.

Daniel O’Connor: Moving Pipe Dream from College Publisher to WordPress

Daniel Bachhuber — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:53:38 +0000

Daniel O’Connor: Moving Pipe Dream from College Publisher to WordPress. Responsive design for a student newspaper website. Props.

Pipe Dream in numbers

Daniel Bachhuber — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 22:39:43 +0000

Pipe Dream in numbers. 7,763 articles containing 4,136,279 words written by ~380 authors in the BU Pipe Dream’s export from College Publisher.

Markup normalization

Daniel Bachhuber — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 02:38:16 +0000

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/

/

/g :%s/

/

/g :%s/ / /g :%s/

/

/g :%s/

/

/g :%s/

/

/g :%s/


/
/g

:%s/
/
/g

:%s/
/
/g

:%s/
/
/g

:%s/
/
/g

:%s/
/

/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.

Daily Emerald relaunches on WordPress

Daniel Bachhuber — Mon, 02 May 2011 22:12:40 +0000

Mad props to Ivar Vong and the rest of his team who finally pulled it off. They did the switch to “web-first” too. It’s been a long time in the making.

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

Daniel Bachhuber — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 19:06:55 +0000

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

Daniel Bachhuber — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 05:21:25 +0000

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

Daniel Bachhuber — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:29:34 +0000

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

Daniel Bachhuber — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 14:45:06 +0000

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

Daniel Bachhuber — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 14:55:38 +0000

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.