PRrag

John Guilfoil's Blog

You are here: Home / Archives for Personal Notebooks

Wanna hear a secret?

by

Every day I ask myself if I’m doing the right thing.

Starting a company — a news company — at age 23 was a risk. Every day I wonder if it’s going to pay off.

Beyond that, there’s the Boston Globe. People tell me all the time that I need to be at a different newspaper right now if I want to come back one day.

I still disagree.

But I still gaze at JournalismJobs.com every few days wondering. Maybe Ft. Wayne? Maybe Miami? Maybe York, Pennsylvania?

Nah. Boston.

Gotta run. I have stories to edit for Blast.

Taking it back

by

It’s time to start blogging again.

I have a voice, and I want to share that with you.

Whether you like it or not.

I’m going to talk about my exploits as a freelance journalist and the editor of the happy little online magazine, Blast. This isn’t going to be a Live Journal or a diary. I hope to make some interesting observations and analysis on my job and what’s going on around me.

-john

WordPress 2.7 ACTIVATE

by

We are testing WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 on PRrag.com to test it out.

So far so decent.

It is definitely a better visual interface than 2.6, but it’s a whole nother thing to get used to.

Two WordPress complaints

by

I have really loved using WordPress to power BlastMagazine.com, but I have been having two huge problems lately.

First, we do not use WordPress Widgets. We use WAY too many plugins and have about 15 different variations of a sidebar on Blast, so we aren’t using Widgets. But it seems like everyone is converting the best plugins to “Widget only” — that sucks for us and I get the feeling there’s a lot of actual bloggers out there that havne’t assimilated to the Widget world yet. 

My question: How do you manually insert/activate/use a Widget in a sidebar or a page without activating the dynamic/widget sidebar function? 

Number two: Importing text for dummies.

Blast has about 20 different people who insert articles or blog on the site. Many of them are not web savvy. But the two most common ways writers send us stories is by email (Gmail usually) and in Microsoft Word .doc (or that stupid .docx) format. 

The problem that leaves us with is that Gmail takes pasted text and inserts random linebreaks all over the place and Microsoft Word inserts all kinds of crazy crap, code, fonts, sizes, etc, etc, etc. I’ve training my editors on how to use the “Paste from Word” function, but even that’s not filtering out all of the MS Word garbage now.

Oh, and we could really use a good multi-author plugin that integrates to the post editor and lets us assign multiple authors to a single post…

Archives

Categories