You might be wondering what these “Shared” posts are. Most of my web surfing consists of reading my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, all 146 of them. On a given day I might find one or two things that I think other people would want to read. Google Reader lets you share items with your “friends”, but there’s no way to have a discussion about the content.
A while back I was trying to figure out a way to share those “shared” items with a wider audience. I stuck a link in the sidebar to my shared item page, but I doubt anybody uses it. What I really wanted to do was have Wordpress automatically create posts with a link to the content I mark in Google Reader. The WP-o-matic plugin does exactly what I want.
Setting up the plugin involves creating a CRON job on the server and setting up a feed to check periodically. You can customize the content of the post that gets created; I opted for a little blurb and a link to the content. I wanted to modify the title that gets created which isn’t an available option so I modified the plugin to do that for me. I also set it to save posts as drafts so I can assign a category and tags and maybe some of my thoughts before Google Reader gets a hold of it and caches it forever.
So these shared posts are really the cream of the crop of my subscriptions and I’d love to have people share things they find. I like the fact that whenever shared items show up in Google Reader from my friends they are of high quality and worth the read even though it might be outside my immediate area of interest.
Tagged with: blogging, google reader, internet, plugin, rss, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Just posted a comment and realized everything has been off an hour since the switch to daylight savings. Yeah for Wordpress not handling it but like for all WP annoyances there is a plugin, Time Zone. Activate and set timezone to “America/Los_Angeles” and all is good.
Tagged with: daylight savings, plugin, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I got quite a number of requests from people asking for a plugin that lets you choose an explicit order for your WP Categories. Geesh, I guess people weren’t content with just being able to set an order for the links and link categories. Check it out at http://geekyweekly.com/mycategoryorder/ or hit the little button underneath my header image that says “WP - My Category Order”.
Tagged with: categories, plugin, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I’ve taken the time to create a plugin to address the fact that some Wordpress users would like to have more control over the order their link categories and links in each category. Sure you can order by name or id or recently updated or this and that but what about setting an explicit order?
I actually had this idea last year when I wrote my own simplistic blog software and was dissapointed by the link management options Wordpress had. So instead of complaining I did something about it.
Right now the plugin is fairly simplistic, check out these screenshots for a quick preview.
For more info click on the tab in the horizontal navigation bar or click through to http://geekyweekly.com/mylinkorder/.
Tagged with: plugin, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Now that the semester is over I’m going to devote some more of my time to my blog and also developing software. One of the first things I was going to do on my blog is add more links over on the right and realized it is a major pain in the butt to order not only the links but also the link categories themselves. Wordpress has no facility for manually ordering the link categories so I changed that. My quick fix was adding a column to the database and then editing the select query to order by “my_order” instead of whatever it was doing.
My plan is to develop a plugin to add this functionality because it is sorely missing and the weakest point of Wordpress that I have found. I’ll update as I work on that and hopefully I can get it released to the WP community for others to use.
Tagged with: coding, plugin, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
