An Update On Moving, From Beta To Gamma

Since I have moved I have been gathering all the nuts and bolts to construct this blog. It was fun earlier to try out all the plugins and develop my own theme, but it started eating up my time in which I could have actually written. I will not fiddle with the blog setup any more. Here is an update.

The theme is almost there, I might just play with the excerpts. You will not see any changes, if there are they will be only enhancements. I will be working on better archives or on rewriting content for my pages, mainly Help. Other changes will be mostly invisible.

I started writing asides with this blog. Asides are really powerful, because they let you write quick thoughts without spending too much time. Over time it will also work as an archive of quick links, which I can refer to whenever I want. I think this is much better than using the social bookmarking sites. I have implemented the asides as a category, that is, all my quick thoughts go in the category asides. The asides are not displayed as part of the posts displayed on the homepage. Instead, they are displayed in the sidebar.

I was looking around for a good statistics tool, currently I have settled for the combination of AWStats, Google Analytics and Performancing. I am not very keen on getting accurate numbers, I am more interested in knowing what do you come here for and what do you want to read.

The internal links in my posts pointed to my old blog, I had not changed it. However, I realised that this will push my readers to the old blog, which I don’t want to encourage. So I used the Search and Replace plugin to replace the old URLs with the new ones. It was not difficult since I have kept the same permalink structure. There was some risk involved, so I made sure that my database was backed up. Unlike the common perception, it is extremely easy to backup your Wordpress database using the Wordpress Database backup plugin. From now on I will start using relative paths rather than absolute ones to avoid this problem in future.

I am not happy with the default search. I might try some of the alternatives or try something completely new. I already tried the Raw Sugar option, but it has not worked as expected. Maybe I am doing something wrong, need to dig into it.

To deal with the topics I am writing I am using the splendid Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin which I had come across through Lorelle and am I thankful for that! I am having a problem that an aside cannot be categorized in any other category other than itself. Whereas I would like to access the asides through the topic I am writing it in. I am using UTW to add the tags with same name as the additional categories for it. Then I can access them using the tag archive. For example, the this tag archive will return you all posts, including the asides even if they are not categorized in this category. You will not be able to retrieve them using the this category archive. However, if you don’t really care about it, just use the heatmap called Thoughts On to surf the blog.

The other I might change is remove the ads. As I had said earlier, putting the ads is an experiment for the theme design. The intention is to release this theme once it is ready to be used by others. Which means that currently it is configurable, but there is no Options of Administration Page for it. I am trying to make this theme efficient such that it retrieves specific data rather than spending resources on retrieving all and then spending more to filter through it. For example, to exclude asides from the main content in the home page, I used the Query Posts template tag just before my Wordpress loop:

query_posts(’cat=-’ . $asides_category . ‘&paged=’ . $paged);

where $asides_category represents the category ID for asides. This query will ask Wordpress to retrieve all posts excepts the ones that fall under asides category.

Another enhancement I made over the asides plugin developed by James Carppe as part of the Squible theme, was to use the same Query Posts tag to request posts specifically from asides category of specific number, like this

query_posts(’category_name=’. $thecategory . ‘&showposts=’ . $numposts);

where $thecategory is the category slug for asides and $numposts is the number of asides to display. Both these parameters were already configurable.

Other than this I have written a couple of wrapper widgets for existing plugins, like Random Quote Widget and AWStats popular posts widget. It was just a trivial task of wrapping it in the widget API.

I also tried the Now Reading plugin so that I could maintain a library of books I am reading. But it broke the configuration for sidebar widgets making it unusable. I have not found any ready made solution for it, probably I need to hack into it.

The unaticipated problem from moving I faced was that I kept receiving comments on my older blog. It is painful to move the comment here for the corresponding post, but I have been doing it. I want to sincerely move all the discussions here. If you end up on my older blog, you can find the corresponding post here just by changing the domain name in the link. Replace iface.wordpress.com with ifacethoughts.net. That’s it and you will be here.

I will keep giving updates about this blog whenever I change something. But the most valuable thing for me will be your feedback. If you feel something needs improvement, or is obstrusive or is out of line, feel free to jump in. I have maintained a theme of thoughts for all the nomenclature, if you have any suggestions don’t hesitate. Think of it as being open sourced!

In the spirit of Web 2.0 betas, I can say that this blog has now moved from Beta to Gamma. I don’t think it will ever be static, as in, I will keep trying new things with it, trying my best not to hurt you. So you can consider this to be the final version.