The other day I switched to using permalinks for the URL. This replaces the URLs like this:
WordPressSS/?post_id=763
With URLs that look like this:
WordPressSS/2008/12/22/penny-stove/

This caused a big problem with showing different sidebar content based on the category. The category used to be passed in through the query string and you get it with _GET['cat']. Permalinks don’t use query strings.

To restore functionality, you need to replace “current_cat = $_GET['cat'];” with
$category = get_the_category();
$current_cat = $category[0]->cat_ID;

It would seem the permalinks can handle multiple categories, because get_the_category() returns an array. This might be useful for some feature I can’t image. Perhaps a sidebar for a tab to show Programming+Computers+Technology content.

Keeping this on the blog is pretty kludgy. I have to copy and paste the last line then edit it. Changes to the table structure like adding new columns or colorization takes a massive amount of effort. It’s good for one thing, adding one line at a time.

I hoped to fix this with some WordPress plugins like WP_Tables, but these are almost as kludgy and are not easy to add one new row. If there’s one thing WordPress does exceptionally bad it’s table data. You can’t just paste in cells from an Excel spreadsheet or quickly mock up a 3 X 4 simple table. This is really too bad as spreadsheets are one of the little known foundations of the digital age.

The Recent Book list is nearly as bad. It’s not a table, but has many common elements and new books are added the same way as the Bike Log. A while ago I added book covers to the mouse hover event. This took a couple of hours.

For some reason, I got the idea on Sunday of writing a Windows app to manage the data and spit out a formatted HTML table that I could just paste into the blog. It took about 6 hours to put together a basic app that would read existing data, write it to a new file format, and spit out an HTML table for the blog. Editing, adding, and removing entries were still done by editing the text file, but that was about the same as the blog anyway. The table got an immediate improvement in appearance that was worth the trouble. Over the past few days I’ve added other basic features along with a few more columns.

I would like to add a bit of analyzation too; things like weekly, monthly, yearly mileage, comparison to past performance in events, and fancier HTML. And to address the other annoyance of the Book List. It would be nice if this were in WordPress as a plugin. My interest can wane overnight and it’s better to have a process that works at the end of each improvement session. PHP, MySQL, WordPress development on a remote box would take too long.

Mashing Up Feeds Using Yahoo Pipes

2.
News from many feeds filtered based on certain keywords to sort or generate a new feed. A list of keywords shift certain stories to the top. For example, to get the release notifications, defects, betas, changes, etc.

3.
Making a post, like an essay, stick around longer. Some content is just commentary or transient, “look my new MacBook Pro came in” But a few articles are longer and well thought out.

How to Make a Featured Post Carousel for WordPress

The topics that I want to have are based roughly on the tags; rambling, bicycling, apple/mac, house projects, news, and gardening. I would like my bicycle items, for example, to stay closer to the top, but the current home page is correct in how it works. So, if I give them their own space the website can filter and organize them to represent my interests more accurately.

It seems this started on April 9th. If you looked at this website on a Windows computer, Firefox or IE, since then you should run a virus and malware scanner.

Thanks to FireFox 3 and the corporate virus scanners for catching this.

I also want to get a Weather Station that will attach to the computer to automatically log wind, rainfall, temperature, humidity, and pressure. So, that I can correlate these with plant yields. The more expensive varieties have many wireless sensors. This seems excessive until you consider the ability to monitor above the canopy, below the canopy, and several different spots in the yard. In effect logging the various microclimates. This would be extremely useful information. After all, I’m most interested in the interactions between plants that create such microclimates.

Wordpress is installing now. I looked for a different Content Management System (CMS), but none of them seem suitable. I have modified WordPress many times. Perhaps, I can hammer it into place to fulfill my needs.

None of the themes so far seem to fit the bill. One will most likely have to be heavily modified. I don’t look forward to this. It’s very time consuming. My needs are pretty specific here and a blog isn’t a good match, but the other choices seem confusing and excessive.

I would like this to be an excellent resource that shows up easily on Google for myself and my fellow dryland, cityfolk gardeners dealing with the thick muck that grows our landscapes and fruits and vegetables.

The link is Stephen’s Garden.