WP

I’m suffering from a little bout of writer’s block these days. When you combine that with the fact that I haven’t been cruising the ‘net finding new and funny things, it makes for a dearth of new content on this site. I was thinking that it would be cool to display a single post from the archives at the top of the home page when there’s nothing new to see. Something like, “Hey! Sorry I haven’t posted anything new in x days, but check out this from y years ago …” I got as far as writing the SQL for it, but then I stopped working on it. I think it’s a good idea, though. Maybe someone will decide to write a plugin to do this. (Or, more likely, someone already has and I am just too lazy to find it.)

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I was very happy to see that the WordPress developers included the ability to “tag” posts. For a long time I’ve been using my own bastardized version of Bunny’s Technorati Tags to add tags to this site. A few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and convert to using the tag system that is now baked into this CMS.

Here’s my only problem: The standard WordPress tagging engine is designed so that clicking a tag on a post displays an archives page with all of the other posts tagged with that tag. (Confused yet?) I don’t like that. One reason I don’t like that is because I have not yet managed to transfer all of my tags from the old system to the new, so lots and lots of my posts have no tags. That means if you click a tag for “ovulating kleptomaniac”, for example, you’re not going to get any results. So I have hornswaggled the code a bit to make it so that on this site the tags link to search results for that tag instead. I think it’s a much more “visitor friendly” implementation of tagging.
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A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to build a WordPress plugin to display a Gunning-Fog analysis on his blog. The math part was pretty easy stuff. I was having a borch of a time getting the plugin to count syllables, so I hunted through Google and found someone else had written a pretty good function to do that. I squished it all together and it seems to be working pretty good.

You can download the plugin here and see it in action here.

Since I installed it 143 days ago, Akismet has killed 23,683 spam comments on this blog. That’s an absurd 165 pieces of spam per day. And the number is definitely increasing daily at what I consider an astronomical rate. I have no doubt that in the time it takes me to write this post I will have earned another dozen. What’s amazing is that I’ve only encountered 3 “false positives” in all that time. (A “false positive” is a valid comment that Akismet incorrectly identifies as spam.) I am quickly approaching the point where I no longer even bother to review any of what Akismet catches. Be warned: If you’re daring enough to mention a drug for erectile dysfunction, any possible gambling topic, or any type of less-than-conservative sexual practices in a comment to my blog, you can safely assume that I won’t see it because Akismet is going to just kill it for me.

Update: As of 03/27/2008 the number is over 370,000.

According to the tag help page at Technorati, all you have to do to have their system “find” your tags is (1) add a rel=”tag” parameter to your links and (2) make sure those links end with the word you are tagging (e.g. something.com/tag). The first part is simple. The second part is easy, but not very practical. More importantly, though, is the fact that neither of these seem to actually work. As far as I can tell Technorati does not read your entire post and strip any tags it finds. In fact it seems that Technorati only reads your RSS and analyzes that to determine how to tag your posts. That’s okay, though, because I can tell you how to convert your WordPress tags into rss category nodes so that Technorati indexes them.

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This domain of mine has had stuff on it for a long, long time — before WordPress or MovableType or even Blogger. The original davidgagne.net is, sadly, lost forever. Some pieces of it have been kicking around on my various hard drives and FTP locations for a decade now.

One file that I could never seem to bring myself to delete was an ancient hand-coded HTML <TABLE> listing of a bunch of important events in my life. A few friends of mine actually built a company based on the idea. It was called “ShareTimelines.com”, had a magnificent interface, was all webbed up, and the site — last I checked — is completely dead. I wanted to have that timeline on this site again. I hadn’t updated it in years and years, and I would rather poke hot needles in my eyes than sit and hand-code a bunch of <td>s all day. “It should all be in a database, of course,” I said to myself. “And I should be able to edit it right in the WordPress Administrator, too. And seriously it should be written so that I can just give other people the ability to add timelines like that to their own sites.” ( I should stop talking to myself.)

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Tags! They’re everywhere! It seems like every site on the ‘net is adding tagging now. Tag clouds — ridiculous, pointless, and annoying — are not the reason. Tagging is a good way to get into Technorati and a good way to get more traffic to your site. It’s a nifty way to organize your posts and to help your readers find what they want on your site. Is it the wave of the future? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Several of the early adopters are now saying that they are useless, and the search engines seemed to be doing a fair job of indexing blogs long before people got tag-happy. But it’s not exactly terribly painful to add this functionality to your site — it only took me about a half hour, so how hard could it be? Plus you’ve got me to explain it all to you.

This how-to assumes that you’re using WordPress to manage your blog. If you are using something else — blogger, MovableType, etc. — then you’ll have to look somewhere else. Technorati is a good place to start.

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Although I can appreciate that it’s a really nifty feature, I am likely never going to use the built-in File Upload feature in WordPress. What has bugged me is that it’s in an IFRAME in the Write Post panel; I think it slows the page load. I was trying to get rid of it, but the best I could find was the Clutter Free plugin from Tempus Fugit. It’s a great plugin, but unfortunately it doesn’t really remove the IFRAME, it just hides it.

So. I dug around in the code and did it myself. If you aren’t the file-uploadin’ type, you only need to change a few lines to prevent the File Upload widget from appearing on your Write Post panel. Open wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php and look for the line containing $uploading_iframe_ID. It’s near or around line 223. There are a few different ways you can handle removing this.

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I have finally updated two of my WordPress hack tutorials so that they are compliant with v. 2.04.

The first one — DropCaps — allows you to put that nifty “dropcap” into a post. This post begins with a dropcap I.

The second one — Amazon Tags — adds two new buttons to your editing screen. They allow you to link directly to an Amazon item by its ASIN or to add a link to an Amazon search.

The second one includes a link to a zipped copy. You can just extract quicktags.js into your wp-includes/js folder and the images into your wp-images folder and you’re set.

Happy WordPress modding!

The spammers finally broke me. I’ve gotten well over 3,000 spam comments since Monday morning. It was becoming such a pain to delete them all that I have now implemented Nio’s anti-spam comment captcha WordPress plug-in. It seems to be working pretty well so far. Please let me know if you have any issues.

NOTE: I AM NO LONGER USING A CAPTCHA ON THIS SITE.

I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical. So I figured I should share with you. Download my Pirates of Penzance “Modern Major-General” random-lyric generator and you, too, will be able to tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a javelin.

Add the function moderngeneral() where you want to print the lyric. I have mine in place of bloginfo(’description’) in my header.php file, but you can place it in your sidebar or anywhere you want.

The chances of me ever using the WordPress str QuickTag are pretty slim, so I replaced it with a drop-capper. (The T in this paragraph should appear as a dropcap for you if you’re using a browser that handles CSS properly.)

Pretty nifty, I think.

Want to do it?

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I wanted to add nifty little Amazon links to my posting window … so I did. Grab my zipped version of quicktags.js and you can, too. This is the javascript file that builds the row of buttons above your posting window (e.g. str, em, del, etc.) My version adds two buttons: one for quick-linking to an item at Amazon via its ASIN and one for quick-linking to an Amazon search.

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I spent a few minutes goofing off tonight and grabbed an ultra-nifty Simpsons Plugin for WordPress. I hacked it a smidge and added about twenty more quotes. Trés cool. It’s amazing that there are just no decent Simpsons images on the ‘net. I seem to remember FOX going nuts on copyright violation a few years ago. It’s hard to imagine that they are that ruthless. How could they have wiped the entire Internet of good Simpsons graphics? What’s even harder to imagine is why the “official” Simpsons site would be so incredibly craptacular — all Flash and useless content; they even incorrectly used “lose” instead of “loose” in one spot. Aye carumba.