Blog comments closed!? Short term fix

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For some reason, caused by either WordPress or an associated plugin, comment sections are closed for all the current and new posts, as far as I can tell. The ultimate solution may require a bit of work. But for the moment, if you write a post or want to comment on a post, do this to turn on the comments:

  1. Log in.
  2. Go to the RLR blog dashboard (dial icon, top left of screen).
  3. Click on Posts/All Posts on left-side panel.
  4. Find the slug of the post you are interested in. Click the “Quick Edit” link under the post’s title.
  5. Click the box “Allow comments”. Comments should now be turned on, go to post and comment at will.

If anyone feels inclined to come up with a universal or permanent solution, this might be a place to start.

RLR Image Library (Dan E.)

Hello all. I’ve created an image library here at RLR. I think its a good idea and I’m hoping that you do too. If we accumulate a collection of good images, mostly photos I assume, it will become useful and interesting.

The idea is that we can post image galleries – collections of photos of or about a particular project/trip/experiment/event – to share with the lab. I hope this sharing will be informative and entertaining but also practical – we can share images for use in presentations and posters and the like.

Right off the bat I want it to be clear that if you use any image from RLR that you did not create yourself, that image must be attributed to its creator. Its easy, just give the person who made and uploaded the image a credit on or near the image in your presentation or poster etc.. Pretty obvious really.

The image library comprises galleries displayed on new pages added to RLR under the “Image Library” page. If you wish, these pages can be hidden such that only registered users who have logged in can see your images.

Check out Brook’s opening effort for an excellent example of what I’m talking about.

Greg O. has also put up some nice shots of Californian sunflowers.

I’ve added instructions on the “How to: contribute content” page and on the “How to: use RLR” page.

If my instructions are insufficient, or you can see obvious problems or improvements, please let me know.

Answers to some questions that you may have . . .

Continue reading

posting code, a warning (Greg B.)

I’ve just noticed there is a problem with code that has been dropped into posts. If you copy and paste directly from the post, for some reason, depending on the syntax of the code you may lose important bits. For example “while ()” appears as “while ()” but thats not what it is! Click on edit and see for yourself! You will not have this problem if you go to the edit post page and copy from there. Also and this may just be the text editor I use but some commented line were broken into multiple lines which did not have ‘#’.

There has to be a better way to host code here but I don’t know what it is. Any ideas?

RSS feed? (Kathryn)

Hello people who know these things!

Is there a way for me to get an RSS feed for this blog so that I can get updates in my Google Reader? I assume you have to do something with the log in…

thanks!

Kathryn

How to post – code (Dan E.)

We have a problem sharing code via RLR.

The Problem

Unfortunately WordPress has a list of acceptable file types that it allows to be uploaded to our media library and none of the useful coding file types are on that list. The list is simply a list of acceptable file extensions. This means if you write a useful R script (or perl or python) script and save it with a standard file extension, like .R or .pl, WordPress will not allow you to upload it to the RLR media library so that you can share it via a post.

The Solution

The list of acceptable file extensions can be hacked and I might give it a try but, until I do, you will have to do one of these things:

  • Change the file extension. If you save your script as a .txt file it will upload fine. You should make it clear in your post what kind of script it is and then people who download it can change the .txt extension to whatever they want.
  • Put the code in your post. If your script is not too long you can simply copy and paste the code from your text editor into the post editor. The formatting of the code will remain true to the original so users can simply copy and paste it back out into a text editor or R-Studio or wherever. See Rose’s post about plotting STRUCTURE results for an example of this.
  • Compress your script file. If your script is big you can try zipping it and then uploading the compressed file. Users can then just download and unzip it. [As of November 2011 this hasn’t been tested.]

Dan E.

How to post- Continue reading-> (Dan E.)

Hi All.

Greg B has shown me a very useful HTML trick that will make the RLR Home page more user friendly if we all use it.

If you are just looking for the code so you can copy it, here it is:
<!--more-->

UPDATE (Jan2012): I just noticed that there are two other, easier, ways to get the “Continue reading →” feature into your post.

  1. Keyboard shortcut: alt+shift+t.
  2. WordPress post editor button: There is an “insert more tag” button among the buttons at the top of the post editor. In my editor it is on the top row 4th from the right – beside the link and unlink buttons.

It is very simple to post to RLR such that your post is displayed on the Home page as an opening paragraph or two followed by a “Continue reading →” link that takes the reader to the full post when followed.

Just like this . . .
Continue reading

If you edit a post – comment on it too! (Dan E.)

Hello all,

Sebastien and Rose have already come across the scenario where a one RLR user has something to add to a post written by another and the sensible thing to do seems to be to edit the post.

This is fine. Editing posts is obviously the right thing to do in some situations.

The problem is that the act of editing a post is not an obvious one to anyone other than the editor. You could make a really significant contribution to a post about something very useful to the lab but this contribution might not be at all obvious to any other RLR user.
Continue reading

Intellectual Property and RLR (Dan E.)

Hello all.

In an effort to prevent some potential problems I want to present some ideas about intellectual property and posting on RLR right now at the beginning.

I hope that RLR will help people in the lab. The idea is simple – that we will benefit from the expertise of others. The Rieseberg lab has a lot more expertise than any individual member does and all of us have skills and information to share. In order to promote this sharing lab members need to feel that the give and take that happens via RLR is fair – not too takey. Users of RLR need to feel that they are not contributing substantially more than others and that their contributions are not being unfairly exploited. With this in mind I’ve come up with three ideas about intellectual property as it pertains to posts on RLR. They are listed below and on the About page.
Continue reading