Category Archives: Metaposting

Via Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, the above image is a word cloud assembled by Wordle from the content of the last two-plus years of posts made to this blog—more precisely the 300 most common words, net of noisewords like and and the. Most of the work went into stripping all the markup from the posts, starting from a WordPress backup.

So the good news is that, inexplicably, Comcast fixed the redirects for the pages that I had hosted there, so the pages for Larry Shue and Wood Duck and the archives of pedantic nuthatch are back online. The bad news is that contractors working near my house (truth to tell, for Comcast’s competition) inadvertently cut the cable, so I’m without cable TV and internet until at least Tuesday. At least the hockey playoffs season is done.

My WordPress dashboard says that this is my 500th post, and I’m in no position to say otherwise.

And there was great rejoicing in the land: a WordPress upgrade (to 2.5) without changes to the blog template.

Well, the calendar navigation is wonky (maybe it always was), and the dedicated search engine stopped working some time ago, but I have restored the archives of pedantic nuthatch and the other pages at the chorister’s c from backups after Comcast clobbered them. Twice.

After an irritating couple of hours fumbling about with the WordPress documentation, I came up with this fragment to draw the dynamic part of my left sidebar:


<!-- Begin - Links from the 'Links Manager'-->
<?php
$link_cats = get_categories('type=link&orderby=ID');
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
?>
<div class="left-widget-title"
id="linkcat-<?php echo $link_cat->cat_ID; ?>">
<?php echo $link_cat->cat_name; ?>
</div>
<div class="left-widget">
<ul>
<?php wp_list_bookmarks('categorize=0&category=' . $link_cat->cat_ID . '&orderby=name&title_li=0') ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php
}
?>
<!-- End - Links from the 'Links Manager'-->


The assignment of the id= attribute to the widget title <div> is mainly there for debugging purposes.

Man oh man, it’s miserable work extracting information from the WordPress docs. And I’m not really happy about an app that breaks existing code every time a point release comes out. Oh well, it didn’t cost me any coin.

I used these doc pages: category, wp_list_bookmarks, and get_categories.

Once again WordPress has reworked the category system:

WordPress 2.3 introduces our new taxonomy schema. Any plugin that queries against the old table will break horribly. Plugins that use the category API should be fine.

This means that this code in my left sidebar, which I modified from the original Tiga theme:


<?php
$link_cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->categories");
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
if (get_links($link_cat->cat_id, '', '', '', FALSE, 'id', FALSE, FALSE, -1, FALSE, FALSE)) { /* anything to show? */
?>


needs some work. Looks like this evening’s project is figuring out how to use category filters.

Happy blogaversary to me.

Hmm. It looks like WP 2.1.x (to which I just upgraded) has hidden the linkcategories table. Come out, come out, whereever you are! My left sidebar hurts!

Specifically, I’m trying to find the equivalent code for

$link_cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories");
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
if (get_links($link_cat->cat_id, '', '', '', FALSE, '', FALSE, FALSE, -1, FALSE, FALSE)) {
...
}
}


Scott Rosenberg reports that WordPress eats posts containing the string “python,” so this post will test that assertion. Or perhaps it’s mod_security.

Everything is back the way I wanted it, but what for the love of Michael J. Fox is that white hairline in the subtitle?

I’m in the process of restoring this blog’s theme after an unexpected WP upgrade clobbered my customizations. More the fool me for not saving the customizations in a separate folder. Well, I’ve learned that lesson.

WordPress needed to be told that we’re off Daylight Savings Time, and I just figured this out.