If you use WordPress's HTML5 comments, there's an annoying little gotcha. There's a four year old bug which prevents client-side form validation. HTML allows <input> elements to have a required attribute. In theory, that means the form shouldn't submit until the input is filled in. Sadly, WordPress uses novalidate on the form - as the name suggests it stops any validation. But! WordPress is…
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There's a new HTML element in town! You can now use <search> to semantically mark up a search box. It's great for letting screen-readers and other assistive tech know what a form does. It's only supported in WebKit for now - other browsers will get it eventually. The WordPress default search widget hasn't yet updated, but I'm going to show you how you can start using it today! In your theme,…
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You can now have this blog federated to your social media site by following @blog@shkspr.mobi If you're on Mastodon, it should look something like this: You should be able to follow it on Lemmy, kBin, PixelFed, and some cool social network I've never heard of. How This blog runs on WordPress. Thanks to the tireless work of Matthias Pfefferle, there's now an official WordPress ActivityPub…
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People can subscribe to receive my blog via email. This is managed by the JetPack plugin. I want to be able to display something like "Join 1,234 subscribers and receive updates via email". So, how do I get the subscriber count from the API? As documented in the JetPack HTTP API, it is possible to interact with JetPack programmatically. A good starting point is /wp-json/ - that will show you…
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Let's say you want to automatically delete specific sorts of comments from your WordPress blog. For example, immediately trashing any comment that has a specific phrase "Elephant Juice" in it. You can do this by going to Settings -> Discussion → Disallowed Comment Keys. Or you can add something to your theme's functions.php file. Here's the code snippet: add_action( 'comment_post', '…
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There's a brilliant post by WordPress about how they've optimised some of the backend code to make it more efficient. So here's a suggestion for something else which can be optimised. If you want to schedule a blog post to be published later, you have to use this WordPress control: I find it mildly annoying. I don't get why part of it is a dropdown. And the number fields don't pop up my…
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This is ridiculously niche. If this is of help to anyone other than to me... please shout! The IntenseDebate comment system is slowly dying. It hasn't received any updates from Automattic for years. Recently it stopped being able to let users submit new comments. So I've switched to Commentics which is a self-hosted PHP / MySQL comment system. It's lightweight, pretty good at respecting users'…
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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 …
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I recently read Darek Kay's excellent post about styling RSS feeds and wanted to do something similar. So, here's my simple guide to styling your WordPress blog's RSS / Atom theme. The end result is that if someone clicks on a link to your feed, they see something nicely formatted, like this: Prerequisites This involves editing your WordPress blog's theme. If you don't know what you're…
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Someone recently complained that using JetPack's Akismet anti-spam plugin wasn't very privacy friendly. So, because I take every minor complaint as a personal rebuke, I decided to switch to AntiSpam Bee - an open source and local antispam solution. And... it's pretty good! There is the occasional false negative - but not significantly worse than JetPack. Most of the false negatives are from…
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I've been thinking a lot about footnotes in Markdown. I've contributed a patch to make them slightly better in WordPress. Now I'm wondering how to make them more useful by enhancing their pop-up title text. To that end, I'm writing a patch for PHP Markdown which will display the first ~200 characters of a footnote in the pop-up title text. Hover over the superscript number and you'll get a…
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I've started adding Restaurant Reviews to this blog - with delicious semantic metadata. Previously I'd been posting all my reviews to HappyCow. It's a great site for finding veggie-friendly food around the worlds, but I wanted to experiment more with the IndieWeb idea of POSSE. So now I can Post on my Own Site and Syndicate Elsewhere. The Schema.org representation of a Restaurant is pretty…
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