Rubénerd :)

I’m not sure whether these problems are just the typical WordPress fare or because SegPub is playing up again. Either way, I can’t wait to get a new host and start fresh with some nice Django goodness, I’m getting so tired of all these problems :’(.

Vinícius Lira over in this comments thread has proposed a ridiculously elegant solution to using a default WordPress installation to host multiple blogs on different databases. If it works, it’s genius.

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I’ve been blogging for long enough to have suffered a couple of disastrous data losses, but only once have I irreversibly lost stuff. Consequently I backup my blogs daily, but on a hunch early this morning I decided to test my backups on a local installation of WordPress. I choked!

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For many years now WordPress has been the iPhone of blogging tools: every other platform is judged by how well it compares to it, and unless you have a specific need that isn’t served by it, it gets chosen almost as the default. Here’s hoping this brand new offshoot of Movable Type brings back some solid competition. And I didn’t even make a terrible musical pun in the title, I was tempted though.

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Every time I try to pry myself away from WordPress which I’ve been moved over to in 2005 after thinking for far too long, another feature comes along that makes the decision harder. I’ll give you the attention you deserve one day Django!

In this case, it’s the ability to show a summary of a post with a link to read more, but only posts you elect it to happen to. Given I merged all my blogs into this one recently I’ve decided to use this on anime reviews which tend to have a ton more graphics and are much longer. It also means I can append a mild NSFW warning on some posts above the read more link when Her Senjougaharaness insists on spending half an episode in the shower.

To pull it off, make sure you have this code within the the_content() method, NOT the_summary() as you may assume. Finally, wherever you want the more link to be inserted, add <!--more-->.

Spiffyness.

Kallen proofreading my nonsensical drivel…

For the longest time I was thinking whether or not to take the Zombie Plan approach and import my anime blog into it’s own subdomain WordPress install here, or import the posts into rubenerd.com with their own seperated category.

Seems the decision was made for me, my university wiped my database and the SQL backups I had made in my home folder. All my screenshots from three years of blogging are still there as well as the original theme files, but the posts themselves are gone. Like a Pythonesque dead parrot, they have ceased to exist. It’s entirely my own baka baka baka fault of course, I should have put my backups in a separate location. Lesson learned!

Never fear though (I can hear you fearing… wait what?) I’ve decided to pick myself up and start again, only this time I’ll be posting my anime reviews and senseless Japanese culture discussion here on Rubenerd.com in the sparsely populated anime category which ironically happens to be one of my most visited pages!

And here I was thinking Haruhi’s Endless 8 would be the thing irritating me most about anime currently. I blame Kyoto Animation. Yeah, that works. Could Mikuru go back in time for me and rescue my old posts? Or perhaps with her bizarre and endless amount energy Minori could rewrite them all one afternoon. Or Negi and Louise could just use their magic wands to recreate them. After Britannia that doesn’t control Britain has been defeated, Mio has got over her stage shyness, those wooden starfish for Fuko have been carved and Mai has moved to her new school with that huge smouldering crater in the front garden. Yes I’m a hopeless closet anime watching geek who’s not cool enough to be an otaku, shaddup!

I haven’t decided whether or not I’ll use the WordPress magic I learned to theme the anime category differently and prevent posts from appearing on the home page and master RSS feed to still make it appear as a separate site. Might be a bit jarring seeing all this new and unrelated stuff start appearing here.

I over-think things too much. Or do I over-think things too much after all? Or do I just over-think to the extent that it impedes my abilities to make decisions? Is that the definition of over-think?

Perhaps a moment with Kyou in the gym supply closet would calm my nerves about this loss and subsequent indecision about where to go from here. Nah, Mizuno Ami is still the best ^_^.

Now do you see why I kept my anime blog posts separate?

Here’s something interesting. If you use WordPress you can assign separate templates for different categories; presumably I’m assuming (what a redundant few words) this also means you could give different categories different CSS styles too.

The WordPress Codex says you can define different templates in your current theme based on the ID of the category you want to customise. If it doesn’t find a specific template for the category, it reverts back to the theme default.

For example, the Rubenerd Show category here has an ID of 277 (the unfortunate legacy of using categories as tags before WordPress has native tag support) which means if I wanted to create a custom theme template for it, I’d create a category-227.php file. Other categories don’t have that ID, so they’d continue to use the basic category.php template.

My plan of merging all my blogs into this one while giving the appearance of separate sites seems to be a neverending story, but all the pieces seem to be falling into place. So far I’ve learned:

• Each category can have it’s own RSS and Atom feeds
• Categories can be selectively blocked from appearing in the master site and feeds
• Using the this plugin and method the term /category/ can be hidden from URIs

I’m starting to think it may have been less work to just move my blog here to my Django system after all, but I guess I have the advantage in this case that someone else is maintaining the code. I’ve gone this far though I guess, so no point stopping now!

Now that version 2.8 is out the electronic door whatsit, The Twitterverse is all abuzz over features people want to see in WordPress 2.9. I’m surprised the vast majority of these requested features have to do with hosting and organising media instead of dealing with some of the shortfalls of the platform itself.

My particular gripe has been the WordPress limit of one blog per installation without resorting to installing multiple copies or using WordPress mu, both of which are overkill. The stop gap workaround for this has been to use categories with separate styles for each section, but even this is more difficult because (by default) categories have to contain the term category in their URIs and separate themes cannot be assigned to different categories.

Honestly, with the amount of discussion I see around the net about this, I reckon there’s more pent up demand for more basic blog functionality than fancy media hosting and organising; as far as I’m concerned the lunch of that idea has already been eaten by the likes of Flickr and YouTube any way. The phrasing of this paragraph is terrible.

My 10 cents. Adjusted for inflation. Or perhaps with the current economic climate maybe I should deflate it to 1 cent. Plus GST of course.

A few months ago I lampooned WordPress for it’s need to have the term "category" appear within every category URL. It appears I’m not the only one who found this irritating.

For me I wanted to merge all my disparate nonsense blogs into one meta nonsense blog (Rubenerd.com) which would be easier to maintain, then use categories with their own CSS to make them still appear separate. A shrewd, devilish cunning plan worthy of Baldric himself, but alas having the term "category" in all the URis spoilt the illusion.

Original blogs	Ideal new sub-URI	WordPress illusion screwup
Rubenerd Show	rubenerd.com/show/	rubenerd.com/category/show/
Fun Facts	rubenerd.com/nonsense/	rubenerd.com/category/nonsense/
Intranet	rubenerd.com/anime/	rubenerd.com/category/anime/
Studies	rubenerd.com/studies/	rubenerd.com/category/studies/

Fortunately having played with and been disappointed by so many plugins in the past, I’ve finally found one that works so beautifully I’m thinking of sending the writer a grilled cheese sandwich: the adeptly-titled WP No Category Base. Not only does it work right out of the box, but it also redirects your previous category permalinks which means you don’t need to mess with .htaccess files. A beautiful, elegant solution!

As the name suggests this plugin will completely remove the mandatory "Category Base" from your category permalinks ( e.g. "myblog.com/category/my-category/" to "myblog.com/my-category/".

The plugin requires no setup or modifying core wordpress files and will not break any links.

Now I can finally start to import all my other posts. Apparently the anime category gets the most hits here anyway despite it having nothing of value in it! Crazy, grilled cheese sandwich stuff.

I’ve already figured out how to exclude certain categories from certain places so they act like separate sites with their own styles and whatnot, now I just need to work out the feeds. I know WordPress allows you to generate separate RSS and Atom feeds for different categories, but how do I customise them? For example, add iTunes information to the Rubenerd Show category feed, but not any others.

If I spent as much time blogging and talking about interesting topics on my blog and podcast as I did blogging and talking about blogging and talking, I’d get much more blogging and talking done on my blog and podcast. Wait, what?

I can confirm adding the following code to the functions.php in my current theme prevents posts from certain categories appearing on the home page, and the main site RSS feed. In this case we’re filtering category ID 5:

function myFilter($query) {
  if ($query->is_feed || $query->is_home) {
    $query->set('cat','-5');
  }
  return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','myFilter');

If you only want to filter categories from the home page, simply remove the $query->is_feed || condition, and vica versa.

This little change really allows WordPress to be used as a simple CMS by allowing you to separate material and provide category feeds for different types of posts. I’ll be using this so regular readers subscribed to my main RSS feed don’t get any of my anime posts from my blog that I’ll be importing from my university intranet.

Thanks to Scott Jangro for this great tip.