Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

RSS Feed Issues

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

You may or may not have noticed that the RSS feed for this site was lost in the switch. I didn’t notice, actually, so thanks to reader Vee for pointing it out. In fact, the people who use RSS are the least likely to notice—they’ll just stop seeing my posts.

John and I have been working on it, and we think it’s fixed now. You should be able to access the feed at http://prepoceros.com/feed/, the same address as before. There does appear to be a lingering problem with Bloglines (and maybe other readers), which seems to have cached the broken version. Since the link is the same, we’re waiting to see if Bloglines will fix itself in the next day or two. I’ve tried unsubscribing and resubscribing, but it made no difference. Google Reader, meanwhile, picks up the correct feed just fine.

If you’re having trouble with the above link, you can also try http://prepoceros.com/wp-rss.php. We’ll keep an eye on this mess and let you know how it turns out.

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P.S. While trying to figure out the RSS stuff, we discovered that the switch had also broken all of my permalinks. They should be working now.

This parasite has moved on

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

Today I switched hosts (Bluehost to Dreamhost) for this site. It was John’s idea; Dreamhost is better for various reasons that I’m sure he’s explained several times. I think the switch went smoothly, but if you see anything that appears to be broken, let me know. And for anyone who is about to comment that my face appears to be broken, yes, yes, you’re very funny. Run along now.

One highlight of mucking around in the blog’s innards is that I finally figured out how to remove that obnoxious “miscellany” tag from my tag cloud.

Here’s the totally boring story: I prefer tags to categories. WordPress used to have only categories. A few versions ago they added tags, but they still kept categories. Every post must be assigned to a category. If you don’t assign it to one, it goes into the default category, which I’d named “miscellany.” I stopped using categories when tags came along, so all my posts went into the “miscellany” category. I can’t delete that category.

Unfortunately, WordPress seems to have trouble keeping categories and tags separate. To every post that by default went into the *category* “miscellany,” it secretly added a *tag* “miscellany.” This ruined my tag cloud, making all the real tags tiny in comparison to the enormous, meaningless MISCELLANY.

This has been bothering me for probably a year now, but today I finally found a way to delete WordPress’s made-up “miscellany” tag. The cloud looks much better now, don’t you think?