Two Display Posts Tricks

I’ve been a fan of Display Posts since the days of straight Non-Programistan. Despite the fact that I can write my own stuff from scratch, Display Posts still comes in handy all the time. The following are just two little tricks used in a recent course site. I’m just skimming the surface of the capabilities […]

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PHP Middleware for Keeping Your JS API Secrets Secret

Screenshot of a design context website where the weather data is being pulled via API.

Origin Story We were looking to pull in live weather data for a eco-related design contest that VCU Qatar is hosting. I found a free API for weather but wanted a way to use it via javascript and not expose any secrets. That led to the script below. Many APIs have query strings that require […]

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Taming a River Theme

Origin Story Matt worked long hours making an incredible theme for Footprints on the James course.1 It’s in WordPress but a large portion of the site ended up being built by hand as complexity increased and time dwindled.2 That means it’s hard-coded HTML/PHP. Now because the site was so great, we ended up having a […]

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H Tags and Auto-Constructing an Anchor Index

Origin Story I got a fairly dense Word document that needed to go online in way that people could more easily navigate. After checking it out, it appeared we had a large number of sections but we were lucky in that they were designated by H tags of various levels. Now I could have gone […]

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Filter WordPress Title but Only in Admin Area

A drawing of a small terrier dog jumping through a hoop held by a monkey.

I am playing around with unfurling1 open graph data in the WordPress TinyMCE editor. You can see what that looks like in the video above. It’s a lot like the oEmbed experience in WordPress but with the open graph information driving it. I want the data to go into the post body but I don’t […]

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Digital Histology & the Long Haul

Digital Histology homescreen screenshot.

Normally we finish our projects in anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. Digital Histology has been the exception to that rule. I can see a reference to the site going back to Nov. of 2016! That doesn’t mean we’ve worked on this site continuously for years. The gaps have been frequent and […]

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Top Hat Content Rescue Bookmarklet

We have more and more people building things in Top Hat. Top Hat has some useful features (and a very aggressive sales team) but it’s not a place that makes it easy to get your content out. I am working with some of our biology faculty who have gotten an Open Stax textbook in there […]

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