Status: Installed

Custom Posts Per Page allow you to change the number of posts displayed per page for different page types. My current settings are as follows:

$posts_per['home'] = 10;
$posts_per['day'] = 10;
$posts_per['month'] = 15;
$posts_per['search'] = 15;
$posts_per['year'] = 999;
$posts_per['author'] = 999;
$posts_per['category'] = 999;

This is a water loss that only an adjuster could love.
You can click on the picture to enlarge it.

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said ‘Stop! don’t do it!’ ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he said. I said, ‘Well, there’s so much to live for!’ He said, ‘Like what?’
I said, ‘Well…are you religious or atheist?’ He said, ‘Religious.’ I said, ‘Me too!
Are you Christian or Buddhist?’ He said, ‘Christian.’ I said, ‘Me too!
Are you Catholic or Protestant?’ He said, ‘Protestant.’ I said, ‘Me too!
Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?’ He said, ‘Baptist!’ I said, ‘Wow! Me too!
Are you Baptist church of god or Baptist church of the lord?’ He said, ‘Baptist church of god!’ I said, ‘Me too!
Are you original Baptist church of god, or are you reformed Baptist church of god?’ He said, ‘Reformed Baptist church of god!’ I said, ‘Me too!
Are you reformed Baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed Baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?’ He said, ‘Reformed Baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!’
I said, ‘Die, heretic scum,’ and pushed him off. –Emo Phillips (from Boars Head Tavern)

How are we to treat fellow Christians in our conversations with them - either in person or on the web? In the hubbub over the Federal Vision I have been amazed at the mean spiritedness that is leveled at them. I have yet to read a single review of their ‘teaching’ that represents it fairly. Instead caricatures are presented and then the warts that the reviewer drew into the picture are attacked.

The May 2005 Table Talk magazine deals with mobilizing the laity and has a number of good articles dealing with ‘the priesthood of all believers’. I really appreciated R.C. Sproul Jr’s article: Laying Down Our Lives. He argues that ‘mobilizing the laity’ does not mean creating an army of armchair theologians or manning programs in the church but instead should look to 1 Timothy 3:2-5, where Paul describes an elder as one who is:

…blameless, the husband of one wife, temperate, sober-minded, of good behavior, hospitable, able to teach; not given to wine, not violent, not greedy for money, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not covetous; one who rules his own house well…

Except for the ability to teach,

everything else on the list is a call to all men in Christ. We discovered the obvious, that preparing men for ministry was virtually identical with preparing men to be men.
…
This is the work of the ministry, to be blameless, and encourage others to do the same, to be faithful to our wives, and encourage others to do the same, to be temperate, sober minded, of good behavior and hospitable, and encourage others to do the same. The church is full of men who can parse Greek, who have earned advanced degrees, who are able teachers. These are good things, great gifts from God. But what we lack are men of character, men who will love their wives as Christ lives the church, who will raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Update: I removed this hack and installed a plugin that does the same thing. Always good to not have to hack your core WordPress code.

Just installed the RSS Comment Titles hack to wp-commentsrss2.php which adds the title of the post to the RSS feed instead of just sending the commentator’s name.

’skippy’ over at http://skippy.net passed this along to me in response to a query I had regarding being able to add the title to the RSS Feed. Below is his hack.

RSS Comment Titles by Skippy.net
52c52,57
In wp-commentsrss2.php: Replace:
<title>by: <?php comment_author_rss() ?></title>

With:
<title>
<?php if ( (! is_single()) || (! is_page()) ) {
$title = get_the_title($comment->comment_post_ID);
$title = apply_filters('the_title', $title);
$title = apply_filters('the_title_rss', $title);
echo "$title --";
} ?>
Comment by: <?php comment_author_rss() ?>
</title>

As I read Christ Church’s Statement of Faith re Church Government I am struck that I don’t find any of the ‘heresy’ that others are so quick to charge them with. Is there anything below that is outside the bounds of orthodoxy?

We believe the Lord commissioned His church to undertake the discipleship of the world (Matt. 28:18-20). At that time, He commanded baptism with water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Baptism with water is therefore an ordinance of the Christian church, and the elders of the church are responsible to ensure that baptisms are administered in a scriptural fashion, and that the proper signification of water baptism is preserved and maintained. We affirm that water baptism signifies union with Christ (Rom. 6:3-7), the baptism of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13), the washing away of sin (Acts 22:16), the washing of regeneration (Tit. 3:5), the outpouring of the Holy Spirit (Tit. 3:6; Acts 10:44,47), and the circumcision of the heart (Col. 2:11-12).

We deny that water baptism imparts grace by means of water. God imparts grace to His saints to enable them to obey Him (2 Cor. 9:8), and strengthens them further by grace in that obedience (Heb. 12:14-15). The faithful observance of water baptism constitutes one part of that obedience.

and:

We believe baptism in water and the Lord’s Supper to be external signs of covenantal, historical and spiritual realities.

We deny that they are automatic means of blessing. Grace comes to us through faith alone. Any biblical means to build biblical faith is therefore a means of blessing and grace — especially including water baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

I have just put together my first plugin. I don’t want to say I wrote it, since none of the code is really original with me. I have an account on club photo and wanted to put some of the pictures on the pages. I had this blank spot over on the top right and figured had to be an easy way to do it.

I looked around and found Random Witty Text Plugin by Alexander Malov I figured if it could pull random text out of the file I could put the URIs to my clubphoto.com pictures in there and them just display those instead of witty sayings.

It is real rough right now. I need to find out how to do some things like make the photo.txt file more accessible but it works!

Now I have to figure if there is a better way to get the URIs than just doing the Right-Click, Properties, Select All, Copy routine.

But hey! It works, and that is what I care about right now.

Books 4 and 5 of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless, are being rebroadcast as the Quandary and Quintessential Phases of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show.

I did not get a chance to listen to them when the BBC first aired the shows so was glad to see they were going to be rebroadcast(ed?). I just finished listening to the first 30 minute segment which was titled: Quandary Phase 1, Fit the Nineteenth: In which The Earth has miraculously reappeared, and, more miraculously, Arthur Dent has found it. Will have to record this and the next 7 for my audio files.

Go to the BBC site for more details. Audio is available for 7 days after the Tuesday broadcasts.

I was reading the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Question 3 is

“What do the scripture principally teach?”

The answer:

“The scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man.

What strikes me here is the part I set up in bold type. Sounds to me that the Westminster Devines did not think that all that was required was ‘right knowledge’ but instad the Bible also requires right actions.

Ever wanted to have the little ‘buttons’ for RSS Feeds or whatnot?
I ran across Adam Kalsey’s Button Maker which allows you to create 80×15 buttons with any text and any color you desire.
I have created the 2 buttons on the right for my site so far.

Status: Testing

I have just installed Cat2Tag as a plugin. I am hoping this will give the ability to find other posts that are similar for those who are interested. I would also like to install a ‘weighted’ tag display similar to what I see at this site (done).

What’s exactly Cat2Tag? Well let me tell you it’s a plugin who lets you use folksonomies — you know, you have seen it in services like Flickr, del.icious and others — for your blog instead of the categories. The beauty in this one is you actually are using the categories sytem as the tags system, or in other words, it let you create new categories on-the-fly when you’re writing a new post, without actually doing any damage to the actual database structure, so it’s safe to uninstall this if you don’t like to use folksonomies, which I really doubt.

Update: 06/18/2005 - New update - will see how it works. The notes do not say anything about what I was having problems with - but we will see. Update includes: can use spaces, the list is comma separated, and output of tags using a weighted list.

Update: 05/07/2005 - Everything appears to work except that the categories are not added to the post. New categories are added to the category list though. Until I can find out how to fix it I have uninstalled it. Have put out some requests for help

Tim Yang lists15 things you can do with RSS besides just reading blogs. I use Newsgator to collect all the sites I am interested in, a couple comics and some podcasts. Now I will have to look into the other possibilities.

Basically, you can perform any task with RSS that requires search or information retrieval from a server. Automatically and repeatedly. Here are my favourites (please let me know if there are better services and I’ll update). I use this list to convince people to start using an RSS feed reader. There’s more to RSS than just weblog syndication and news aggregation.

Here are a couple that caught my eye:

• Get notified of bargains at Ebay
• Get stock updates
• Get the weather reports
• Get software update notifications

And the article mentions Comicalert.com which I will have to look into. I already get Dilbert and Wizard of ID.

Status: Installed

Just installed the Heat Map plugin. This plugin provides a template tag that can be placed anywhere you can put php code. It will display a heat map (aka weighted list) of categories. The more posts in any given category can be indicated by increasing larger font sizes and/or color intensities. There is a 2nd template tag available that can do the same thing for the montly archives.

Syntax:
heatmap_categories(smallest, largest, ‘unit’, ‘cold’, ‘hot’, ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘exclude’) heatmap_archives(smallest, largest, ‘unit’, ‘cold’, ‘hot’, ‘before’, ‘after’)

Update: I have incorporated this on the sidebar and also on the site-map page.

I just finished reading Credit Card Pranks II at Zug.com I got a kick out of most of his antics but the best was this one:

EXPERIMENT 4.

Another recent development in credit card receipts is the helpful “tip reminder.” This is a calculation on the bottom of the receipt of how much you should tip, with figures given for 10%, 15%, and 20%. Call me old-fashioned, but this seems a little presumptuous. For instance, what if my server sucks? This was the case in Bickford’s, a local franchise of family-style restaurants, where they mixed up our orders, kept us waiting, and didn’t apologize.

I decided to use the “tip calculator” to reduce the total bill by the amount I felt I should be credited (10%). Then I signed the bill with my reasoning, and snapped a photo of the copy before I left.

When I got my credit card statement a month later, I found they had charged me the original amount of the bill. Oh well. At least I didn’t have to leave a tip.

Not sure why Yahoo is sending people to this page - but here is the link if you are looking for the E_vo_lution of D_ance

Status: Installed

Batch Categories is a drop-in hack for WordPress that allows you to change the categories for groups of posts at one time, either by doing a massive ‘add category’ to all the posts that meet a search critieria or by choosing the categories to add to individual posts from a drop down list. Here is a screen shot of what it can look like.

What I like best about this is that it does not modify the ‘post_modified’ date for the post. I would like to be able to call this from an individual post so I could change the categories - or better yet find someone who could add the ‘post_modified’ date to the ‘post_edit.php’ routines so that you could check a box saying you did not want the date updated.

Because this is an old hack designed for prior versions of WordPress I found numerous posts detailing how to get it to work but most of them didn’t seem to work, or I was too dense. I am indebted to Kafkaesqui’s comments on the WP Support Board in getting this to work.

I ended up following his instructions and downloading the .91 version at http://climbtothestars.org/code/batch-categories.phps

As a side note - the easiest way to edit these files is to use the File Editor in the Admin Menu. Go to Admin | Manage | Files and it will list files that you have edited. At the bottom there is a spot where you can just type in (or paste) the file name you want to edit, like ‘wp-admin/batch-categories’ or ‘wp-admin/menu.php’.

My Mods
Near the top of ‘wp-admin/batch-categories’ I added a line to ‘menu.php’, changing this: