Neatlinks wordpressification
Since I started my neatlinks sidebar in January 2003, it has been powered by Blogger. I’ve wanted to incorporate it into WordPress forever, but as I’d constructed things (dynamically including the static files created by Blogger into WordPress) things just worked.
Well, Blogger is now well into its 3rd incarnation since I started blogging, and though it’s receiving some much needed polish, the new features are nothing that I need. In fact the only reason I stuck with them for so long was inertia and their excellent BlogThis bookmarklet (which I modded).
What I did
Upgraded to WordPress 2.1.
I used Ady Romantika’s excellent Import New Blogger To WordPress Plugin to import my 3322 neatlinks! This took about an hour.
Ady even added a feature so I could easily run my Haloscan comment importer and grab the 829 comments related to neatlinks.
Still to do:
- Improve WordPress’s “Press It” bookmarklet to be more like BlogThis (anyone have any suggestions if this has already been done?)
Autogen titles/post-slugs for title-less posts (why doesn’t WP do this natively?)See: WordPress ticket #3794Improve neatlink permalink page style (bigger font)font size the same, but hid the titles, and limited next/prev to just neatlinks, effectively creating a blog within a blog- Add back in the fading color scale
Skip over neatlinks in the next/prev chronology (if it’s even possible…)Yup, just skip the category- Create neatlinks/non-neatlinks feeds
- Improve style of neatlinks on homepage
Redirect old feed (neatlinks/atom.xml) to main justinsomnia.org/feed
So the only difference I see is that my RSS feed reader now shows the combined blog and neatlinks in one feed each with a different category. Would it be possible to create one feed for each?
Added to my list of things to do.
Submitted a patch to the WordPress folks with a function for generating a post_title based on the post_content.
So far the patch is working like a charm, though I really should install WP via Subversion to help maintain any changes to the code that they don’t accept.
So Justin are you basically running two loops to get your Blog and Neatlinks on your index? And then just excluding a category on one loop and only showing a category on the other?
Wow, blast from the past. Yup, I have two loops in my index and archive templates:
// first, for main column posts query_posts($query_string . '&cat=-23'); while (have_posts()) { the_post(); // ... } // second, for neatlinks only query_posts($query_string . '&showposts=30&cat=23'); while (have_posts()) { the_post(); // ... }Awesome. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, in fact that was one of the reasons I followed your blog at first was because I liked the format. I have links I always want to share but always having issues figuring out how to do it. I used to do a once a week type post but that just got cumbersome, and Google ruined Reader recently which made that impossible to do any further. Thanks for the help!
Dan, I simplified some things in my answer above for the sake of brevity. If you run into any stumbling blocks, shoot me an email, and I’ll send you some more precise code snippets.