This uses the wp shell command. It gives you an interactive prompt into which you can do various WordPress "things". One small annoyance is that it doesn't like multi-line entry. It treats every hit of the enter key as "plz run the codez" - so, at the end of this blog post, I've put the commands in copy-n-paste format. Once you've installed WP CLIP, go to the command line and run wp shell. You'll be greeted with an interactive prompt wp> Method One - Quick Search This command constructs a…
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If you've ever learned Mandarin Chinese, you'll know about "measure words". They're the sort of thing that trip up all new learners of the language. While 个 (gè) can be used as a generic measure word, using it everywhere makes you sound like an idiot (according to my old teacher). So you learn to use 个 for people, 包 for packets, and 根 for things which are long and thin. English has a similar construct. You might say "one bunch of flowers" or "two glasses of wine" or "three bowls of soup". You…
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Hello! Thank you for reading what I write. Sorry to ask, but… who are you? I was chatting to a friend about what it is like running a blog, finding new topics, keeping up with a daily schedule, moderating comments, etc. And they asked, quite reasonably, "who are your readers?" And, honestly, I have very little idea! The only analytics I have on here is basic WordPress JetPack statistics. I can see which posts are popular. I get a sense of which countries you are in. If you leave a comment, I k…
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I blog. A lot. Too much really. One of the things I like to do is see what I was rambling on about this time last year. And the year before that. And so on. So, here's my On This Day page and here's how I built it. WARNING Extremely quick and dirty code ahead! This allows you to add a shortcode like [ edent_on_this_day ] to a page and have it auto generate a list of posts you published on this day in previous years. You may need to exclude that page from your cache. Add these functions to…
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I know they say you should never read the bottom half of the web. This blog has existed in one form or other since 2004. Since then, I've approved TWELVE-THOUSAND comments. Most comments - but by no means all - are delightful. People wanting to share their own stories, add something to the discussion, or politely disagree. I moderate heavily. If someone is rude or abusive, their comment isn't published. Unless it's really funny. In all the years of running this site, I've only had to…
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Jon Hicks has a lovely blog post about his site's design. In it, he briefly touches on something I find interesting: Blogging like it's 1972 I also finally realised that there's nothing stopping me from adding journal posts dated from before I started blogging. So I'm going to start adding key life moments as much as I can. A blog isn't an immutable chain of events. There's nothing to stop us travelling in time. When I go digital sperlunking though my history, I often find interesting…
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This blog uses WebMention technology. If you write an article on your website and mention one of my blog posts, I get a notification. That notification can then be published as a comment. It usually looks something like this: This means readers of my post can see where it has been mentioned around the web. They can read your article after reading mine. Nice! I've also set up a "bridge" service which looks for people posting comments about my work on social media. For example, if you…
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The best thing about WordPress is the plugin infrastructure. A million little gadgets to make your blog better. Sadly, there are all sorts of ways plugin authors can abuse their privileges. Dodgy code and user-hostile features sometimes make plugins more trouble than they're worth. Recently, the normally excellent Blubrry PowerPress plugin pissed me off. It's a useful plugin for publishing podcasts on WordPress. They had a new feature - some kind of embedded audio player - and introduced it…
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Listen to this blog post in your browser: Download MP3 audio. Powered by Amazon Polly. I've noticed an interesting trend on some of the blogs I follow. More of them - though by no means the majority - are including audio versions of the content. The usually look something like this: or The ones which have this are mostly using commercial Text-To-Speech (TTS) engines. Although a few of the (perhaps wealthier?) bloggers have hired people to record audio versions of their…
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At the start of 2020, for some strange reason, I decided to publish a new blog post every single day of the year. And, a third of the way through that, COVID struck. In a way, it was good for my motivation. I didn't have any fun and exciting trips to go on - so I had plenty of free time. But there's only so long you can stare at four walls while your friends are sick and dying, without going out of your mind. So I started buying random tech to review. And then companies started sending me…
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The WordPress app for Android prompted me to add a story! < p>This is a new and experimental feature. Sadly, it isn't very good. Here's how it works. < p>There's a brief description and some aspirational screenshots. < p>There's a basic image picker. Then you get some basic tools to add text on top of your image. < p>I know I'm a cynic, but this is a little underwhelming. It just posts an image to the blog. You can make it go full screen. < p>This is it: < p>There's a…
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This is a quick round-up of the blogs which "did numbers" this year - and a few which I feel were cruelly overlooked. I posted a new blog every day in 2020 - so don't be surprised if you missed a few. OK? Here we go! January Watch out; there's a scam about. People love sharing horror stories. Scammers registering date-based domain names A venture into the arcane mysteries of programming Why do we have different programming languages? A nice security report to Google but, sadly, no…
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