Well, it would be fair to say that the re-introduction of the Rhetoric Blog into this site has been less than smooth. If you have been looking at the site over the last week, you will have noticed that the focus has gone back to the photoblog, at least for the main page. This is a conscious decision based both aesthetic and structural factors.

Probably the biggest hurdle that has hindered me from focusing on form over function is that WordPress has no system or plugin (at least that I could find) for offering a full-page option to a multi-page post. This caused issues both with creating a full feed and providing a usability feature on the paginated articles themselves. After overcoming this I will be looking into packaging my solution into a plugin to assist others (add it to the list).

Having decided to use the added functionality offered by Feedburner with regards to handling syndication caused it's own issues, both as part of the above situation, but also as part of a conflict with existing plugins. I had to rely on several different methods to try and view un-cached and unfiltered views of the current XML (somewhat having to rely on both Opera and IE7).

The one thing that cancels out the frustration that came with the inability of bending some aspects of my templates (Note: MY templates - not WP itself) was that it forced me to learn new techniques and up-skill myself. That being said - there's a lot of work required to update the WordPress Codex (documentation repository) as it hasn't kept up effectively with some of the more major recent updates. Given that the documentation is done mostly by volunteers this is hardly and indictment.

So where does that leave this website? Well if you're interested, keep an eye on the 'to-do' list at the bottom of the about page, my tweets on the rhetoric main page. I still won't be focusing on design until I can get the templates functioning as I wish. Even then the design will mostly consist of some minor rebranding and look'n'feel - the current layout suits - the color scheme doesn't...

WordPizzle to the Shizzle, yo

I don't know what it is with me and having to bolt on every, sometimes unnecessary, extra to software that allows me to do it. It's no different with WordPress and plugins. Same goes with Firefox and extensions (that's gonna be another post).

Sure most of it is for functionality, but a lot of it is because I like to tweak things to the point of death. But it does amaze me that so many people are happy with the base functionality that WordPress provides and instead concentrate on the visual customisation (which unfortunately seem to be mostly poorly ported versions of Kubrick).

The big push that I got was having to customize client websites to bend WordPress beyond it's normally used for (a blogging tool) towards more of a full CMS. This exposed me to a wider range of plugins that would also cross-over into the blogosphere as well.

I will leave the focus on using WordPress for a CMS to another post (i'm trying to save up a list of topics I want to write about), and concentrate on listing the plugins that are in use on this site with reasons for choosing them. This gives me the opportunity to give "props" to the plugin developers, but also give an insight to others who may like what I have done here and want to get a handle on the behind the scenes approach.

This will probably be a long post, and I want to test out post pagination - so bear with me... Continue reading »

Happy New Year!

And with it, the return (after more than 2 years) of the seriocomic rhetoric - where I get to try and form some semi-coherent sense out of what is tumbling though my brain and lay it out for the world to laugh at...

More and more this last year I have felt I have wanted to comment on a number of things - political, existential, blogging and web related; and haven't really felt that the photoblog presented a proper format to do this.

Additionally, with extra exposure to the WordPress engine that runs this site over the last 12 months on other client projects I have become more aware of new methods of presenting the information that I want, in the manner that I want.

I am (very) far from finished, but wanted to get the majority of the groundwork done before lifting the lid. View the entire post »