smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

After quite some experimentation, much of it fruitless, that has resulted in a mass tug-of-war with Wordpress and it’s infernal re-write rules, the structure of the ‘foo has changed. This has primarily been driven by a fundamental flaw in Wordpress that will likely never be addressed, as it’s simply not considered a “problem” to begin with..

Whilst I am not at all pleased with the final result, it’s the closest I can come to a workable solution, that scales well and will be as ‘fluff’ free as I can make it.

It means I have to go back to using pages for semi-static content, rather than using a fluid rewrite rule set that blurs the lines to make pages and posts interchangeable. Thus, the resulting changes to the overall structure, are :

• links to posts are now formatted as /year/month/postname,
• categories are now assigned with a /meta base and are still used to ’structure’ and finally
• tags are still in use throughout to describe and link related content.

As I have noted previously using a /%category%/%post% permalink structure wasn’t as smooth-a-sailing as one would expect to believe. One of the reasons for using such a structure is that it reduces permalink ‘fluff’ - the downside is that Wordpress still enforces the category base rule.

So whilst one can have nice short URIs for posts, the categories end up having a redundant component. And really, “/category/journal” isn’t any more descriptive than “/journal”. Why? .. ultimately the category base doesn’t help describe the content at all and pretty much just gets in the way. It’s also disinjenious as one can end up with crazy non-logical uri structures as:

• http://www.smackfoo.com/meta/journal/page/2 for category archives, yet
• http://www.smackfoo.com/journal/post_name as individual entries.

Whilst Wordpress has become increasingly more custom friendly, with more dynamic functionality being added as time progresses, it does very show that the re-write engine has not seen much action since it became an internalised process. Really, the above should be merged into one option, that allows one to select a custom URI structure that keeps both category archives and posts in some semblance of logical association. Continue Reading »

If you happened to notice odd on-off-on-off formatting changes to the foo’s remaindered links, you weren’t actually seeing things.

You see, there’s yet another safety feature in wordpress 2.1. That being the ubiquitous add_filter, via the kses.php sitting in wp-includes. Allow me a moment to set-the-scene, as it were, so you have at least some reference point:

I have a handy (and somewhat hacked) php script that pulls in del.icio.us links and injects them as entries. It parses the RSS feed, generates a snazzy (and pre-formatted) array and injects each bookmark as an entry. I even parse in the associated del.icio.us tags to map as entry tags.

And it all works remarkably well — submit a bookmark to del.icio.us and the script takes care of the rest. Until one uses curl, or wget.

So you’re running a flavour of linux for the AMD 64bit platform - such as Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop ((.. which coincidentally has just won the ‘Best Linux Desktop’ category in Infoworld Technology of the Year Awards )) and you’re about to go visit a frequently used flash powered website, so you launch firefox and.. oh noes, no flash.

So of course one thinks “no worries, I’ll just install it..” and that would be that, right?

Wrong!

Up until recently if one used a 64 bit linux operating system, one was, quite literally, shit out of luck. You see Macromedia Adobe doesn’t ((.. or certainly didn’t up until recently.)) believe 64bit Linux exists, oh no, it’s some nasty rumour spread by Microsoft employee’s as some kind of sick in-joke.

But.. all is not lost - indeed this slipped under the radar and I only happened across it entirely by mistake. Damn fine mistake, indeed the best one I’ve made today.

Having just upgraded to
Firefox 2.0 RC3, I note with some amusement that the ‘bug’ affecting firefox’s default
google homepage has resurfaced.
I’m not exactly sure when this new concept of using an ever so bright neon yellow sign that screams “help help, I’m being hijacked!” came into being, but I’m pretty sure it will be […]

A
complete destruction of the back end admin interface of WordPress 2.0+. While it’s a great idea, I’d really prefer a font size toggle within the stock admin interface.

For the love of cthulu, would someone in the wordpress development team please fix the fucking re-write rules in 2.0.x!
If you cannot do that, provide a bloody administration tab to allow ‘exclusions’ to be manually entered in that will never be parsed by the built in wordpress re-write functions.
The single biggest flaw with 2.x is […]

Wonders will never cease - I am currently writing this aside in Safari, in OSX, running on my Dell D600 Laptop.

I’ve updated the Incoherent Ramblings podcast RSS feed php script, with a
hacked version courtesy of
Geek Speak Radio.
This may be of particular interest to Podcasters who use Wordpress. :)
With the advent of iTunes with podcast support - Apple have added a number of supported RSS tags to provide greater detail in for podcasts, including […]