 It's a good intro, dancing in the background every single time. I agree. Splot. Splots. Splot. So we had kind of a lot to talk about with splots and site templates, but before we're going to showcase kind of, you know, what our favorite splots are and a little bit about how to make a site template and what you might want to be thinking about. But before we do that, I'm going to put Jim on the spot. What is a splot, even? Put Jim on the spot, more like, smallest possible learning online tool. I don't know. I think the origins of the splot are shady. Brian Lamb and Al Levine and Thompson River University came up with the idea that WordPress was, you know, as great as tool as it is. It's a bit of a blank, it's a bit of a tablerasa. You install it, it's like, okay, hello world, what do I do? And they were thinking, is there a way that they could customize a WordPress install that would make what you need to do or how you need to use it like a portfolio or a resource sharing tool or something like that easier and kind of build out part of that tool in WordPress to create essentially a template. And so splots are templates that reclaim hosting provide some. There's more than that we don't provide a one-click installer for, but we provide several that give folks a quick and easy way to get up and running with a kind of, we'll call it like a custom app built on WordPress. That's one way to think about it. App might be a strong word. It might be doing a lot of work in that sense. That's kind of how I think about it. Did that, you know, scale of one to 10, how was that answer? You can only really say 10 or 11, so. Yeah. I would say 12. We turned it up. Whoa! Yeah! That explanation went up to 11, yeah, so, cool. So we're going to kind of talk about some of, we're going to show a case, some of the splots that exist and how to use them. And before we even do that, I wanted to mention the splot.ca site where you can learn all kinds of things about splots and see, in fact, my favorite thing about this is it's a splot about splots, actually. This is, I believe, true box or a splot box, I mean. And so this one is one itself. But basically the splot box is just a really quick and easy site to showcase media and collections of links and things like that. But you can find out about all the different splots that exist from there. So that's also in Discord, I'll just put it in there and in our little session description. So before we dig into any individual one, or sorry, before... One more thing there, Taylor, just before we move on from the splots is I also think it's a testament to some good ed tech. Like Al Levine and Brian Lamb coming up with, you know, building on top of WordPress and open source tool and making it more accessible for their community and for people to use it and to build a kind of small, like I like that it's intentionally small, right? It's not trying to be a big, scalable, all-encompassing tool. It's a very focused tool. And I think it reflects part of what we can do as ed techs at our local campuses and beyond is, you know, really customize this experience for the people on the ground at that school. And I love that. Like, it's the opposite of scaling big and massive. And in that way, the essence spot always means small for me because all is beautiful. So which one do you want to look at first? Jim, do you have a favorite you want to showcase? I do. And I'm going to go full screen here because I'm going to share it in my screen. One of the things people don't know about me, but I have a superpower. I'm like Ant-Man. And so I can kind of just... Like that. Isn't that crazy? It's very funny. I'm underestimated. Okay. Yes. I'm at the SPLOT CA tool site just like Taylor was. And my favorite SPLOT is a SPLOT called True Collector. True is referencing Thompson River University because that's where it was created. But the thing about True Collector that I really like is... And this is the thing about SPLOT in general. Not only was it a quick and easy tool, but one of the hurdles they wanted to solve was allowing people to submit resources easily without ever logging into WordPress. So basically you could go here and this is the Avalte. This is a collection of open source tools that this conference was highlighting for its folks and asking people to kind of submit. So they're like, hey, you have an example of a good open source tool at it. And you didn't have to log into WordPress. You didn't have to actually get a username. You didn't even have to identify yourself and give away that identity. All you had to do was go in here and fill out a gravity-based like form. And all of this information and it could be anonymous is added to the site. It's vetted and you get a draft. But the idea is faculty could have students use this as a tool to submit resources for the class where they could collect and actually create in some ways a database that highlights images, highlights data, other things like that. So for me, the True Collector is a great tool. It's very simple. I use it personally to collect my radio shows when I do vinyl on the radio or something like that. And I don't need to do this. I could do it on my blog, but I like the way it looks. I like the idea of quickly and easily adding examples and focus that. And I think it's a tool that what I like about it is it's kind of a protean. It could be used for various things in different ways, whether it's image collections, whether it's collections of cell types, whether it's collections. I know there was another example at Coventry University where they used it as a kind of dictionary to collect words for people who were learning the English language and used images to demonstrate that word. And it was pretty cool. It was kind of like a broad dictionary, almost like the container, what do we call it, lexicon. What do we call that container thing that you built? The Docker glossary? The glossary. Could I forget? Yes! But I like the flexibility of it as well. I think one of my favorite things I've seen a couple conferences do. I can't remember what popped my head. I want to say an OER conference or two has done it, but used it as the true collector as a space for folks to introduce themselves. They basically set up a true collector and it had a little bit of like prompt in it. So it would say like, maybe you want to tell people about this or that. But basically you'd upload a picture and put your name in and your like little description of who you are and post it. You didn't need an account. You could just post things to it. That was super cool. And you had your image there. Yeah. And it was a virtual conference. So it was kind of a way to get to know the other attendees right from kind of friendly space. And you're right. And kudos to Coventry because Coventry was also was behind not only the Abilte site and that example I talked about with language learning kind of dictionary slash glossary, but also they were behind the OER. I think it was 18 example where attendees would introduce themselves there. And then you have a list of attendees using TrueCollector. So yeah, they have a lot of good examples. There's a lot of permutations of that example too. So there's TrueCollector and we're going to talk about some of the other Splats that are a little bit different than in function than TrueCollector. But Splatbox already mentioned is similar in idea in terms of collecting media, making it accountless to posts basically. TrueSoundr is kind of like that and TrueWriter are all kind of like that with different layouts optimized for different media basically is how I kind of think of them. I've even seen the TrueWriter, I wish I would have pulled this up, but there was there's all kinds of really interesting uses of people opening sites for anonymous writing using TrueWriter, which is really cool. And a lot of people have done journals with TrueWriter, like full blown like class journals where you have like a publication that a class did together using TrueWriter, which is pretty elegant. I had a co-worker who at S&C when I worked there who helped a music professor use TrueWriter to have a online public journal for your practice. So basically they're a trumpet professor and they had their students post there and of course everyone could see what they're working on, which is really kind of interesting. And kind of it was like semi-private, but love the use cases that kind of thing enables because they they're like I want someone to log in this specific way, but I don't want them that they don't need like this doesn't we're not concerned about spam here. It just gets right to the use case, which is always really cool. Cool. Pyle, I think you had one you wanted to share, right? I did. I actually this one is available as a TrueWriter, TrueCollector I think also are, but it was available as a custom install in C-Panel. It's called, I wanted to talk about dimension, the name is sort of getting, but the dimension is calling card, which is a again wordpress-based slot that functionally what it serves as is a I guess micro site is sort of how I think of it. The idea of it being a calling card is you can really quickly put it together, have a couple of photos, a couple of very small pages, a couple of links that just talk about who you are and what you're doing, but you don't have to get into the weeds of customizing your wordpress design, making it look super polished, navigating all of that. It's comes with those sort of preset and pre-designed, so it looks really clean. And Taylor, if you're cool with just walking through installing this application, that'd be awesome. Yeah, we can just do it on my default domain, HTTPS, of course, it is just going back through, we sleeve all the default settings, it's fine. Yeah, I'm going to set a password. I don't believe that for the Splots, the WP admin works. Maybe it does, but maybe. And we forgot to actually mention here that if you go in C-Panel to all applications, many of the Splots, not all of them, but pretty much all the ones we've talked about so far, are actually available as installers ready to go. And we and Ellen maintain these so that they're really simple to get set up with. I will talk about one later that doesn't have an installer, but you can kind of see how that would work and how you install it. And I also specifically called out the Dimensions one, Dimensions calling card, but there are, you were mousing them over times. Just in the applications list, there are a couple of other calling cards that are running on the same principle. It just doesn't like the even open C-Panel a bunch of different places, but that big picture, those highlights, those are built on the same principles as the Dimension calling card. So if you can go back to that tab right there, that one. So you can see it's pre-populated with just a little bit of text, links about skills. The idea being, you could use this as a very small resume, personal site, people go and they find out a couple things about you. And it's very simple, easy. I am not actually a professional cowboy, but I do appreciate the theme. I think that's fun. And Taylor, if you can maybe log in and take us to the back end, but the idea being there's links to all your social media where you can get contacted about, but you don't have to put lots of effort into building out posts, building out huge chunks of content, which sometimes that's what you feel like with WordPress. And so these are a couple of different, these are all of the different, if you make that a little bit bigger, we can see it. But the idea is these are the titles for each of those for links that you saw. So about cowboy or about writing skills and contact are each of those. And you can say which one is which. So this is a list of all of the writing that I, a professional cowboy have absolutely done. And you can sort of go through that, you can go into the Customize, we don't need to save this, but go to the Customize menu and just change things up a little bit. The text, the social media. And it's really very simple to get started. And it takes the pressure off of feeling like, gosh, I got to build all these pages, I got to make all these posts, I got to be WordPress has so many features, I feel like I'm not using them. No, I have four links, four pages links to my social media. That's it. That's all you need, at least to get started. And I was just going to say, and a good way for people who are new, but maybe a little overwhelmed to get familiar with the WordPress backend and what that looks like, because backend is still the WordPress backend, just a bit stripped down. I was just going to say, Piley, it also looks very familiar this. Have we seen it before? You know, maybe, maybe so. Dominated one zone admins, you may recognize this as the slot that we use to build out the admin sort of resource page. There's for every Dominated One Zone school, we have a, let me pull up the state you.org one and put it in the DOO admin, I'll pull it up and I'll put it in the chat. But the idea is that it's got links to the WordPress, to the WHMCS, to the WHM documentation, all of that, so that you can very easily, is it not showing up? Yeah, something's up with it with my browser at the very least, I'm going to pull it back. It's loading for me, but I've dropped it in the chat anyway, so you can navigate to it, oh, saw a little blink of it. Yeah, not quite sure what's up with my browser, but I'll pull the different one here. There's six links, WordPress, WHM, WHM, CS, documentation, links to the community forums, and a place where you can go to see how your server is doing. Yeah, so that's the one for Rochester. It gives you a little blurb, gives you a little link, and you're ready to go. I like it, I think it's very clean and easy. It's clean and elegant, and I think it's a really nice kind of parallel to, like you said, a student faculty, staff getting up and running with a portfolio site, or like a splash page for their web presence, quickly and easily, and swapping out a couple of images, because it's a black and white combo. It's pretty simple, and I think that was the logic behind Splots, what you really described brilliantly was what they were trying to do, give people an on-ramp to the web. Well, and not only is it simple to start with, but you actually have a lot of headroom to grow with it too, so it is what I like, because it is WordPress. So if someone starts with this and then goes, okay, I want to do a bunch of blogging and stuff, you can go from there. You've already dealt with WordPress a lot. In a lot of cases, you'll be able to actually continue right inside of this plot without having to do much else. There's a lot of options to go from there. In contrast to something like, this isn't even popular anymore, but remember the about.me sites that people claim? Those were very simple of just like, all right, you can get your name, you can put a couple links on it, and that's it. If you want more than that, you're going to have another site. So I like that people can kind of, this can grow with them, with their needs. I was going to say if you are familiar, you may not be with card, which is card, but spelled with two Rs. It is exactly the same principle, but you can't scale it and it's free meal. So if you want a custom domain, you have to pay. Otherwise, you have to get a sub domain off of card. If you want to get rid of the card branding, you have to pay. It's just a plot, but freemium and you can't scale it. And so it's the same concept, but better, I think. You know what? And this is, if we were getting, it might go a little far afield, and I want to be mindful because I want Amanda and Taylor to still be sharing this, but one of the things that's interesting is CUNY, the City University of New York, did an example of CUNY.is slash and then the person's name. And they did like exactly like template sites where you could make a quick and easy website for who you are. And it kind of plays on the whole idea of it was OER 20 that did that, like who is who, who's who. And like, I love that idea of using a plot like thing for a community to introduce themselves and have what would be the old school HTML webpage that, you know, people would claim and share. And it's a cool community that CUNY.is and that reminds me of what we're talking about. So anyway, back to you. Yeah. I just wanted to pull up an example of that. I threw it in Discord too, but here's one of those. And it really just, at least this particular one, re-do X to a spot in their comments. So it's really, really kind of cool. I love that. That's cool. Yeah. Okay. I'll show a plot point really quick. I'm not going to do a ton with it other than just kind of show what it is. But a plot point, and I'm going to mostly make the case for web-native presentations because I think web-native slides are great, personally. So I use these, I use slides on, I use websites as slide presentations pretty much every time I do slides anymore. Just because the first thing people always ask is, can you send these to me? And my favorite thing is to just be presenting them in a web browser. And I'm like, you can just go to the link right there right now, right now. It's fine. So that's the main thing that I like about plot point is that I think it is a really good way to do this. So plot point is a plot that is just a WordPress site dressed up to be slides. I have an example of it on my own site here. It's a little older. And frankly, I'm not 100% sure about all of the accuracy of the content. It's been a bit since I revisited this. But the, I had one about SEO and some, basically, I gave this for a class that was interested in talking about SEO. And I was talking about in the context of like personal websites or like very, very small websites. So the cool thing is you get this WordPress site that you can make different slides, you can order them, and then you can use your arrow keys to navigate between them. They have a title and a subtitle and then a image and it can be GIF in the background. And then what I like about them is that you can also put content below them. So I tended to use them and navigate them like slides and then I would have notes and additional materials below the slides that you can find through, you can go through. And so I really like this layout. It's nice because you can use the WordPress editor to write your slides. And I really like that actually. And you can do all kinds of things. I have another example here. I think, you know what, I might have moved that one. Hold on. Yeah. That was a spot point that I really like because I could embed YouTube videos right in it and many multiple in certain cases. So I really like spot point for that and the speed of which I can create these I think is really cool. And then what you end up doing is building a resource that isn't just slides. It's now a website proper, right? So you can link to it and reuse that. So I'm a big fan for anything that I want to last longer than the one presentation that I'm going to give. So that's spot point. This one does not have an installer on built in. But basically if you go to spot that CA, you can go to the get your spot here. And it's basically just a theme you have to install. So if you go in here, they have a instruction on, hey, you upload the zip file to WP content themes. And then you can set your theme in WordPress to that. And that you're ready to go. Basically, they do have, there is further instructions here. And if you want to keep it like up to date all the time, or you can manually update it as needed and how to use it and everything, it's great. I'm a big fan of spot point. So Amanda, I think you had something you wanted to show too. Yeah. What I wanted to kind of bring to the conversation was a little bit less robust than some of these slots, but rather going toward more site templating. But it definitely, you know, it aligns itself with this kind of idea where that kind of blank page syndrome is very real with WordPress. And so starting from scratch can be intimidating. And even if you don't find a slot that you're like, guess this is the one, or you don't need everything that is built into a spot, you can very easily just kind of throw something up and make it a template. So what I did a little bit earlier was I ended up putting together a portfolio style template that I could imagine somebody sharing with a bunch of students where it's just, you know, they, you know, the students put up their WordPress and do their WordPress install. And then instead of doing a blank WordPress, they just download this template. And it is this portfolio template. I got the colors really weird, I guess, when I changed that they disappear when you hover over them. But so what this does is, you know, I put up some menu options to get them started. I, you know, set it so that it doesn't have that WordPress automatic blog, you know, real feature, but instead it's a static page. So these kinds of small steps you can take for students to get them started. And so if I created this and I said, oh, yeah, this is just something that will get them started. I want to make this a template that is available outside of my account. We can kind of walk you through how to do that. So right now Taylor is in, was in my cPanel just kind of showing you what that looked like from there. And if we wanted to make it accessible across the server, then we would move into the WHM for State University, which is where we are now. And so the best way to find this would be to start typing in Installatron in the search bar there and go to Installatron applications installer. And then from here, you can go to my applications exactly. And then if you know the name of your template, which you should mine is Amanda's template. But you can name that, you know, whatever you'd like. And the way to make it a template is to click on that little star button. Yeah, a couple of things that I wanted to mention too, is when you make the template, you know, think carefully about what's, it's going to be kind of a copy of the site. So the way it looks in the cPanel with its name and everything like that will be the case when they install it. So if you've got, you know, I don't know, like you may want to name it like my portfolio template depending or a podcasting template or something like that. And that this title in description is what they'll see when they're going to install it. So they're technically separate titles in descriptions, but they are both important. So when you're, when you're doing your own templating. Absolutely. So yep, we can just fill that out portfolio template is a lot even more descriptive than what I had. Just a brief description. And then you can make that official. This takes a second, but not too long. Right. And so this is going to make it something that is going to be available for you to then make available. Lauren also just posted something important in the chat, which was recommending that there be a dedicated cPanel for template design. That way, if you end up wanting to clear off cPanel accounts, the way that Taylor and I were discussing earlier, you know, to say, Oh, no, no, no, not that one. We need that. Yeah. It makes it certainly easier to keep them updated over time, because that way you can return to that cPanel and just template the original one again to update it. Whereas otherwise, your process has to be, all right, we've got to install the template someplace, make our updates, and then template that one, which is kind of annoying and obtuse, especially if there's something potential. I mean, I haven't seen this a lot, but you always want to prepare for something not working. So if your template is somehow broken, and you can't deploy it at all, then that's going to be a problem, right? And that could happen if it's a very old template, maybe that's on a very old version of WordPress. Because it is important to note that templates do not automatically sync. So if Amanda now goes in and edits, a management.state.org, if I had installed this on my account, my version would never update to match the new template. Or rather, if now that it is templated, if Amanda goes back in and edits, and then I install, my installation will look like the original version that was templated and not the newly updated one with the new edits. Well, if you install that afterwards, it would, right? But not pre-existing sites, right? It won't modify old sites. Exactly. And one of the things, too, it's not just WordPress. You can do this with Omega, Scaler, and others. And Omega might be a useful one because they still have, like, you have to manually FTP or upload plugins. So the way it looks, if we can go to, if this template is in, let's go to an instance of cPanel and install Atron, and actually look at what it looks like. Because you can go to WordPress to install, and then there'll be an option with a radio button underneath that says, Amanda's template, right? So you have WordPress, the kind of, we'll call it the vanilla WordPress install, or a custom template, which is kind of like a splot, but a little bit more DIY, and not, as Pilot said, going to take in transfer updates that you make post installation. But the thing that's nice when I think of other applications, even beyond WordPress, is for folks who are unfamiliar with Omega, and you want a very focused project for students who may be building an exhibit or something like that, all of those plugins and things that you want them to use would be there and ready to go. And you can see it there. There's an example underneath where it says, content of the four different templates that are available on state U. So the nice thing is, if you're managing a Domain of One's own server for your community, you can make a few templates that are useful for, say, a class that you know they want to have portfolios, and you want to make it easier on them, and they have a very specific idea of what that faculty or staff want. You can do that seamlessly, just like Amanda showed. Click the star and you're done, which is a beautiful and simple way at it through Installatron. So it's like you're making a splot without all the overhead of having to maintain it over time. Yeah, it's super nice that you get that benefit of picking like plugins or content or whatever, all that stuff without having to worry about the WordPress part of it, right? Because you don't have to say, oh, we got to update our template because WordPress 6 is out. It's like, no, actually Installatron separates that out for you in a way that you don't have to worry about it, which is super nice because the updates are handled. It's really handy. I remember when I think it was a WordPress 2020 theme, there was a WordPress theme that came out that when the first time you go to the customizer, it would just like put a bunch of demo content on your WordPress site. Yeah, I as an admin, that made me live it because it just totally broke. I think the way I and most of my students would show WordPress to people. So I actually, we made our own starter template that really had nothing in it. It was just a default one, but we had already clicked the customize button, had it already spit out all of its garbage, and then we already deleted all of it. It wasn't a big deal. It just offended me. So I wanted to save that. And I believe if you go back into the WHM template, overall template manager, yeah, so one thing I want to mention is the default. Yeah, when you've made templates, you can manage them from Installatron. So if you go to Installatron applications installer from WHM and go to templates, this is your list of all your templates. And this one here is the default one that people will get when they're installing WordPress. So that's empty content. I made one that was, I don't remember what we called it, but it was, you know, it was like good empty content or something like that sarcastically. Luckily I didn't have to keep it that long because they kind of changed that behavior, which is good. But yeah, you can technically set a different default if you want. I would think real carefully about that. I wouldn't do that lightly. But it is an option. You can also disable templates from here. So if you don't want one to show up anymore, but you don't want to delete it yet, say maybe you have our Domain's Community Site template, you've deployed it already, but you don't want just anyone to be able to deploy it for whatever reason. You could just turn that off so it's not available for the time being. So all good options. Yeah, so we are looking at about 10 minutes to our next session. So I think we're just about ready to wrap up here. But is there anything else you all want to talk about with Splots? I think we've covered everything. I'm sure we could go on and on, but it's true. I might as well cut it off now. Yeah, for sure. Splots are fantastic. I'm a big fan as well. Yeah, so we'll see everyone for the last session of the day. That's Jim and I with Beyond Domain's No Lampshade is the subtitle to that one. And we'll talk about all kinds of other things you can do with Domain's that you may not have thought of. So see you all in about 10 minutes.