John Lamansky

As visitors to this blog may have noticed, I have a new WordPress theme! I mentioned back in February that I needed a WordPress theme to replace Kubrick, and was planning to develop a theme on my own.

Well, I didn’t have the time to devote to that sort of project. So I looked. And I searched. And I hunted for a WordPress theme I liked. Then one day, I began yet another theme-searching session, and one of the first themes I stumbled on was Integral.

Ah-ha! I liked it! So I installed it, changed some colors around, and over the course of a couple weeks I tweaked and modified it. And now I’m about done!

To all RSS-only readers: come on over and check it out!

A very useful resource for WordPress plugin developers: Browse the WordPress 2.2 source code at PHPXref.com.

Yep, I’ve decided that Kubrick just won’t cut it. The reason is that it isn’t “brandable.” So many sites have Kubrick that you can’t really tell them apart if you just look at the layout.

The reason I stuck with Kubrick in the first place was that I couldn’t find another theme I really liked. So I think what I’m going to do is design a new theme from scratch.

Of course, this will take a while, so keep an eye out for it in a couple of months.

As those familiar with WordPress probably know, WordPress’s “slogan” is “Code is Poetry.”

Personally, I think it’s a great slogan. And I agree: well-written computer code is like a work of art. Good code creates something that runs beautifully and can even look beautiful too.

So yes, code is poetry; however, I find it kind of annoying to discover poetry in code, or more specifically, I find it kind of annoying when I find Daisy Bell lycrics hiding in my WordPress CSS:

.navigation {
	display: block;
	text-align: center;
	margin-top: 10px;
	margin-bottom: 60px;
	}
/* End Various Tags & Classes*/

/* "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you.
	It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage.
	But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two." */

I do feel kind of annoyed, but the lightheartedness of it also almost makes me want to laugh. And that’s probably why it’s there.

Sure, I had set up basic feed redirection. I had set it so that the feed/ and feed/atom/ WordPress feed URLs would redirect to my FeedBurner feed.

But when I saw that the Best of the Web blog directory had listed my RSS feed as being http://www.johnlamansky.com/?feed=rss2, I knew I had to implement more extensive redirection.

I had heard of this “WordPress Feedburner Plugin” before, and decided to give it a try. After a little bit of trouble at first, I got it to work and - lo and behold! - the next day my Feedburner subscriber count had almost - not quite, but almost - doubled.

It just goes to show how important it is to make sure all of your feed traffic is directed to the right place.

I would highly recommend the aforementioned plugin to WordPress bloggers who are using Feedburner; and if you haven’t already, be sure to check out Feedburner’s feed redirection tips.

You may have noticed that for about two weeks or so now, across this blog the word “tag” has been used in place of the word “category.” You might also have noticed the list of the 20 most popular tags (on the sidebar on the homepage) in replacement of the giant category list. And last but not least, another new addition to the site is the cool-looking tag cloud.

The reason I made this change was because, in short, I had a lot of categories. Dozens and dozens of them. The list on the sidebar was huge.

The problem was, I wanted to have more. Even if I talked about, say, DMOZ, just once, I wanted to have a category for it so that my post would show up in Technorati searches for that topic.

With the default WordPress system, that just wasn’t feasible.

I had known for quite some time that I wanted to make the change to the more flexible tagging system. So once day I decided to do some plugin searching, and I found the perfect plugin: Category Tagging. From the plugin website:

WordPress has a categorization system that lets users categorize posts. However, using categories is no longer state of the art: In the word wide web, tagging is established — and categorizing is obsolete. Tagging is quite different to categorizing since it is based on keywords.

[…]

[The] Category Tagging Plugin provides the following features:

1. Tag cloud
   It displays all tags (categories) as tag cloud.
2. Related posts
   When visitors find your website via search engines or other websites, they are often there for a reason and want to find out about a particular topic of interest. Presenting a list of related posts to a given post makes life easier for your visitors by showing them other posts you have written on the subject. This increases the chance that a visitor will stick around browsing your blog, and is perfect for existing visitors to find out your past thoughts on a particular subject.

Very cool.

I would highly recommend the Category Tagging plugin, although be forewarned that it’s not easy to set up.

While I was at it, I also fixed that annoying WordPress “bug” that causes categories to be arranged by ID when the categories for a post are listed. All I had to do was install the Simple Category Sort extension (link not working as of this writing; hopefully it’ll soon be fixed), click Enable, and tada! sorted categories… er, I mean tags.

Yea! Fantastico’s WordPress bug is fixed and I finally have a WordPress installation that is 100% WordPress 2.0!

I am convinced that my WordPress installation is half WordPress 1.5 and half WordPress 2.0. As detailed previously, I had a bit of trouble upgrading to WordPress 2.0. Besides the fact that my theme has a functions.php file now, the main thing I have noticed is that my Quicktags toolbar has changed. That’s the post composition toolbar that has links to common HTML tags.

First of all, the “b” button used to be called “strong,” and the “i” button used to be called “em.” In addition, I don’t remember the “del,” the “ins,” the “more,” or the “lookup” buttons being there. But I’m glad those new buttons are there. Cool stuff.

I have to give credit to WordPress. Even though it’s a half-upgraded installation, it still works.