cjyabraham.com

I’m looking for an experienced and versatile web developer/producer to develop and modernize the digital presence of the Mountains and Rivers Order of Zen Buddhism.

The Mountains and Rivers Order and its mainhouse, Zen Mountain Monastery, is one of the more significant Zen Buddhist training centers in the West. Ranked first on Google for searches such as “Zen buddhism” and “Zen meditation,” the Order also maintains a strong presence on the web with large archives of teaching material, web radio, an online journal, and an online store.

This is an excellent opportunity for the right candidate with the technical knowledge and project managerial skills to coordinate a team of designers and content editors who will be working closely with a religious organization. See the full RFP and please contact me for further details.

EdNews Colorado has just gone public with their new Jobs Board.  The Jobs Board, however, is actually not so new.  Instead it’s a re-brand of the GothamSchools Jobs Board.

Behind the scenes, both sites use the same WordPress instance and the same database.  I managed to do this by using the Domain Mirror WordPress plugin.  It allows a WordPress instance to be accessible from multiple domains.  I could sniff out the domain requested and serve up a different header, footer and stylesheet for each of the sites.

I also sorted the jobs list on the home page of each site to favor recent jobs that are local to each site.  I laid out the plans for this here.  Various widgets, contact emails, featured post prices, and site copy are also unique to each site.

Hopefully this jobs board will gather momentum and will help to support the news reporting on EdNews Colorado as it is doing for GothamSchools.  I also hope that partnering both sites like this will be an added incentive for people to post their listing, knowing that it will show up on both jobs boards.  Perhaps in the future we can roll this out to other education news sites across the country.

I’ve just republished my Curing RSI report that I wrote back in 2004 after recovering from a crippling seven-year struggle with Repetitive Strain Injury in my hands.  Over the years it has been distributed widely and I’ve been in touch with many people to help them recover.  I had it up initially at Fred Amir’s site but have relocated it here after touching it up a bit.

It has been a long time now since I’ve experienced any chronic pain and I’ve almost forgotten what it was like back then, searching for a cure to my condition.  I continue to be grateful for the groundbreaking work done by Dr. John Sarno.

GothamSchools is partnering with EdNews Colorado to create an education jobs network based on the success of the GothamSchools Jobs Board.  I’ve been thinking a bit about just how to do this that will be a win for both communities and will lay the pattern for rolling out future versions of the jobs board to other cities.

Design

It’s conceivable that someone looking for a job on the EdNews Colorado board may be interested in a posting in NYC and vice versa, so we wanted to integrate both of these boards in a way that added value to each of them.  The trick to do this is to list the jobs in a way that is most relevant to the particular board.

Here is what I think it should look like for the GothamSchools Jobs board.  The EdNews Colorado version would be the same, except centered around Colorado:

As a future idea, once we have more cities represented, we could expand the design to have a map showing the locations of all the available jobs.

Hosting

Both jobs boards will be hosted on one server and hitting the same database.  I’m hoping we can get the jobs.ednewscolorado.org to hit an appropriately themed copy of our WordPress code. (more…)

Google Analytics has recently launched a new Search Engine Optimization reporting module that I’ve just rigged up this morning for all of our sites.  It integrates with data from Google Webmaster Tools to produce reports on the performance of the site on Google search.

As an example, let’s take a look at the Streetfilms‘ report.  First, we should note that Streetfilms gets about 30% of its traffic from Google search.  The Search Engine Optimization reports are nested under Traffic Sources in Google Analytics.  For Streetfilms over the last month we get this information:

(more…)

It’s quite easy these days to geo-tag blogs posts, photos, comments, and other bits of data and then display them on a map.  The comments geo map plugin I made a few years ago did just that for comments and allowed a conversation to have an added geographic dimension.

I just came across the way Gothamist does this with what they call a News Map:

I think this would be a great way to list stories on Streetsblog.org, Streetsblog.net, Streetfilms and also GothamSchools as an alternative to the reverse-chronological blogging format.  The map could position itself by default at the location of the user to show them stories immediately surrounding them.  The sidebar could display a reverse-chronological list of blog posts.  When you click on a title it will highlight the blog post on the map.

We run all of our blogs using WordPress.  Wordpress.org releases updates to their software on a regular basis, adding new features, making it more secure, faster etc.  Normally upgrading is just a matter of downloading the new source code, testing it out on a dev server, then deploying it on our live servers.

Just recently when we upgraded to version 3.3.1 this process didn’t go as smoothly as it normally does and I’d like to briefly document here what the issue was for the benefit of other people and to remind myself of what happened here for future reference.

After deploying the new version, things looked fine.  Over the next few days, however, problems started to arise.  Scheduled posts were not getting published on time and the local comment sync from Disqus was not working automatically.  This only was occurring on the Streetsblogs, however, and not on GothamSchools. (more…)

Our editors are looking for new ways to create a story by curating social media entries into a linear conversation.  This morning I came across Storify and am very pleased with it.  I was so enthusiastic that I couldn’t help but to whip together a tribute to the great Lionel Messi (to serve as an example!)  To create your own story, simply go to storify.com. You can then easily embed it into your blog, as I have done here:
(more…)

Streetfilms is in the process of applying for a grant to improve their site.  This poses the question of how do we measure the effectiveness of streetfilms.org so that we can show whether any investment in it pays off?

Streetfilms produces short films showing how smart transportation design and policy can result in better places to live, work and play.  Its goal is to inspire action and behavioral change to make the cities of the world more livable.

So how do we measure Streetfilms’ success at achieving this goal?  If we look at how people engage Streetfilms, we can draw a few rough categories of increasing degrees of user engagement: (more…)

Our editors have been asking for a way to embed twitter searches into their blogs.  It turns out it’s really easy.  Twitter offers a number of embeddable widgets.

1. Log in to Twitter and click on Resources in the right sidebar
2. Choose Widgets and then click “My Website”
3. Choose the Search widget or any other widget
4. Customize then embed!
5. You may want to add some css on the page to customize the look of the widget. I had to here because my styles were interfering with it a bit.
6. Edit the settings to set interval: 5000.  This will make the widget update every 5s instead of the default 30s.  You can also adjust the width and height.