This is an investigation into some problems with the way WordPress generates .htaccess rules to make its fancy permalinks work. For a new site I am building, I wanted the permalinks to not have the date in the URL. Accordingly, I set the permalink structure to the following.
/%category%/%postname%/Less is more.
Less is a WordPress plugin that makes reading posts more intuitive for your many readers. With Less, when readers click a (more…) link on your post “teaser”, they see the full article on the screen, not just the part after the (more…).
Google introduced the rel="nofollow" attribute earlier this year; most blogging platforms now support it. Its initial promise of ridding the web of blog comment spam has not happened, and there has been a lot of conspiracy theory about the “real” reasons Google would do this. But it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about. This issue came up in the IO Error blog — I started to write a comment on it, but the logorrhoea set in, as it often does.
Here’s an amusing hack to fix a niggling problem in the WordPress default theme. I came up with this soon after I started using WordPress, but I recently noticed that this small annoyance had generated a discussion on Mathibus.com. My fully automatic solution is now ready for a waiting world.
Last month I wrote that Microsoft doesn’t understand the GPL. But there’s more where that came from. Microsoft’s Shared Source Initiative website also includes a page on Basic Principles of Software Source Code Licensing, which attempts to debunk other open source licensing practices in favour of their own.
Code Markup is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to include program code samples in your posts. You can even include HTML markup in the code sample; Code Markup magically knows which characters should be displayed as code and which should be rendered as HTML.
Google Sitemaps seemed like a moderately good idea at first. A standard format for information is always good for interoperability. But it’s hard to see Google Sitemaps ever really being useful to web search engines. Some features seem to add little to what Google already does, and others seem entirely useless.
Google Sitemaps is a good idea — it’s a standard XML format for site maps. Google (and anybody else) can use such a sitemap to get information about site structure without having to crawl the entire site. The sitemap can contain information about the URLs in your site, including how often they are updated and how important they are relative to the other pages in your site.
I have recently needed to write code that uses JavaScript to add elements dynamically to a web page on the client. I read the relevant W3C documents and wrote the code, and it seemed to work fine. Until I tried it on Internet Explorer. After some digging, I found an explanation in the MSDN DHTML reference, on the page describing the NAME Attribute.
Top Cat is a WordPress plugin that allows you to specify a main category for your posts. Even though WordPress posts can have more than one category, you may want to specify which of them is the main category. Top Cat lets you do this and also provides template tags for displaying the main category of each post.