Tag: wordpress

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
pictures technology

Snooping Around

While reading through my feeds today I learned from Kim Cavanaugh’s Brain Frieze about the official Library of Congress blog. I went over to have a look and got curious about what software they had running the blog. Maybe it was something about the familiar format of the postmetadata section that got me looking. I looked at the bottom of the page to see if there was a footer stating that it was powered by WordPress. I was not surprised to find no such mention – it’s easy to take that out. I then looked at the page code and found that the meta tag named generator was also gone – another place that WordPress identifies itself unless you change it – but I did find that the code looked very familiar again. I quickly spotted a reference to the “wp-content” folder – it is a WordPress blog running the Library of Congress blog. Here’s proof:Library of Congress Blog code
Screenshot of the code to the Library of Congress blog

By way of comparison, here is a screenshot of the code from my WordPress blog:My WordPress blog code

For anyone who might still be skeptical (or who might care) I later found a more obvious reference to WordPress in their blog code:Library of Congress Blog code with WordPress comments

Categories
meta

Site Feeds

I learned a new thing about the feeds on my site today. I thought it was worth sharing. If anyone is interested in only reading the posts from a specific category they can subscribe to that category. The URL for the feed would be http://www.davidjmiller.org/category/categoryname/feed/

This or something like it should get you category-specific feeds from any WordPress blog (depending on the settings of the blog).

Categories
meta

Moving Details

There are always so many little things to making a move complete. Yesterday I took the time to move all my self-referenced links. When I revisit a topic I have previously covered I try to link to my previous post(s). When I moved from blogger all those links still pointed to the posts on blogger. Once i moved the links they were added to the comments for the posts they pointed to, but the dates were all “March 7th” so I had to go through those new comments and change the timestamp to match the time of the posts they were coming from. With less than a year of posts to cover it was not too long a task, but I’m glad to have that done.

Categories
meta

My Theme

I am making my theme available for anyone to download. The reason for this is that I would be very flattered to see another site that looked like mine. Realistically this was also an excuse for me to test the File Upload feature of WordPress to see how simple it was.

Categories
technology

Testing Content Management Systems

I am trying to start using a content management system that is free (as in – not the free license of a system like MT) and produces valid xhtml but I am unwilling to mess with this site where everything is running so smoothly. I once tried to move to WordPress when my site went down and found that it was easy to set up, but I could not do anything. I got a blank site and no way to access the simplest publishing or administrative interface. I have no idea what was wrong but I am less excited about WordPress than I was before.

I finally found a solution. I am going to set up a blog etc. on my family genealogy site. If I get a working system I will test how easy it is to port these blogs to the new format. If I find a good combination I will change all of this, but hopefully the end users (if there are any of you) will see almost exactly what you are seeing now. I have a couple of systems to try – WordPress (it will probably get a second chance), Mambo and Drupal.