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WordPress – Sidebar Static Page Order

I got an e-mail today from someone who found my My Link Order plugin but wanted to order his pages instead. At first I wasn’t completely sure if you could but a quick look at the core files, database, and WP site answered that question.

Yes, you can set the order in which pages show up in your sidebar, but it is a little clunky. When you edit a page, there is an option to set the “Page Order” to a certain number (in WP 2.0 this is one the collapsable boxes). Now follow these steps:

  1. Set the Page Order on each page in your desired order.
  2. Check if that changes the order, if not you will need to make a change to your template to tell it to sort on that order instead of by name.
  3. Go to Presentation->Theme Editor and select the Sidebar page (I’m assuming this is where your list of pages is being displayed). Find the line that is using a function named wp_list_pages, the whole line should look something like this:<?php wp_list_pages(‘title_li=<h2>Pages</h2>’ ); ?>

    A parameter to tell it to sort by your order needs to be added:

    <?php wp_list_pages(‘title_li=<h2>Pages</h2>&sort_column=menu_order’ ); ?>

With that added your pages should now be sorted. I might create a plugin similar to My Link Order to handle the setting of orders because the current way is annoying and very very very user-unfriendly.

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Evolving Musical Tastes

I’ve never been a huge music nut but the history of rock music class I took a couple summers ago at Cerritos has kept me thinking about music in ways I hadn’t when I was younger. I remember when my musical taste was dictated by what was on the radio, now I’d be surprised if I even like 10% of it.

Looking back at some of the bands I used to listen to frequently, I find they get less play time on my mp3 player, in the car, or on the computer. So what gives? Did I grow out of them? Did I listen to them because friends at the time did? Am I tired of them? Has my taste in music become more sophisticated? Am I more critical now?

I can probably answer yes to all those questions to some degree. I seem to value songwriting, composition, and the recording itself more than anything now. Before a fast beat and catchy guitar riff might have been enough to hold my interest. Now I find I don’t mind deviations from the 3 piece rock band. That probably started with my interest in swing and then ska, but has expanded from there. My new found appreciations probably came from listening to more classic rock and seeing the genre evolve from rock n’ roll to what we listen to today.

Some of my more recent infatuations include Beck (old and new), Cake, Ben Folds, Reel Big Fish, The New Pornographers, Less Than Jake, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Presidents of the United States (they just seem to never get old), The White Stripes, and probably more I can’t even think of right now. There will always be exceptions to the rules though. I’ve found recently that I actually like melodic metal and as I type I’m getting some Parliament and Funkadelic which I got a taste of in my aforementioned class.

So what trends have you noticed in your own tastes and is there anything you listen to that you are slightly surprised you liked in the first place?

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Effect of releasing my plugin

Probably the most exciting thing that has happened around here in the past month or so is the release of my WordPress plugin. I spent a good amount of time exchanging e-mail with people about it and I’ve started to get more comments. So what has the plugin done for my site’s traffic? Check out the numbers for yourself, I released it the last few days of January 2006.

Month Unique visitors
Oct-05 76
Nov-05 165
Dec-05 331
Jan-06 329
Feb-06 1113

For the plugin itself I’ve had about 650 downloads, but a number of those might be repeats for upgrading. Hopefully I’ll have something a little more interesting to post about soon, school and work are time, motivation, and creativity killers.

And boo, the wordpress editor that comes with 2.0.1 doesn’t like tables for some reason. Have to install a more advanced one.

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Professor Andrew?

Not really, more like teacher assistant Andrew. I’ve got a project going at school right now to further develop our Microsoft infrastructure for use in various classes, primarily for teaching ASP.NET. Since I’ve actually been using it in my internship I guess that makes me qualified to give 3 lectures on the subject in the upper division Web class. I’m actually taking the other class that will be using the technology so I’m sure I will be contributing there as well. I need to make a point of posting more often to keep myself off of Nathan’s Dead Blarg Friends list.