WordPress

WP Tiger Administration v3.0

Steve Smith has updated his Tiger Admin plug-in. What does it do? It makes the WordPress admin screen look very nice indeed. Good job!

[tags]wordpress, WP Tiger Administration, steve smith[/tags]

Aggregating RSS with WordPress

I have been working away recently on a little project to bring together all of the RSS feeds of members of Palimpsest, the discussion forum I maintain. I have used third party arrangements, like KickRSS and Suprglu in the past, neither of which were wholly satisfactory. I’m a regular reader of the WordPress Planet – which pulls together influential WordPress based feeds – and one for the Anglian LUG. So I thought perhaps it would be best to host the aggregated feeds myself, using either the Python based Planet or the PHP MetaPlanet.

An hour’s fiddling last night made it clear that both were beyond my modest abilities. So, I needed another solution. I found it – a WordPress plug-in that aggregates feeds and spews out separate posts for each item. The title of each posts acts as a link back to the originating site. I soon had it up and running, and it seems to work really well for a quick-and-dirty solution. 

A great option for those wanting to create a blogging community.

New look, new feel

Things have changed quite a bit on here, largely because of the change in nature of my blog, and the sort of stuff I’m writing about, as well as the fact that I am not adding as much content as I used to.

I have switched theme from my pretty heavily modded Contempt – which was a shame in a way, because I especially liked my rotating header images – to Hemingway, which displays stuff in a quite different way. It’s also cool because we are having a reading from A Farewell to Arms at the wedding! I like it, but it is going to take a bit of tweaking here and there to get it looking just how I want it. I’ve also personalised the title of the site a bit, and used one of my favourite quotes as the sub-header. It’s from Gore Vidal, by the way.

While I am talking about themes and stuff, I must pass on the Firefox theme Mostly Crystal, which is excellent!

More Plug-In Fun…

I have installed a couple of extra WordPress plug-ins – one seems to work nicely, the other, well, less so.

First up is Comment Quicktags which adds little buttons above the comment form to help people out with formatting HTML in posts.

The other one is Simple Recent Comments, which you can see in the sidebar on the right. Only, those aren’t the most recent comments for this blog. Oh, no. They are the last comments left on davebriggs.net, my old blog. Useful! Hopefully the chap behind the plug-in, Raoul, will get back to me soon, as it is a nice little addition to the site.

Update: All sorted. The recent comments plug-in makes explicit reference to tables in the database, and assumes that the prefix for the tables is “wp_” which is the default for all WordPress installations. But those of us that run more than one blog from one database, like me, then t just picks up the comments from the blog that uses that prefix – which is my original blog. All I had to do was edit the plug-in file and change the table prefixes to those for this blog. Phew! I was seriously freaked out for a while!
[tags]WordPress[/tags]

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