John Larkin

I have been working on a new web site for my students and as part of the process the students will be working with WordPress. During the course of this forthcoming project I am hoping that the students will link to relevant audio and video based resources within their posts.

Uploading and embedding the media files is not an option at this stage due to bandwidth and space considerations so I am encouraging my students to link to the actual resources. Not always a great solution but fine at the moment.

WordPress is a great tool but not all themes are created equal and media embedding is a hit and miss art form at times. There are themes that allow simple embeds and others that require a little more work. As a result I have tested a number of themes which will be made available to the self hosted WordPress network site I am creating for the students.

As well, I prefer to use fine tuned YouTube video embed code so that specific parameters can be added to the embedded video, in particular, switching off the suggested videos that appear at the end of a YouTube clip be default.

Embedding video in a WordPress site

Embedding audio in a WordPress site

This afternoon I created two “How To” guides using Comic Life and exported them as pdf documents. These will be made available to the students in order to guide them through the process. They are linked to at the foot of each page on this web site as well as being made available via the Guides and Resources page.

In the meantime, below is a screen shot of the forthcoming web site. The Dead Dude Diaries 2011. All will be revealed in a week or so.