Tri Nguyen

I keep tweaking my WordPress blog, trying to bring it closer to some kind of ideal. Here, in list form, is what I did recently.

• New banner photograph. I found a brilliant photo by scouring Flickr for Creative Commons, “BY-NC-SA”-licensed photographs. I tweaked it in Photoshop, then masked it into my banner image.

• Began using <!---more---> tags in my posts. I’m inserting the tags manually for now. Aníbal Rojas has a brilliant plugin called More Paragraphs that “automatically inserts a <!---more---> tag after a user configurable number of paragraphs.” Unfortunately, it chokes on Flickr-generated HTML in certain of my posts. Aníbal is working on a fix that I look forward to using.

• Updated my Colophon page.

• Integrated Lester Chan’s wp-stats into the blog (see my Statistics page). I’ve also begun using gVisit.com, which “tracks visitors to your website using Google Maps.”

• Integrated Lazy Gallery into the blog (see my Photo page). At the end of the day, I’d rather use a Flickr gallery plugin, but Lazy Gallery is a quick and dirty solution for now.

• Integrated Sortable Nicer Archives into the blog (see my Archivesn page). I had a hell of a time integrating this, but here’s the trick that finally made it work:

  $posts_per_page = '-1'; needs to be before require('./wp-blog-header.php');

  More about this can be found at these Support threads: Sortable Nicer Archives for 1.3 and Nicer Archives Error.

• Installed the Related Posts 1.3.3 plugin.

  In this version, you can specify keywords by placing <!---kw=keyword1 keyword2---> in your article . . . When generating lists of related posts, it will first check if the article has the custom field “keyword” and use these “keywords” as search terms; otherwise, it will use post name . . . .