Froosh. Stuff.

I’ve started using Alex King’s fabulous Twitter Tools again.  I’ve used it in the past to great effect but was disturbed by how noisy it made my blog – normal posts got lost in a sea of tweets that most people could care less about – and so I turned it off.

I’ve just taken the time to discover the query_posts() template function for Wordpress and used it to exclude my tweets from the main page (and soon, the RSS feed):

Insert the following into your index.php before the “have_posts()” section:

<?php
if (is_home()) {
query_posts($query_string . “&cat=-42″);
}
?>

In this case, I’m excluding my tweets category (42) from the main home page.

Now, sitting back and enjoying the best of both worlds – cake, and eating it too

Update: Now using the Simply Exclude plugin to exclude the tweets from the front page and RSS feeds.

Yes, the site looks awful.  That is the point.  Without friendly CSS written and provided to me for free by the internets, this is somewhat like it would look all the time!

CSS Naked Day is a token of our appreciation to all the fantastic CSS coders out there who make the internets a prettier place for everyone.  Thank you.

(And I’m abandoning many of my in-progress posts since I’ve long forgotten the point I was trying to make.  I may continue the time-shifting series, or I may not.  But it’s likely I’ll blog more often, just little things here and there.  I miss the outlet.)

[My CSS Naked effort powered by Aja Lapus' CSS Naked Day Plugin]

While the twitter daily summaries have been handy (for me) to see who and what I’ve been talking about, I’m turning them off for now as I intend to start posting real entries more often and they would be lost amongst the twitter noise.

The may return at some time in the future in their own feed.  Or they may not.  Just follow me on twitter if you want to keep up.

I’ve been using Wordpress for a while now and it just keeps getting better and better.  I actually started blogging with Grey Matter but changed over to Wordpress fairly soon after and for a while updated regularly to the bleeding-edge-sometimes-broken-but-always-better SVN versions.  Until 2.0.  When 2.0 launched, I was content to stick with it and only bothered with the security updates along the way.  I haven’t even really neem paying attention to the development of 2.1.

The great news is, 2.1 has been released!  And what’s more the upgrade took less than 15 seconds (including the package download time)!

Absolutely awesome.  Complete kudos to the WP team!

And remember folks, if you want something from Wordpress that it’s not currently doing, ask for it and vote on other people’s ideas!

In one of the most unprofessional IT moves ever, my domain expired over the weekend.

I am so ashamed. I rant and rail at other who do this, yet when the time comes apparently I can be just as incompetent.

The story goes like this: I received 3 expiry warnings from GoDaddy and blithely ignored them, as I had enabled the auto-renew feature where they simply charge the credit card used last time. Yeah good, except that I have changed credit card numbers and last years wont work. Stoopid. But recoverable at least. Fees paid and GoDaddy switched back the DNS within minutes. Very happy with their service so far. And to think I have Scott Sigler to thank for the recommendation – a horror podcaster would not have been my first choice for domain registration advice, but its working.

My most humble apologies to the various peoples who I have been assisting in their endeavors. I’ll have to step up my service level to win back your acclaim and trust.

I used to have an “aside” kind of blog in a sub-site here, but haven’t really been using it recently. It was meant to be a test site for wordpress upgrades, plugins, development, etc but I’m spreading myself too thin and getting nothing effective done. I didn’t wan’t to lose the content (such as it was) and I like the idea of never breaking a link once established. I know I have broken some links, but the bulk of the content has been imported and most of the links are still working.

For the 1 or 2 people who were subscribed to the sub-feed, it’s now being redirected to the main feed and you’ll probably see everything twice.

So, what did I use to do it? Well, since Wordpress does not include an “Import from Wordpress” option I had to dodgy it up by exporting the sub-blog into MovableType format and importing that. Thanks to the WPExport plugin (needs minor edits – read the comments at the source site) it was a trivial task. The MT importer auto-creates the required categories and can auto-create authors or translate them to pre-existing authors on your Wordpress blog. Very tidy.

Update: To be specific, I did this to make the plugin work for me (I’m using Wordpress 2.0.4):

• Removed ‘SQL’ and ‘blogger’ from the $filetypes definition at the start of WPExport_plugin.php
• Renamed 2 instances of user_nickname to user_nicename in MT.php

Looking good. I quite like the Dovecot IMAP and POP3 servers. Easy to install (with Debian) and configure.

I’m also loving the Maildir format instead of MBox – why did it take me so long to try it out?!