Category: Metaposting

The year in review

Meme via Pondering Pikaia: the first sentence of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • January 4: Via things magazine, a museum of strange and rarely used HTML tags.
  • February 4: Charles Isherwood articulates why I was underwhelmed when I read Tom Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia.
  • March 1: Arthur Lubow submits an instructive profile of aptly-named photographer Jeff Wall, whose lightbox-mounted transparencies are measured in feet, not inches.
  • April 1: After nearly a year of operating under dual and provisional corporate badges, we have a new company name, to be pronounced “vo-vee-see.”
  • May 1: Ruth La Ferla profiles designer Santo Loquasto.
  • June 3: I recorded Stuart Hart’s 1997 paper for Harvard Business Review, “Beyond Greening,” at the the studio yesterday, as part of a collection of articles on organization development.
  • July 2: Katherine Ellison looks at today’s carbon offset market.
  • August 1: Via The Morning News: Michael Bloomberg can’t be bothered to take the local IRT and change at 59th Street.
  • September 3: I had just a little time yesterday morning, before we scurried off to the theater, to get out for the first International Rock-Flipping Day, so I poked around in the wooded strip between my townhouse cluster and the middle school grounds.
  • October 2: Once again WordPress has reworked the category system.
  • November 2: Ben Schuman Stoler revisits the District boundary stones.
  • December 2: Rorschach Theatre turns in a gritty, muscular production of David Grimm’s tale of political intrigue and misplaced loyalty.

Upgrades: 3

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.

Upgrades: 2

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.

10 years of “Here I am”

I cracked the electronic mic ten years ago today with a GeoCities account (back before the Yahoo! acquisition). My first project was a set of photos taken from various vantage points along the 70-odd miles of Interstate 66. Painstakingly scanned and cropped, most of them nevertheless were quite pedestrian, and I’ve since taken the set down.

Nearly six years later, I migrated most of the rest of the content to a Comcast account. My Larry Shue appreciation page is still up, as is the suite of pages about the Wood Duck. I was experimenting with several blog-style efforts (here, here, and here), but the page-maintenance effort was dragging me down, so I climbed on the dedicated-software bandwagon once it picked up some steam, and the result was pedantic nuthatch.

I’ve a couple of Blogger-based side projects (here and here), I write and maintain the web site for Reston Community Players, and my fingerprints are beginning to appear in a couple of wikis.

Last year, after a futile bit of FTP-juggling and username chicanery, I realized that I was going to run out of disk space on the Comcast account, and so I moved my blogging house here. And now you know everything.

Upgrades

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)) {
...
}
}

We don’t need no stinking categories

I admit it: the category system for this blog is a mess. I started out with clever allusive titles like Ars Longa and Like Life (the title of a comic novel by Lorrie Moore), but I quickly ran out of allusions that were sufficiently descriptive. Every time I tagged something with NOC, Leta would ask me, “what does that stand for?” and I would explain “not otherwise classified.” And my posts refused to distribute themselves at all evenly into a tidy set of seven categories or so. What would George Miller make of the folksonomy movement, I wonder? Anyhow, let this be a warning to the teeming millions (milling onesies, maybe?) that I may scribble all over the category system at some point.