Interactive Llama

I read many books from the library. I don’t finished reading many books though. First of all, they are free, since they are from the library, and second my attention span doesn’t last that long. I believe browsing the web daily from age 14 (circa 1996) will do that to someone (read the latest cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, is Google Making Us Stoopid). Most of the books I read come from the magazines I read (The Atlantic, Books & Culture: A Christian Review) or from the podcasts I listen to (Diane Rehm, This Week in Tech).

Either way, I want to share my latest reading endeavors across my blogs. But how? (more…)

As you already know, I post all my non-reply tweets from Twitter on my personal blog with Twitter Tools. I do not display the posts with the Twitter Tools widget, but with SideBlog. With SideBlog you can place all posts from a particular category in the sidebar. I have chosen to show only my “Tweets from Twitter” category. The original output of SideBlog places a title, post content and a permalinked “#” at the end of the post. This wasn’t minimalistic enough, and on top of that with Twitter Tools the first 40 characters of your content is your title, so you are repeating yourself. I don’t care for the pound sign, “#”, either. So I made the following changes to the plug-in. (more…)

If you’ve been around WordPress for more than six months, most of the following plug-ins should be familiar to you. In case you haven’t heard of any them, I highly recommend all of them. I’m not a fan of widgets (too-limiting), since I create websites for a living. I’ve divided them into Anti-Spam, Category/Tag, and Additional Content. If you are not caching your blog, remember, don’t install too many plug-ins. (more…)

No matter how carefully you design your site, visitors will always request a page that is missing, moved, or non-existent (especially if you experiment with your site structure frequently). This past week, I’ve been obsessed with HTTP 404 errors and working on creating a better 404 Not Found page. The default 404 page for WordPress offers the opportunity to search the blog, but you should go another step. Usability is one of (if not the) key trait of a great website. If thought has gone into even your 404 error page, then I’d guess that much thought has been put into your entire site. (more…)

I’ve been familiarizing myself with WordPress 2.5’s new media gallery. If you’ve visited my blog before, you know I don’t upload many images, but I’m hoping to upload many images to my wife, Rachel Steely’s website. I was annoyed to find out that the default image posting size is medium (which is about 300px). On top of that, if you select full size, it doesn’t mean full size. It means your WordPress theme’s column width. So unless you are using Kubrick your media size will not be your column width. (more…)

It’s been a hot debate over what to include in your blog’s RSS recently. I say you should include more than blog posts in your RSS feed IF (and this is a big if) you can editorialize what goes in. The following, explains how to change which tweets from Twitter get posted to your blog and into your RSS feed.

If you use Alex King’s Twitter Tools (version: 1.1b1), you will want to make the following two changes to his code. The first one will make your tweet-post URLs and title more beautiful and SEO friendly by not splitting words at the end. The second one will remove reply tweets (’@username’) from becoming posts in your blog, so that half-conversations do not get recorded. (more…)

In WordPress Administration under Options->Reading, there is an option to set a “Front page” and “Posts page.” The front page setting is fairly straightforward. If you do not want your latest blog posts (index.php) as your homepage, you can set a static page and its template as the root page (http://www.example.com/). This is great for an under construction page, too.

Posts Page

What is a post page? If you have disabled the default homepage (explained above) and made it a static template page, then where are your latest posts? They are on this page.

1) Create a page (Write>Write Page) and make the “Page Slug” on the sidebar whatever URL slug you want to be the location of your posts. I recommend making it be the same as your custom structure (Options>Permalinks, e.g. – “blog” as in “/blog/%postname%/”).

2) Go to this Options->Reading and in the drop down box for “Posts Page” you can now choose your newly created page (e.g.- “Blog”).

The contents of this page (i.e.- “Blog”) will never really be accessible. Now if the user goes to “http://www.example.com/blog” then they will see the latest posts instead of an error.

I upgraded the poetry knook today from WordPress 2.1.3 to 2.3. Including backing up the database and user files, the process took about an hour. Be sure to follow the upgrade steps (in order!). I have heard that logging into administration during an upgrade can cause problems.

WordPress 2.3, which was released back in September, includes among other things: a native tag system, plug-in and platform upgrade notification, post management interface improvements, roll your own dashboard, and roll your own RSS libraries. Many of these items have been addressed by plug-ins. Tagging especially comes to mind. I love Ultimate Tag Warrior and use it on all my blogs. (more…)