• A theme customizer that lets you change your site’s settings and styles in one interface.
• Automatic Twitter embeds. Paste the URL of a Tweet into one of your posts and it will automatically show up in the post, like the example below.
• HTML Image Captions. When writing an image caption you can include some HTML tags like <b>, <i>, and <a> to add information to your caption.

WordPress 3.4 is here! Update your site now to try the new theme customizer, better headers, HTML captions & more: wp.me/pZhYe-BE

— WordPress(@WordPress) June 13, 2012

Here’s a video that highlights these features.

There is more information available about WordPress 3.4 in their official blog and developer documentation.

Here is an example of this type of spam:

Comment Author: canada goose kensington parka
Comment Author Email: Lan….o@yahoo.com
Comment Author Website: http://www.canadagoosejakket…rk.eu

You made some respectable points there. I regarded on the web for the issue and found most individuals will go together with with your website.

The point of these spam comments is to use the Comment Author Website field to plaster the web with links back to the spammer’s site in order to make the site seem more popular to search engines.

WordPress’s built-in anti-spam tools ignore the Comment Author Website field and only look at links in the comment text. This used to be sufficient since it is unlikely that most readers will click on the comment-author’s name and follow through to their website. As well, adding links in the comment text allowed spammers better control in how to present the link so that it had the most impact on search engines. Because of the success in filtering of the comment text, spammers have now moved on to other techniques, just trying to get their links to exist anywhere on the page, even if they aren’t ideally positioned.

To combat this form of spam we have removed the Comment Author Website field from the comment form. There are few legitimate needs for this field and it was originally added to allow people to link back to their own blogs — a nice feature, but not necessary. By removing this “attractive nuisance” we can instantly mark as spam any comments that submit a value for the Comment Author Website even though this field is no longer shown in the form.

As of today, this type of comment spam will no longer even be held for moderation — it will be dropped into the “spam” category right away. In the first two hours since this change has been in place it has blocked 70 spam comments that would otherwise have required moderation by the target blogs’ administrators.

You can click on one of the thumbnails in the Themes page to see a preview of your blog in the new theme.

If you want to blog, but the Middlebury blogging network is lacking something you need, let us know.

ShareThis

The ShareThis plugin adds buttons to the top or bottom of your posts and/or pages that people can click on to share the post with many social media sites. These buttons appear at the bottom of this post, even. You can choose which buttons appear and pick between several different button styles. ShareThis also lets you track how often your content is shared this way and how many people it reaches.

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools provides two-way communication between your blog and Twitter. You can use this to send out a tweet any time you write a new blog post, so your followers know when you’ve put up new content. You can also have it create a blog post from each of your tweets or a digest post at the end of the day with all of your tweets from that day. This plugin also comes with a widget you can put in your sidebar to show your latest tweets.

Simple Facebook Connect

The Simple Facebook Connect plugin is now available for you to enable on any sites.middlebury.edu blog. The plugin has a number of features, one of the most useful is an option to automatically publish posts to your Facebook profile or Fan Page. There is also an option (if you turn that publishing on) to import comments made on those Facebook posts back into the blog. It also has the usual assortment of Like Buttons, Share Boxes, and Facebook Wall widgets. You can also turn on a tab in the Media pane that lets you include images from your Facebook Photo Albums in your posts.

Disqus Commenting System

The Disqus plugin replaces your normal WordPress comment form with a form that lets people post comments as guests, or by signing into one of several other accounts they may have (Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, or any other service that proivdes an Open ID authentication system). You can see this now on MiddLab. Be aware that this removes the ability to post using your Middlebury account, so it is not a good option for private blogs and course blogs.

As an added bonus, we now show videos from MiddMedia using the HTML5 video player in browsers supporting WebM playback: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and browsers on Android devices. Internet Explorer 9, Safari and iOS users also get the HTML5 video player, playing the video in MP4 format while Internet Explorer 7 and 8 users will still see the flash-based player.

• 2-3 pm, Thurs, Dec 8th, Library 105, Introduction to Moodle (sign up)
• 3-4 pm, Thurs, Dec 8th, Library 105, Introduction to WordPress (sign up)
• 3-4 pm, Tues, Dec 13th, Library 105, Curricular Technologies Work Session (sign up)
• 2-3 pm, Wed, Dec 14th, Library 105, Curricular Technologies Work Session (sign up)

For more information on these, see: Workshops

For information about all workshops offered by LIS in December see: On-campus Workshops > Schedule