August 2009

This blog has become schizophrenic; rather than blogging about one thing, it’s covering many aspects of my life. So I thought I’d find a way to present different views. I had already categorised my posts into general areas, now I needed a way to present the different views with some commentary. The best way was a set of category-based pages, with some text at the top describing the area of interest and then the category-based listing of posts below.

This post describes how I implemented a set of category-based page templates in WordPress, covering the design and implementation.
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One of the main parts of this blog is the Now Reading Reloaded plugin for managing the books I’m reading and have read. The plugin is great providing library, page, author, tag and search views. It also has a review/rating system where you can rate a book and write a review. However it does not provide a template to display favourites; like a “top 10″ list of highest-rated books. So I thought I’d write one. It was a bit of a challenge figuring out the URL structure, but once I did that, the template implementation was reasonably simple; the functions I wanted were already implemented in the plugin just not exposed in the provided templates.

This post is a summary of how I implemented the favourites page, including the URL structure required for Now Reading, how I added the new page functionality to the plugin code, and how I implemented the new template page…
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During my recent them upgrade I had some challenges with the Now Reading Reloaded plugin for WordPress and the frustrating “HTTP 500: Internal Server Error” messages. This took me on a journey of exploration into how the php modules used by WordPress and its plugins ended up as HTML on my browser and what logs were available to help me diagnose the 500 error.

The following article looks at how the pieces fit together in a typical Apache/PHP deployment (for WordPress and other PHP-based applications) and then shows how the pieces can be used to identify code problems….
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When I first joined LinkedIn I got excited about their book/library plugin… until my colleagues got annoyed with constant updates when I finished a book and started another. Then I found the Now Reading Reloaded plugin for WordPress. With the recent theme upgrade I had a few challenges updating the CSS and Page Templates used by NRR to suit my updated theme. This post summarises some of the things I found…
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Here’s a challenge… the WordPress “Add New Post” page that I’m currently using to type this post into has a button labeled “code“. If you select a chunk of code (such as the CSS I’ll put later) it wraps the <code> and <\code> tags around it. Depending on the CSS you have mapped to the code tag, you will get a nicely displayed piece of code in your blog. But there’s a catch; you can’t get a solid box/background just by using the default code tags. You need to add the <pre> and <\pre> tags as well….
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