Blogs@Baruch/Wordpress

Featured Images

For the purposes of setting up a “Zine” project that looks similar across courses, we ask that all posts contain a featured image, which will then be displayed on the blogroll for the course site. Featured images will reformat to square or a square excerpt (if you have issues with the formatting of the featured image as it appears, try cropping the thumbnail to square within Blogs@Baruch).

In-Line Media

Featured images will only be displayed on the “blogroll” grid of everyone’s posts, so posts will also need to contain those images added as a “block” in the post themselves (we’d call this “in-line”). For other in-line media, like video and audio, we recommend adding/embedding links from other hosts (more below).

Please Copy and Paste Our Code

We added some code to make the site work for us. Under “Customize” settings for the Appearance of your site, paste under “Custom CSS.”

body,
paragraph,
button,
input,
select,
textarea,
header, head, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 {font-family: sans-serif; text-transform:none; line-height: 1.5; list-style-type: disc
}
.site-description,
.page-links > .page-links-title
{font-family: sans-serif; 
text-transform:none}
ul {
    list-style-position: outside;
	margin-left: 30px; list-style-type: disc} 
ul ul {list-style-type: circle}
}
thumbnail {
    height: 300px !important;
    max-width: 80%;
    margin: auto; align-content: center !important
}
body.page .entry-thumbnail, body.single .entry-thumbnail {
display: none;
}
.wp-caption.caption-big, .image-big {
	alignment-adjust: center
}

Media Sizes

Media included in posts should also be under 2MB in size. Server space tends to run dry on a course site, so we highly recommend using a separate space to upload larger files, including audio and video, and then adding those files by URL to Pages and Posts.

Text

WordPress has robust options for writing and designing text. That said, it’s not great for drafting text before it is finalized, so you may want to use a more traditional word process for that part. Once you’ve placed your text on a Post or Page on your site, you can change headings, fonts, columns, and other display options. Note that sans serif fonts are preferred over serif fonts for accessibility purposes.

Images

For creating and editing images, a variety of free software is available that matches the approach and level of depth needed for the work. GIMP, for example, is a powerful tool that works as an open-source alternative to other image creation and editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. Another open-source option is an in-browser clone of Photoshop we like called Photopea. If these feel like overkill for your needs, a site with a simpler interface for producing media like Canva might be useful for generating free visual material, or a pixel-drawing platform like Piskel for making pixelated images (like students’ avatars). Honestly, Google Slides is a pretty good image editor. Note that images on your site should contain descriptive alt text for accessibility purposes.

One useful tool to have handy is something that cuts out the background of an image and makes it transparent. We like the free in-browser backround remover Imagix for this.

For taking photos, smartphones are generally robust photo-taking devices!

Video

For free video editing software, we recommend OpenShot—which includes tools for syncing audio and video if recorded separately, as well as effects and transition options for recordings. Videos should be hosted away from WordPress and then added to your course site via a link; we recommended Vimeo or YouTube—which are not open-source options but free, and when you place the link to your video into a WordPress post from either, WordPress automatically embeds it and makes it look nice. Note that videos you create should have captions (which can be auto-produced by YouTube or Vimeo) for accessibility purposes.

And just as with images or audio, smartphones are generally ideal for taking video!

Audio

For free and open-source audio editing software, we recommend Audacity. It can elegantly do what many pricey platforms like Logic Pro X can do in terms of sound engineering or effects like fade-ins or outs. Audio should be hosted away from WordPress (we recommend SoundCloud) and then added to your course site via link. Note that audio you create should preferably have a view transcript option for accessibility purposes.

And, again here, if you have a smartphone, it’s probably a pretty good audio recorder!