blogwaffe

Some people really like that WordPress sends pings from your own site to your own site when you write posts; it lets them easily leave a trail of related posts.

Some people do not like this behavior; it clutters up their comments.

So here’s a plugin to disable self pinging. I couldn’t find any prior art, but if you know of any other plugins that do this, please let me know.

Download the plugin, put it in your WordPress plugins directory, activate it via your WordPress admin panel, and you’re set. No configuration necessary.

This plugin will send an email notification to the blog’s administrator when a draft is written or edited by a user that cannot publish posts (these users are called “Contributors“). You may find such notification useful since these posts must be subsequently approved (published) by a user who can publish other people’s posts.

NOTE: Notification is sent to the email address defined in the Administration Panels: Options->General / Email address. This is not, in general, the same address as that specified for the Admin user account.

Instructions:

1. Download the plugin.
2. Upload it to your wp-content/plugins/ directory (i.e. wp-content/plugins/draft-notifier.php).
3. Make sure the file has sufficient File Permissions to be read by your web server (you probably don’t have to worry about this step).
4. Activate the plugin called “Draft Notifier” from your Administration Panel’s Plugin Manager.

That should be it. No configuration is necessary.

UPDATE: This plugin is now hosted on http://wp-plugins.org and is called “Draft Notifier“.

Michelle and I drove down a portion of the Pacific Coast Highway after our WordCamp inspired trip to the bay area. (I should note that the section of Highway 1 we were on is not officially called the Pacific Coast Highway according to the hard to parse California State Route 1 wikipedia entry.)
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DOWNLOAD

Get the plugin from the Ajax Comment Preview page in the WordPress.org plugins directory.

COMPATIBILITY

The newest version of this plugin (version 2.1) is compatible with WordPress 2.6 and higher only. Users of WordPress 2.0.x should use the older version 1.0.1 (which is unsupported and probably broken).

INSTALLATION

For more information, see the Ajax Comment Preview FAQ in the WordPress.org plugins directory.

To use this plugin, all files from the zip file you download must be in your wp-content/plugins/ directory. If you choose to place them in a subdirectory, all files must be in the same directory.

Activate the plugin from your WordPress site’s Plugins admin page.

Edit the plugin’s options from your Options -> AJAX Comment Preview admin page in order to specify the formatting of the preview. This will depend on your particular theme. The default format works for WordPress’ default Kubrick theme.

Note: You may need to tweak your theme’s CSS to get the preview to look exactly like a normal comment.

Testing

I get a number of comments on this post testing the system. A little odd, since it seems to me people should be testing the preview functionality (which is new) not the comment posting functionality (which is the same old WordPress standard stuff). Anyway, that’s cool. Go ahead. But please do me a favor; don’t just thow up some lame “testing” comment. Try sending over a poem or maybe something from the Farmer’s Almanac. Tell me your favorite book/artist/music. Don’t suck; try to be creative.

The History

My original post.

2.1

• Fixes an JavaScript issue in Internet Explorer reported by Eric

2.0

• Full gravatar/avatar support
• Moved to jQuery
• WordPress 2.7 support
• Should have fixed any character endcoding issues
• Should now work on pages served as XML

1.2.1:

• Fully internationalized dates

1.2:

• Fixed some JS errors (Mark Jaquith)
• %email_hash% available for gravatars
• Readme file with configuration instructions
• Fix double offset in dates (Mark Jaquith)

UPDATE: The documentation for this plugin is now on my AJAX Comment Preview page. All the talk below of the installation being hard is out of date. Things are much easier now.

I’ve looked around occasionally for a good comment preview plugin for the site. There’s a few “Live” preview plugins around, but I find an as-you-type update of your comment really annoying. Plus, those plugins are entirely javascript based; they can’t know what the server will do to a comment after it gets sent off, so it’s not robustly WYSIWIG.

There seemed to be no good pre-fab solution fitting all my criteria:

1. Not live updating (who’d have thought you’d need to specify the negative)
2. All content filtered through WordPress ensuring solid WYSIWIGnitude
3. Delicious AJAX goodness to avoid hard refreshes

So I made my own.

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Many have already heard Apple’s official announcement at WWDC 2005 that the company will be transitioning to Intel brand processors.

This announcement brings up some interesting questions. Will I be able to buy a cheap PC desktop and install OS X? Will some kind of Windows emulator be available (making the transition from Windows to OS X extremely easy for anyone)? Is my current hardware fated to a doom of ill support and obsolescence?

And, of course, is Steve Jobs in league with the denizens of hell?

Apparently, the first Intel Inside Mac will ship by June 6th, 2006. 666: indeed, the veritable number of the beast.

The answer, I believe, must be “yes”. How else could they gain such a legion of fanatics (in which I suppose I must count myself) if not by the means of the occult. I suppose I should not exclude the possibility that Mr. Jobs is himself the devil, but I’d have thought Satan would be better at predicting the future. Though, to be fair, all of Mr. Jobs’ false promises over the years may have been entirely intentional. It all may have been part of Satan’s tricky scheming.

At any rate, beware Apple. Their good design sense is just part of their twisted mask of deception. Do not be tempted by their sexy aluminum laptops, their vast expanses of widescreen flat panels, or their clean user interface. Every time you use a Mac, you’re communing with the lord of darkness.

I hear he’s pretty fun guy, though, so it’s not all bad.

This plugin will cause WordPress to display on a category archive page only those posts which are direct members of that category, i.e. this plugin will exclude from that category page all posts which belong to any of that category’s subcategories but do not belong to the category itself.

Compatibility:
This plugin requires at least WordPress version 2.3 or higher, and I have tested it with the still-in-development WordPress version 2.8. If you haven’t already, upgrade to the latest WordPress.

Instructions:

1. Download the plugin.
2. Upload it to your wp-content/plugins/ directory (i.e. wp-content/plugins/just_one_cat.php).
3. Make sure the file has sufficient File Permissions to be read by your web server (you probably don’t have to worry about this step).
4. Activate the plugin called “Just One Category” from your Administration Panel’s Plugin Manager.

That should be it. No configuration is necessary.

Update: This plugin is now hosted on the wp-plugins.org repository. The download link above has been changed to reflect that.

As promised, I have started running. And, as predicted, the schedule is kicking my pansy ass. I was supposed to run one and a half miles the first day (yesterday) but only managed to run the first half a mile before having to walk a bit. Overall, I ran a total of one mile. Go me.

Today I was scheduled to run three miles. Though I managed better than the day before, I still couldn’t run the whole thing. I ran one mile before having to walk; I ran a bit over two miles overall. On the plus side, the path I took turned out to be four miles instead of three. So, adding the walking I did when I should have been running and the walking I did back and forth to campus, I walked nearly four miles today. Walking’s nice; I like it.

“How do I feel?” you ask. Thank you for asking. I feel horrible :) I typically don’t get sore until two days after working out (rather than the next day). Right now I can barely move my legs. That means this running nonsense has made me sore just the day after or perhaps even the very same day. I shudder to think how I’ll feel tomorrow morning. Plus my foot hurts. Same for some funny tendon in my groinal region. And my back is stiff.

This is supposed to be good for me?

The schedule puts me back to one and a half miles tomorrow. I might just have a chance, assuming my groinal region doesn’t brast all to shivers.