Tag: plugin

Categories
meta technology

Classic Posts

I have been wanting to implement a “greatest hits” section in my sidebar ever since I read the lessons for would-be bloggers. Yesterday I discovered the classic posts plugin from Chris vs Chris which displays posts which you have designated as “classic.” That sounded like the kind of thing I wanted, except that I was looking for a sidebar list. I added a function to their plugin which returns a list of posts rather than the posts themselves. I also discovered that their plugin does not successfully handle selecting and deselecting posts as being “classic” if you are on anything except the default list of posts – in other words it only works on the last 15 posts. (I went into the database so that I cold manually select some older posts)

I have no particular desire to own this plugin so if Chris and Chris want to adopt my modification into their official plugin they are welcome to it. If they do I will link to their version of the file, but until then here is my version: Classic Posts plugin with List Option.

UPDATE: I found the error on the plugin (I had to add two characters to the code) and I have the working version up now (same link as before).

UPDATE 2: Chris has added my modification and the bug fix so I will include a link to the official version.

Categories
meta technology

Post by Email

I finally have the Post-by-Email working in WordPress. There is one catch – the body of the post only shows up if the message is sent in plain text. No “rich formatting” or other high-and-mighty “My email client is better than what was available 15 years ago” shenanigans.

Add this to the fact that I have to go edit the post later if I want it anywhere but the default category, or if I want to add tags or anything else besides text, and you can be sure that I will only use email as a place to compose posts that are still in the formative stages. I will also be looking at other plugins with more versatility in this department.

Enough griping, it’s still a new feature for me so this may be a small step, but it’s a forward step.

Update: There is another catch – extra line breaks show up when posting this way – definitely not for regular use.

Categories
life meta

Lunar Day

I enjoyed watching the full moon set this morning as I was out running. I watched as the last wisp of the moon fell behind the mountains in the west. This evening I was driving to the store with my kids and we all watched the moon rise in the east from the first tiny slice of the moon until it was fully risen. How’s that for bookends on the day.

As I came here to post on that and share with my hordes of readers that we got a new tree and many of our flowers in for this year I discovered that the spam bots had discovered my site today.

Thanks to Akismet, nobody had to suffer through anything – not the porn, the dubious pharmaceutical products, nor the offers to lose real money in virtual casinos. What surprised me was that before today only about 10 spam comments had been caught by Akismet (and none missed) and none of them were of the variety mentioned above. Tonight there were over 60 comments that had been caught by Akismet and all of them, unless my skimming missed an anomaly, were of the types listed above. This is much easier to maintain than the blacklists etc. that I was relying on two years ago.

Categories
meta technology

Plugin Bug Fix

I was so excited by the plugin “Blogger RSS Import” that I failed to notice that it got all the dates wrong on comments (they were all set to midnight of the day I did the import). Thankfully, and very professionally, I got an email from the developer (sent to everyone who commented on the plugin between the applicable dates) that the error existed and had been fixed in the new version. I now have the correct dates on my comments, which is good because all the conversations looked wierd with the comments for each post in random order.

Categories
meta technology

All Here

Well, my move from blogger is complete thanks to a WordPress plugin: Import New Blogger To WordPress. It was exceptionally smooth and I have all posts, comments, and categories from blogger. I had recreated all but one category already, but that one got moved as well. Once the plugin had done its work I took the time to move my few pictures over to my site rather than linking to their google-hosted space.