More from the dept. of I have the time or how to make Wordpress into a tumble log on the same install as your normal blog.

I wasn’t terribly pleased with the way my “Press This” posts were blending in with the normal posts here. They were, really, out of place I’m sure you would agree.

I know our good friend Josh does, since he moved all of his link-type posts out to a whole other site.

I tried that with tumblr if you recall, but the lack of comments and layout control really bothered me.

So, I built my own. Ha.

It’s not fancy. No plug-ins are used or anything. It’s just this page, completely stripped of everything and some layout changes made. You will notice those posts are now gone from the front page even. Sure I’m going to tell you how I did it (after a jump), but before I do, lemme tell you how to find it.

http://www.windthefrog.net/archive/wtf/category/pressd/.

Ok, so it’s not terribly elegant and that’s only because of my ridiculous spam-bot-squashing ninja-like rewrite rules. It’s ok, the link is also at the bottom of all of the pages. What’s even cooler than that is when you get there, you will see a very large feed icon. See? Who watches out for you, huh? That’s right and don’t you forget it!

Update. I have also modified the main w(t)f feed to exclude those posts. If you want to keep them separate, unsubscribe to the old one and resubscribe to the new one. Or, don’t change anything, it’s entirely up to you. But, if you subscribed to the pressd posts and the original wtf feed, you will see posts twice. No good that.

Now, on to the how. Jump!

This is probably the easiest Wordpress mod you can do yourself. Here is what I did.

• Create a category for those links. Get the category number by pointing at the category in the wp-admin once it’s created and looking at your status bar. Safari users, I can’t help you.
• Make a copy of your index.php and call it category-xxx.php where xxx is the category you just created.
• Upload the new file to your wp-content/themes directory.
• At this point, you are done. If you want to also exclude that category from your main page, you will need to modify your index.php thusly.

find:

< ?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

And add beneath it:

< ?php if (in_category('xxx')) continue; ?>

• Upload your new index.php into your wp-content/theme directory

That’s it! Take a few minutes and style that page out if you want. I gave mine a different header page, removed the sidebars and stripped out a bunch of the formatting. It’s up to you.

Update 2. I’ve made the single post pages look correct as well. Full info on how to do that can be found here. Handy handy stuff!

Man I love Wordpress.

2 Responses to “Changes to w(t)f”

1. chris Says:
   July 21st, 2008 at 6:47 am

   I tried the ‘wordpress-it’ thing a long time ago but it acted a little odd..seems like you have it working pretty good.

2. db Says:
   July 21st, 2008 at 7:31 am

   A long time (back on v1.2 I think) it was kinda dodgy and I never used it. Now it actually works for most everything (snagging a pic still doesn’t work for me or Josh).

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