Alan’s Kiloblog

I’m writing my first WordPress plugin. Hopefully, my last. I don’t like PHP. I’m going to call it “Sidelines”. You choose a category, and posts in that category do not appear in the index of posts, nor in the main feed.

This is to faciliate communication that is not for general consumption. It might be better still, to have a category that allows you to place information in the index explicitly, rather than to exclude it. I don’t feel like going back and adding every post in my blog the main category, though.

While writing this plugin, the following resources were useful.

• WordPress Plugin API.
• Source of Event Calendar 3
• WordPress Conditional Tags
• WordPress Hooks

Easy plugin. It already doesn’t do quite what I want. It would be nice to remove the sidelined posts from the recent posts listing, but that might be a function of that plugin, and not the post query.

Update: A bug fix. I filtered the query for the main page, but not for the main feed. There is a remaining issue in that browsing the archive view should also strip sidelines from next and previous, and there is a spearate set of hooks for paged browsing or single posts, or so it seems. Finally, I need to find a place to check in the plugin, so that others can use it if they’d like.

I’m reading Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure or Homeland Security. This is what I’ve done when I’ve not been sleeping. Stories of incompetence. Stories of unrecognized ingenuity. There is a feeling that I need to be doing something to commemorate Katrina, but I’m quite tired of being around people. I don’t feel like changing my web sites to include some graphic. It seems hollow. I don’t feel that we can have a one year anniversary, any more than we could have had a one week anniversary. The CSO was announced yesterday. They are moving forward while we mourn.

Especially since the Rising Tide Conference, I’ve been depressed. About as depressed as I used to get in Ann Arbor. I have been sleeping a lot. Slept all day yesterday. Other that going out for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I’ve been sleeping and reading Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure or Homeland Security. To justify the sleeping, I’ve told myself that I’m going to give up coffee, and that naturally, I’m going to be tired. This is an old pantomime, one that ends when I realize that I’m not going to function until I caffeinated. I’m drinking coffee now.

Once agian, it must be noted that I do not program professionally. I am hobbiest programmer. The computer programs that I write are little hobby programs. They are not professional. I program in my spare time, when I get a chance. Sometimes there are little ideas in them. I may fancy a patent someday, for which I’ll reach into my own pocket. But do keep in mind, that I do not do this professionally, this programming. It is a lark.

Historically, I have had a knack for attracting withering disapproval. Today, I’m finding that the trick to avoiding it, when I’ve discovered a source, it to not allow the source any social expectations. No expectations, no disapproval. It is nice to live a life where there are so many good people to which I am beholden, they serve to displace toxins.

I’m asking those that are volunteers of Think New Orleans to familiarize themselves with Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Getting Things Done is a philosophy of time management for the knowledge worker. The old school, the A-B-C checklist that you configure everday, doesn’t fit with the modern office life, where the next email message can send your day in a drastically different direction.

At the core of Getting Things Done is the notion that if you keep things track of things in your head, you’ll feel overwhelmed, you’ll use your mind for storage and not problem solving. You track things on paper or in a planner. The other key to Getting Things Done, is that when some new bit of information comes your way, you decide what you need to do about it, as it arrives.

To my mind, most New Orleanians were thrust into the world of knowledge work a year ago Tuesday. We need to learn how to cope with the overwhelming flow of information, as a city. Applying the tenants of Getting Things Done is probably the way to go.