Evolution of a blog

I have decided to change the blog’s theme once again. I want to go with something more professional. I chose BlueBird, because I wanted something less busy, more open and, at the time, I was also high on the Twitter wave.

Lately I have been kind of burned out on Twitter! I am not as excited or obsessed with it, although I do still look forward to connecting with friends and posting random things. I guess everything comes in waves. At least that’s how it is with me. I obsess with something for couple of days to couple of weeks and then I move on.

Anyhow, back to the looks of my blog. I want to have something plain, which will present the content in easy to the eyes fashion. I don’t want to have busy pages, either. I think I will start with trying out few different theme. Currently I am deicing between Mimbo Pro, The Studio and maybe Unbound. I will test their appeal and organization of the content, but I think, at the end, I just might just create my own theme from modifying the classic WordPress them. Just like I did many years ago, when I first started using Wordpress. I would provide some examples, but the Archive.org does not have that many archived copies of my site. Besides, I think this was probably before the total data loss I suffered in July of 2004.

After I have settled on a theme or have created my own, I will reorganize the pages and the content their provide. Then maybe I will finally complete the About page. I am doing this, because I want to make my blog more useful. I want to start posting better articles and attract new and regular visitors. Eventually I would like to also have a forum community.

We will have to see who this will go. I see this as “The Evolution of a personal blog”, the evolution of my blog. Looking through old posts and remembering old designs I can trace the changes in my way of thinking and writing. I am definitely more mature and interested to provided something useful and not just random ramblings. Well … for most part. It IS a journey after all. Correct?!

Progress and development is a must.

Twitter Tool - I love you, I hate you!

The Twitter Tool, a Wordpress plugin, is an awesome tool. I love that it posts to my Twitter account whenever I make a post on my blog. It also provides me with the ability to make new tweets from my blog’s sidebar and from within the Wordpress administrator menu. But the feature I find most valuable is the Twitter digest. The plugin creates a blog post with the day’s tweets, thus creating a back up of my Twitter activity. This is also the feature, which makes me HATE this plugin.

The damn thing creates the digest posts, which are scheduled to appear at midnight with the days tweets, but it generates the posts 4 to 6 hours prior to midnight, right before my active time and thus missing my tweets from the day the post is supposed to reflect. I tried contacting Alex, the creator of the plugin, weeks ago, but I never received a peep from him. I told him about the problem and asked him how can I tweak the code to compensate for this problem, but like I said - not a peep.

It is a love-hate relationship.Unfortunately there isn’t another plugin like it. I guess I will just have to spend the time looking through the source code, line by line, until I figure out how it all works and what needs to be changed to resolve this headache. It won’t be the first time I have had to improve a plugin.

Latest Posts v1.0 by Cypher

While looking for plugins for Jutia Group I stumbled upon Latest Posts v1.0. It is on the left side, under “10 Newest Entries”.

I needed some more functionality out of it so I took the liberty to modify the code a bit. Just to make it a tad more flexible.

I started by changing the function call for inside the template. I changed it from:

<?php cypher_latestposts(); ?>

to

<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts(); ?>

What this does is, before the function is called its existence will be verified. This will prevent your theme from braking and your pages loading halfway and then displaying errors when the function is called:

• if you disable the plugin (now you can turn on and off the plugin without the visitors getting page errors)
• the plugin file is moved, corrupted or deleted

In other words, if something happens to the plugin and you are unaware of the problem, your site will not brake. This of course is bad, but it will not have a negative effect on your site.

My next change was to make the number of posts being displayed flexible. With other plugins and the ability to call the function in any page or post you might want to display different number of posts at different places.

I started by deleting the variable

$max_posts

from the global declaration.

Then I placed that variable in the function declaration.

Old

function cypher_latestposts($before='', $after='<br>')

New

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before='', $after='<br>')

Now when you call your function you can set the number of post to be displayed at the function call location. Like this:

<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10'); ?>

In this example I want 10 posts. You can change this number to anything you want.

Here is an extra. Some of you might want to display your links in a list, others separated by a comma (no idea why), slashes, hyphens or as in the original just with a line breaker. So what you will do is change the function declaration like this:
From

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before='', $after='<br>')

to

function cypher_latestposts($max_posts, $before, $after)

When you call your function just insert what you want to separate the links with. Here are some examples:

<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','<li>','</li>'); ?>
<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','+','<br />'); ?>
<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','','/'); ?>
<?php if (function_exists('cypher_latestposts')) cypher_latestposts('10','==','=='); ?>