To take the smiley off your page, go to the Jetpack dashboard, and click on the Configure.  In the configuration options you will see a checkbox to “Hide the stats smiley face image.”  Just check that and save and you are smiley free, and free to smile.

What is Jetpack?  From the makers of Jetpack, they say “Jetpack supercharges your self‑hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.” 

From our standpoint it is a number of WordPress modules that will add some benefit to your site, including site subscriptions, posting a blog post via email and more.  But to use Jetpack you have to understand the peculiarities and actually see if some of the features will work with the theme that is being used.  In a nutshell, the theme has to be able to support Jetpack.

We are outlining some of the steps and peculiarities that we have encountered in our testing with the OSU Responsive theme which is the primary theme we are testing against at this time.  All other themes are unsupported for Jetpack at this time.

Steps to use Jetpack

1.  First you will need to connect to wordpress.com, which means you need a wordpress.com account.

Best practice for departments and organizations.  Create a wordpress.com with a generic account.  That way it can stay with the organization rather than with an individual.

Why do you need a wordpress.com account?  The plugin itself uses wordpress.com’s cloud infrastructure to do some of the processing, and where we can offload some of this is a good thing.

2.  Then connect to Jetpack from the Jetpack Dashboard.  Once you connect to a wordpress.com account, you will see the Connected in your Jetpack screen navigated to from your Dashboard.

3.  Next is to look at the variety of options and activate the ones you would like to use.  Please note that not all of these might work with the theme that is being used.  For OSU Responsive, WordPress.com Stats, Subscriptions, Carousel, Like, Post by Email, Sharing, Contact have all been tested in our limited testing capabilities.

Please note the Contacts feature of Jetpack is not compatible with the Sociable plugin.

You can disable Sociable under Plugins menu located on the left in your administrative menu.

So you get all that done and you decide you don’t want to use one of the features any more.  But where to turn it off?  It wasn’t intuitive when I first went looking for it, that was certain, but a quick Google search found the answer.

Once a Jetpack feature is activated, there might be a configure button there.  If it is clicked, it will expand the area, and it is in that expanded area that the Deactivate button will be.  Why there?  I don’t know but after using it a few times, I was able to manage remembering where it was the next time around.

Overall it looks like some good pieces are there.  As you are using this, remember to keep in mind everyone.  There are accessibility policies to keep in mind, as well as just a general sense of if you really will be using  a a feature that is activated.  As we get more information we will put up, but the best thing right now is to visit the Jetpack site for more information.  We’ll be writing more as we use the features ourselves.  As always we would love to hear your feedback, so try out the contact form that we’ve just put in as part of the Jetpack feature set and send us some feedback about your experience with Jetpack.

In the intervening time between our blog posts, we still have some work to do to fix the Responsive menu structure.  More than one level deep in a menu and it isn’t too useful and on the mobile side, the mobile menu has a bug we know about that does not expand it beyond a certain length, making part of the menu not visible.  That fix is in the works.

At this point, however, we want to give you the ability to take off with Jetpack.

Responsive really means responsive web design.  The goal behind responsive web design is to have the design of a given web page be adjusted dependent on the size of the screen.  So on a phone, the look and feel changes to be more of a mobile experience where reading a full web page doesn’t necessarily make sense.

The theme is a two column theme, with only a main sidebar, and the bottom contact area as available areas to put widgets in.  Remember, not all widgets will look good in different areas so you will have to see what works and doesn’t.

Who can use OSU Responsive?  Responsive is available for everyone, however, there are some things to note.  The use of the OSU logo or tag is restricted to certain use.  The theme will display the tag or not based on the Organization Type as specified by the table below.

Student Organizations are governed by the policies of Student Leadership and Involvement.  If you are a student group and do not know which type of organization you are, please visit the Student Leadership and Involvement site.

What do you need to do to use it?

1.  If you are switching over from an existing theme, and you switch it immediately, it might seem that your site is broken in layout.  It isn’t.  It is simply that the widgets need to be removed and put back into the areas available for it.  So we recommend first removing all the widgets in use from the sidebars.

2.  Go to Appearance -> Themes in your WordPress dashboard, and select the OSU Responsive theme.

3.  Put your widgets back into the sidebar.

4.  Deactivate the Sociable Skyscraper plugin if you are using it.  Use of this inserts a thin horizontal line and makes the theme look broken.  Go to Skyscraper Options in the Select Sociable Plugin expanded menu to deactivate.

And that’s it.  Good blogging to you all.

Accessibility and Brand Guidelines

As part of the OSU Responsive use, the use of a different background image or color must adhere to OSU’s policies regarding Accessibility and Brand.  Any failure to do so may cause your blog to be disabled.  The net takeaway here is don’t change it if you don’t understand the policies, which is why we at Central Web Services, take care of these things for you in creating the default theme.  However, do remember within your articles, accessibility policies still apply if this is used in any official capacity for students, staff, or faculty or OSU.

There’s an app for this. Just today I looked to see what apps are available for iPad for WordPress, and there it was WordPress for iPad. So naturally I had to try it. There is one setting to enable on your blogs.oregonstate.edu blog after you install it, but then voila. The device will tell you what to change after you set up blogs.oregonstate.edu/your-blog-name/wp-admin in the interface with your ONID ID and password, and then attempt to connect. That is all it takes, and you are able to write and publish to your OSU blog from your iOS device. For more information, visit http://ios.wordpress.org.