Early Modern Notes

Greg kindly pointed out that my RSS feed doesn’t work (you just get a 404 message). I’m not sure if I can fix it yet, but will have a look at it. But in the meantime, I can assure you that I do have a working Atom feed, and you can subscribe to it through services like Bloglines. But I don’t think it’s worth putting the link that I have on this page, because it works in a rather odd way. Maybe I can also set up a ‘normal’ Atom feed this weekend.

I’ve also noticed that since I stuck all those photos up, the blog no longer fits properly in the computer screens I’m using at the university (and I didn’t think they were that small; it’s fine on my laptop screen and that’s only 13 or 14″). The main column’s a bit too wide and the sidebar gets pushed down to the bottom. Of course, I could make the photos smaller, but I don’t quite understand why it does it, especially as it already has a slight ‘overflow’ (if that’s the right expression). So I apologise if you’re getting this effect; it’s not how you’re supposed to see the thing. (But I’m not alone: the same thing is happening when I visit some other sites too - though not all of them.) In fact, even if I take the photos down, the fit on this screen is a bit cramped. It’s hardly a big issue, but it irritates me.

But at least the damn page validates for XHTML.

With some of these picture-heavy posts, I’d like to use the ‘excerpt’ function. (Yes, I have something with a lot more pictures coming up…). At least I think that’s the tag I want. I gave it a try, and seemed to get the whole post plus excerpt, for all posts, on the index page (didn’t stop to look at individual pages!). Not what I was after. But reading the support forums for more detailed advice, I just got rather confused. I need someone to explain to me in simple terms - or point me to an online tutorial for dummies where I can get this information - what I do to have an excerpt on the main page only when I want one; if I leave the excerpt box blank, it’ll be just a normal post. If that’s possible.

Can anyone help please?

I have one or two WP plugins that I downloaded and haven’t got round to installing. One is the Recent Comments plugin, which I rather like the idea of. The thing is - well two things, really. I had a vague idea of making this blog a 3-column affair, so that things like Recent posts, Recent comments etc would go down one side and links to blogs and so on down the other. Except that I read the WP support forums and it looked a really, really difficult thing to set up properly. So it didn’t happen and probably ain’t gonna neither. Secondly, do I get enough comments to make it worthwhile? I’m really really jealous of bloggers who get lots of feedback. (Sulk.) But, then, maybe I would actually get more if it was easy to see and respond to commenters?

So should I install it (and perhaps add recent posts while I’m about it)? And are there any other cool and EASY to install WP plugins anyone could recommend?

By the way, All Day Permanent Red has the cutest cat photo. Ahhh…

If you can’t get access to archive pages at the moment, me neither, and it’s because I’m trying to do the smart permalinks thing, which seems to cause nearly everyone trouble… Back to the support forum I go… Bah.

Ten minutes later… Still no joy, and I swear that I can’t see what’s wrong. The scripty thing that does the rewrite works, as you can see in the status bar if you point at the link. Path looks right, I think, and the .htaccess file looks good compared to the ‘do it this way’ posts at the support forum.

Bloody bloody bloody hell. And I wanted to do a good resources post today, not get bogged down in code stuff.

Another ten minutes… Well, I found one way that seems to work, but I’m not sure that I like it too much (that extra /index.php/ in the URL), or that it should be necessary. But if it works, what the hell… Individual, monthly and category links all seem to take you where they should and it’s getting too hot to worry about it any more.

I don’t know what effect this has on any hyperlinks you may have created to the original archive URLs, whether they still work or not.

Next task: stats plug-in (OK, will leave that for a bit. The readme makes my brain hurt). And page-by-page navigation (that sounds like another thing that can go horribly wrong… and for single post pages has just turned out to be really really easy, thanks to the scripty goddess! But for archive pages, hmm, more complicated…) And another look at that menu column in Netscape. Any requests?