Blogging and Writing for the Web

This course will become read-only in the near future. Tell us at community.p2pu.org if that is a problem.

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Tools and Technology #2: Helpful plugins

I'm creating this task to collect useful plugin links. Add them to the task itself or in the comments. :)

Zemanta is a plugin that suggests related articles, links to external resources (such as Wikipedia or Google Maps) and images all while you're writing your blog post. It scans the text and gives you one click access to making your content more dynamic. It also suggests metatags for better SEO. I highly recommend it. This link is to the Wordpress extension library, but you can get Zemanta as a browser plugin, for Joomla or Drupal, etc. 

Open Attribute helps you add licensing information to your site, find creative commons licensed images and give credit where credit is due.

Task Discussion


  • Stefanie   Aug. 16, 2011, 10:38 a.m.
    An interesting announcement from OER-DISCUSS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK:
     
     
    We’re pleased to announce that we’re releasing a CaPRéT alpha for testing and feedback! Take a look at: http://capret.mitoeit.org/.
     
    Please provide your feedback via Github's Issue tracker for CaPRéT.



    What is CaPRéT?
    Teachers
    and students cut and paste text from OER sites all the time--usually
    that's where the story ends. The OER site doesn't know what text was
    cut, nor how it might be used. Enter CaPRéT--Cut and Paste Reuse
    Tracking. OER sites that are CaPRéT-enabled can now better understand
    how their content is being used.

    When a user cuts and pastes text from a CaPRéT-enabled site:
    • The
      user gets the text as originally cut, and if their application supports
      it the pasted text will also automatically include attribution and
      licensing information.
    • The OER site can also track what text was cut, allowing them to better understand how users are using their site.
    For the alpha, we’ve built upon Pat Locksley’s OpenAttribute Chrome extension (http://openattribute.com/)
    to find and parse embedded license information. So if there’s license
    info that we can parse, and you paste the text into a destination that
    supports the rewritten clipboard, we’ll display attribution and license
    information.

    Testing CaPRéT
    The alpha has the basics working, but it *is* an alpha release so not everything’s perfect.

    We need your help to:
    • Test it out, does what you expect?
    • Paste text from CaPRéT enabled sites into a variety of locations, does it work the way you think it should?
    • Add the javascript code to your website, does it behave in unexpected or unusual ways?
    • Suggest additional features or customizations of the attribution and license display.
    You can test it for yourself at http://capret.mitoeit.org/. The code is available at https://github.com/tatemae/capret under a MIT License.

    Demo
    There's a demo at http://capret.mitoeit.org/demo.html.
    But to demonstrate how easy it is to use, I took the CaPRéT code
    snippet and inserted it on my personal blog. So if we’ve done our work
    right, it should just work (to be fair I tried this after Justin at
    Tatemae said he had the CaPRéT site up). 


     
    Visit http://www.mura.org/2011/04/capret-receives-funding/ and cut and paste text to see for yourself.


     


     


     
    Brandon
  • Pippa Buchanan   Aug. 17, 2011, 5:27 a.m.
    In Reply To:   Stefanie   Aug. 16, 2011, 10:38 a.m.

    That looks great Stefanie and probably has a lot of relevance for P2PU as a whole, and as a place where OER are often used. I'll forward this to the P2PU-Dev team!

  • Stefanie   Aug. 17, 2011, 5:42 a.m.
    In Reply To:   Pippa Buchanan   Aug. 17, 2011, 5:27 a.m.

    Great! We might try it out at ETC-J, at least I've suggested that to the editors.

    Best,

    Stefanie

  • Jessica Ledbetter   Aug. 18, 2011, 12:28 p.m.
    In Reply To:   Pippa Buchanan   Aug. 17, 2011, 5:27 a.m.

    +1

    Thanks for forwarding this, Pippa.

    Looks really neat, Stefanie. If it's adopted by ETC-J, will you let us know? I'm curious as both a geek of open learning and programming ;)