Alan’s Kiloblog

I am considering moving the WordPress blog on ThinkNOLA so that it is the landing page and changing the URL structure. This is to create smaller URLs that are easier to cut and paste into email.

What has kept me from putting WordPress as the base is that I always imagined a different application there. An application that still exists primarily in my imagination. I’ll let that go. When the time comes, I can incorporate the existing URL structure into the new application. This is aligns with the attitude that content and archival is important, and that new code should respect the cumulative efforts of the user base.

Now, I am concerned that redirections will suck out some of my Google Juice, especially on the few articles that are rock stars in my mind. Articles about AmericaSpeaks are slipping anyway.

Ryan Vis said something about how by virtue of being a redirection, the landing page for ThinkNOLA.com is invisible to search engines.

Is is best to rework ThinkNOLA to accommodate the usage patterns of New Orleanians. They need URLs that won’t break in email. I don’t like using tinyurl.com with it’s mystery meat URLs. That can’t do much for my Google ranking.

People will copy and paste URLs into other forums, and if they don’t break, then incoming links to ThinkNOLA.com will increase.

Switched TheBayouBoogaloo.com to a simple structure.

Used to do the long structure like http://kiloblog.com/2007/04/23/why-I-like-to-put-mustard-on-blueberry-pancakes, but who cares when I posted, really? It makes the URLs long and makes finding something via auto-complete in the browser pointless. I’m probably not going to write about my tangy, sweet breakfast taste sensation more than once. Certainly, I would not have to explain myself more than once.

My new structure is http://TheBayouBoogaloo.com/post/volunteer-2007. Because I’m able to edit the post slug, I choose one that would not be long, and not collide with a call for volunteers in 2008.

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’ve added a plugin to the Think New Orleans weblog that I’ll probably roll into the web publishing platform. It is called Subscribe to Comments and it installs easily, however the manage subscriptions link for logged in and registered users points to a page that says 404 not found.

Now I’m able to markup pages in WordPress quickly using Textile. What was the appeal of the rich text editor? It’s awful. There is no semantic markup. It takes forever to teach someone how to make a hyperlink. With Textile, you almost have a Wiki with WordPress. What’s missing? The generation of pages from a Wiki word or Wiki link and history. Otherwise, the web publishing platform can be used for colaborative authoring as it. The [Instiki] evaluation is front burner.

Everything we create must be printed. Textile will permit this. Need to create styles for headings and other semantic markup in all my templates, and encourage people to create documents with semantic markup. That way, it is much easier to print.