Suggest your favourite tool to use with IFTTT and your blog. What are you pleased with, not so pleased with?#mscedc
— Eli's inane rambling (@Eli_App_D) March 2, 2017
I wondered if we each had a tool that we were brave enough to recommend to the rest of the class? We are all using twitter to its death but is there something else which you feel has worked particularly well with minimum fuss? Pinterest perhaps?
My take homes are that there are some tools which don’t quite manage and need a little bit of jiggery-pokery in the code to make it work visually – Instagram, for example, posts the images at 600px width. However with my theme, the column for content is only 550px wide so the images bleed into the text on the right-hand-side column, so I change the width to 500px. Also pocket doesn’t always post the pic but instead of leaving it blank, adds an image not found – image which I find annoying.
I found today that youtube, which is native in wordpress (if you post the link it will embed), doesn’t work when added through ITFFF, so again a little tweak in the code fixes that.
I am obsessive about my blog being easy to read and not look messy though so maybe it’s just me but I do believe as we are posting our blogs publically on the web, we are all responsible for adhering to WWW rules of accessibility where we can and so should be making an effort to ensure any internet user who wishes to enjoy our blog content can and is not restricted because they are not able bodied.
I tried to get YouTube playlist and IFTTT working together, but it didn’t work.
I’m loathe to use the “liked” function with youtube because I’d spend more time removing junk from my blog, than I would save from manually cutting and pasting my video link directly. Which is what I’ve taken to do.
I am very impressed with the layout and legibility of your blog though. Something I aspire to, but time is not my own at the moment.
I’m a bit annoyed at the restrictions on our WordPress tbh. We can’t apply our own templates, edit CSS or really do much with it other than pick a theme… or am I missing something!
Cheers,
Colin
IFTTT, at the least the way we are using it, does cause a lot of extra time and work when it would be quicker to just do things manually. I’ve taken to a bit of both. There are some things which IFTTT doesn’t quite cope with so I tweak them so that the blog is readable etc. Things like it doesn’t pull the youtube video in, instead, gives an error, so I fix the HTML once the feed is done. Same with Pinterest andInstagram. The image it pulls is too big for the theme on my blog so I reduce the image size in the HTML.
We discussed this on our skype chat this week and there were varying opinions about whether or not to fix it or leave it and then add the item again manually. It is my opinion that as our blogs are open and public, we have a responsibility to engage with the WWW rules on accessibility and inclusion, therefore it is our personal responsibility to ensure everyone can access the info on our blogs if they chose to and not be denied that because they need to use a screen reader or mobility device etc. Unfortunately, not everyone on our course understands about accessibility, though.
It would be nice to have more control over the blogs, but as I understand it, the blogs aren’t supported properly by the university IT dept, so if something goes wrong, the course organisers have limited help. So makes sense to keep things as simple and locked down as they are. Otherwise, it could be carnage 🙂
If you are finding things a pain, shout out, I’m sure amongst the class us we will be able to come up with a solution.
Eli