404 page added to J-blue

I added a 404 page to Mike Little’s journalized theme. It’s nothing fancy, just ripped the content area out of index.php and put some semi-helpful text in its place. This page should work for all of the Journalized themes, and should be site-independent.

The WordPress Codex has an excellent article on 404 pages, including instructions for making your 404 page show up instead of the browser’s default (useless) information. It’s al got suggestions for 404 page content and links to other helpful sites.

Instructions: right-click on this link and save it to a local file. Add any custom text or links as appropriate for your site. Then upload it to your Journalized theme directory, e.g. wordpress/wp-content/themes/journalized-blue.

Enjoy!

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Nothing new here, but check out cvntrak.org

Nothing’s been going on here since I’ve been busy hacking up Central Valley NTrak, my model railroad site. It’s now a full WordPress site–all content is managed by WP. I learned a few things about Pages (note the capital “P”) and hierarchal categories which I thought I would share. (Or at least write down, so I don’t have to re-learn them the hard way!)

The site is using a modified version of BB Iverson’s theme, Spirit, which has a few non-post Pages linked from the header. Creating the pages sounded pretty easy, so I jumped in. I got the pages created okay, but I couldn’t view them–I kept getting 404 errors whenever I tried to browse cvntrak.org/archives/. I thought perhaps I had set the page template incorrectly, or perhaps I should have titled the page “archives” instead of “Archives”. I tried all kinds of things, to no avail. Eventually I found a reference to “the default ‘pretty’ permalink format”, so I double-checked that I had indeed set these up correctly, and found my problem–I had turned off write access to my .htaccess file after I got the permalink format set initially, and there were a whole bunch of new rewrite rules to be added for the new Pages I had written. I played with this a little bit more, and it seems like you need to visit the Options/Permalinks page and hit “Update permalink structure” whenever you create a new Page. I tried leaving .htaccess writable, then creating a Page, then viewing it, and I always got 404’s for pages created after the most recent permalink update. I don’t like leaving this file writable, so I’ll just cut-and-paste if I ever need to change the rewrite rules again.

“Spirit” has a category list in the left sidebar, generated by wp_list_cats(). I set up hierarchal categories for this site, with a couple of top-level “container” categories. Then I made the first post and filed it under the child categories, published it and viewed the home page and wp_list_cats showed… nothing! I futzed around with this for a while and finally I made a post in one of the top-level categories. Voila! All of a sudden I can see the category hierarchy in the sidebar, at least for all children of the top-level category with a post. I have to play with this some more to see exactly when it breaks. I’m not sure if this is a bug, or maybe I don’t completely understand how wp_list_cats() is supposed to work.

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Is the Bee trying to sweep the Downing Street Memo under the rug?

(NB: If you are asked to login or register for the articles at the SacBee site, just go to BugMeNot.)

Our local paper, the Sacramento Bee, may be doing its best to bury the Downing Street Memo (DSM) story by giving it cursory coverage. One may ask how I can possibly make this claim, considering that the “Bee” is supposedly a liberal newspaper. My evidence:

  1. This editorial, published last Sunday, 2005-06-19, does all that it can to sweep the DSM story from the public eye.
  2. Two days later the Bee published these letters to the editor, all but one of them reprimanding the Bee for this slighty editorial and trying to contain the DSM firestorm.

Think about this–two days. There is no mail on Sunday, so all these letters where either emailed or posted and delivered on Monday in order to be printed on Tuesday morning. Typically the Bee will only publish letters to the editor on a given topic ONCE, so the letters that appeared on Tuesday are likely to be the only ones that will ever see the light of day. I believe that the only way the Bee will publish more on this topic is if they are inundated with letters about the DSM and the Bee’s slipshod coverage of it.

So Sacramento… Start writing!

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Using curl to slurp a file via http

In this post, I mentioned having problems with live updating of the blacklist. (The “URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration” error.) In this comment, Matt Read shows how to use curl to fetch the file contents via http. I have posted the curl info on Fahim’s site already.

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New parameter for list_tags() cleaned up Sharepoint theme

A bit of hacking on Felix’s tags plugin (version 0.3.0) has cleaned up the Sharepoint theme. I added a new parameter, “count_posts” (default true), to the list_tags() function. This controls the display of number of posts. The patch is here, just right-click and save locally or use your browser’s “view source” command.

This code could probably be much cleaner, but it gets the job done for me right now. Enjoy!

Update: 2005-09-03 05:36 UTC–the patchfile has been fixed. See this article for more info.

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Tags added to Sharepoint, but they’re ugly

I’ve got tags working in “Sharepoint like”, but the tags list (left column) looks pretty ugly. The CSS for this theme doesn’t work well with the output of list_tags(), since the CSS sort of expects category listings to contain only anchors (<a>), while list_tags() outputs an anchored tag name followed by the article count as plain text.

This is a bummer. I really like the Sharepoint theme, and I much prefer tags over categories. I may have to hack the tags plugin to add a function to list the anchored tags without article counts, or perhaps add another parameter to the list_tags() function to control this.

It’s getting late, I think that’s enough theme hacking for one night. I’ll look at this with fresh eyes in the morning.

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Tags support finished on J-blue

I finished hacking up Journalized-Blue to support the tags plugin. Since this is the only theme I have finished (wrt tags), I have made this the default theme for my blog.

Replacing categories with tags for this theme turned out to involve only two files, index.php and leftcolumn.php. Patches for both files are below. I made the theme “tags aware”, so if you have the tags plugin, the theme will show tags wherever it now shows categories. If you want both tags and categories, it’d be very simple to hack the patched files so that categories were always displayed.

The patches are .txt files. I can’t recall how to force these to display “as is” (my http-fu is weak, I’ll admit), but you can either right-click on these links and save the files locally or simply click on the links and then use your browser’s “view source” command to see the straight .txt files.

Update: 2005-09-03 05:32 UTC
I’ve created a single patchfile of all the changes I’ve made to Journalized-blue. More information is available in this article.

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Turning up the heat on Gee Dubya

The VoteToImpeach/ImpeachBush site has been around since before GW was elected. For some reason, they haven’t been getting much attention from the so-called “liberal media”. But since the Downing Street Memo came to light on 1 May 2005, things have been getting a little less comfortable for “the President Quayle we never had”. And bloggers have been one of, if not the, main reason for the whole brouhaha.

In this article from 17 Jun 2005, the “Sacramento Bee” reports, …the memo … got scant attention in U.S. newspapers or broadcasts until liberal bloggers castigated the U.S. press for not exposing inconsistent Bush statements on the war. Yay, liberal bloggers! (If you are asked to login or register for the articles at the SacBee site, just go to BugMeNot.)

And opposing the liberal bloggers, is… the “liberal” media?!?. In this article, (also available on Common Dreams), Molly Ivins has some pretty sharp things to say about how the mainstream media has been trying to bury the whole DSM story.

Just like Watergate, the longer the spotlight stays on, the longer that more embarassing information comes out. On the DowningStreetMemo.org’s blog, a post which reports that at least one person in the British government knew that the WMD claims used to justify invading Iraq were “totally implausible”. (Of course, nowadays the reason given for invasion is “spreading democracy”. Don’t ask me how foreign occupation==democracy. Perhaps the Poles, Belgians, Dutch, French, et al, understand this based on their experiences with Germany in the 1940’s.)

So HOORAY for the liberal team. Keep up the heat! VoteToImpeach (among others) is planning demonstrations on 24 Sep 2005 in Washington DC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. With Republicans controlling both houses of the legislature, I doubt that impeachment will actually happen. But the radical right has already shown that a President doesn’t have to actually be impeached in order for their party to suffer at the hands of the voters. Let’s give the wing-nuts on the extreme right a taste of their own medicine!

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Added tags support to J-Blue theme

I hacked up Journalized-Blue‘s index.php to replace the category listing with Felix Wong’s tags plugin. I still need to grep the rest of this theme for categories and fix them as well. Then I’ll have to see which of the rest of my themes are worth the effort. (I guess it’s not that tough to add tags support, it’s just a matter of finding all the places where categories are listed in all of the theme php files.)

I should probably also be a good citizen and post the modified themes.

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Journalized-Blue theme installed

Another theme for people to try out. Journalized-Blue is the only 3-column theme I have installed on my blog. I was really trying to stick to 2-column layouts, but this theme is just too good to pass up. I’ll be tweaking it to better suit my needs over the coming days.

Great work, Mike!

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