iTamer.com

I’ve just started a new blog, open to any contributor, to collect personal stories of backstabbing incidents.

If you have a story to tell, rock on over and type it up

I downloaded the Widgets plugin for WordPress the other day and didn’t think I’d have time to check it out for a bit but I took 5 minutes today to install it on my experimental WPv2 blog. Well, the install took seconds, I activated it, and had it setup in no time at all.

The only shame is that once you’ve played with it you have no reason to continue doing so.

Spam is one of those topics that gets returned to time and again. Well, I was just updating this blog and found:

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One thing I haven’t become involved with is writing plugins for WordPress but I have been looking at ways to make my blog more efficient.

I tried out a tag system back in October but found that it generated too many tags and often irrelevant tags so finally scrapped it in favour of the plugins from Ultimate Tag Warrior produced by fellow kiwi Christine Davis (who I don’t actually know ;)). Her system allowed me to produce a “Tag Cloud” which is pretty cool.

I haven’t totally got my head around the custom tags page with url rewriting but for now I’m happy with urls like /index.php?tag=kiwi and I’ve learnt a little about templates.

So when I posted some info about the UTW plugin at DigitalPoint one of the members asked about Category Archives and gave a new plugin to use. I took a look and couldn’t quite work out how to use it, so took the lessons from UTW and applied them! (more…)

I took a rare look at the dashboard of my WordPress blog and saw that Matt Mullenweg was looking for beta testers for a new spam blocking tool. I was getting hammered by spammers and they were driving me mad so I emailed him and found myself accepted.

Akismet is the end result of that beta testing - and it’s awesome. I’m actually getting less spam as a result at the spammers can see that their efforts are going nowhere! Phew. (more…)

I’ve just discovered a swag of hacks for WordPress by Denis de Bernardy. They’re pretty impressive and highlight for me, in the few lines of code that represent each hack, how little I understand the internal workings of WordPress. Aaah, one day.

The only part I’m using right now is the related posts list at the bottom of the page. It should just be when you see a single post but I’ll get to that later. Before I commit much time to it I need to work out how to make the related posts a bit more relevant. In the meantime it all helps my internal navigation I guess.

When I was editing my Essential change to Blogger Templates and using the output of php’s sytax highlighter I was getting unreliable presentation via WordPress. What had worked well in the old part of my site was falling over now. I needed something that made posting simple and worked for readers!

I looked through various libraries of WordPress plugins and decided on iG:Syntax Hiliter and it’s fantastic. The layout is cleaner than I had before and the code doesn’t have to be manipulated before I post!

Thank you Amit!