Add this blog to your feeds.

The Audacious Epigone

It’s an excellent site that I’ve been reading for months. Here’s a sample from a recent post:

–

Think electing Obama will be a cathartic experience that’ll put an end to black community’s resentment over the perceived restraining force of the white power structure like John McWhorter does**? Maybe not:

Yet even as they bask in the senator’s success, some middle-class blacks remain uneasy about their own choices and wonder whether they have distanced themselves too much from poor blacks. They worry that Mr. Obama’s success — what many call being a “good black” — could feed negative stereotypes among whites about blacks who don’t succeed or who act in a more confrontational manner.

If a black guy becomes President, white society will expect us all to become Presidents. It’ll turn the bigotry of low expectations on its head! And they’ll expect us to play the game, too:

“Part of me has my fist clenched under the table,” says Dawn Jefferson, a 31-year-old who teaches at a predominantly white private school outside Washington, D.C. “There is this feeling that black confrontational behavior won’t be so acceptable. We have to all play the game now.”

Welcome to the professional world. We all have to play the game.

–

It looks like I just topped 1,000 subscribers for the first time on my main site. W00t.

Thanks to all who read the site and comment. You keep me honest and keep me thinking; I truly appreciate it.

-Daniel

Ever wanted to take a piece of WordPress functionality and put it in a non-WordPress portion of your website? Like, for example, pulling your Wordpress Sidebar and dropping it into a custom page of yours?

Well, here’s how to make it work.

The Wrong Way

Many have tried doing this simple include below and have met with failure. What they did was add the include by itself, like so:

<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>

This ends in a fail whale because PHP doesn’t know what to do with that request. Within a WordPress page it’s fine because you already have the required headers loaded, but in your own custom web site they aren’t there.

So we’ll add them.

The Right Way

<?php
    // turn off WordPress themes and include the WordPress core:
    define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
    require($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/wp-blog-header.php');
?>
 
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>

If you include the WordPress blog header first (wp-blog-header.php) and then invoke the piece of code you want, you’ll be able to add WordPress functionality anywhere you want on your custom pages!

The code above (get_archives) allows me to display my entire blog archive on any page of mine I want — even outside of a WordPress-generated page.

This lets you get tons of functionality from WordPress, including:

1. Get a list of all your links
2. Pull your tag cloud from your posts
3. Pull your WordPress sidebar into a page

…and there are dozens more here.

This is how I have created the page you’re reading this on. The entire page is custom code; I only have a couple of pieces of WordPress embedded within it — the loop, and my archives toward the bottom on the right. This gives me the ability to seamlessly blend my WordPress content with my custom content at dmiessler.com/study and dmiessler.com/writing.

It’s the perfect combination — custom control + WordPress functionality.

Ping me at daniel@dmiessler.com with any questions…

Links

[ WordPress's get_archives | wordpress.org ]
[ WordPress Template Tags | wordpress.org ]
[ The WordPress Loop | wordpress.org ]
[ The WordPress Codex | wordpress.org ]

Test post from the iPhone Wordpress application.

If you haven’t upgraded yet you may want to look into it. There are tons of new features in 2.6.

(actually, I’m at 2.7 ;) )

Links

[ Latest Wordpress Download ]

After this last Wordpress upgrade (2.6) I decided to clean up the script I use and post it here. It’s not as fast as using svn itself to upgrade, but I prefer to pull the latest version via svn, but drop it in manually — at least for now.

Anyway, I’d be cautious about running this until you’re very comfortable with the commands being executed. Until then, just use it as a list of instructions; even that will save tons of time vs. remembering the commands each time you want to upgrade.

Here’s basically what’s happening:

1. Pull down the latest, cutting-edge copy of Wordpress
2. Back up your existing webroot
3. Delete your Wordpress related content from your webroot
4. Copy the new Wordpress content to your webroot
5. Replace your backed up content into the new install
6. Re-apply the permissions on your webroot
7. Test

And here’s the script:

#!/bin/bash
# Daniel Miessler's script for updating Wordpress using SVN
 
# Set variables
WEBROOT=/path/to/your/webroot
 
# Change directories to your updated wordpress folder (create if necessary)
cd $WEBROOT/wordpress_svn/
 
# Delete any old stuff in there
rm -rf $WEBROOT/wordpress_svn/*
 
# Download the latest version of Wordpress via SVN
svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/ .
 
# Change back into your webroot
cd $WEBROOT
 
# Backup your webroot (Really, really make sure this works before continuing!)
cp -a $WEBROOT ../htdocs_backup
 
# Kill off all your Wordspress files in your webroot
rm -rf $WEBROOT/wp*
 
# Copy in your updated Wordpress files from the SVN folder
cp -a $WEBROOT/wordpress/* .
 
# Replace your backed up/customized content from your backup
cp -a ../htdocs_backup/wp-content/plugins/ ./wp-content/
cp -a ../htdocs_backup/wp-content/themes ./wp-content/
cp -a ../htdocs_backup/wp-content/uploaded_content ./wp-content/
cp -a ../htdocs_backup/wp-config.php .
 
# Re-apply proper permissions to your webroot
find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755 
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644
find . -print0 | xargs -0 chown apache
 
# Finally, clear your cache and navigate to your site's admin page
#  update the database and make sure your plugins are working
#  http://$yoursite/wp-admin/
# For any questions, email me at daniel@dmiessler.com

And let me know if you have any questions.

FriendFeed is a relatively new service designed to let you stay in contact with your friends in a more complete way than other services. Twitter is an excellent service because it allows one to microblog and push updates via sms, but this doesn’t show your friends everything you’re doing.

Someone wanting to follow your blog posts, your picassa/flikr photos, or your Amazon wishlists would have to add those things separately.

FriendFeed solves this problem by consolidating updates into a single interface, and providing syndication feeds (RSS/Atom) as well. So what you do, as a user, is get a FriendFeed account and add then add the services that you use, i.e. your blog, your Twitter account, your Google Shared items, your Picassa account, etc.

Once you’ve added your accounts, you can continue using those disparate services like usual, but when update one of those services, FriendFeed will update as well. So, as an example, I have the following services in FriendFeed now:

• My Blog
• Twitter
• Google Shared Items (shared links)
• Google Picasa (photos)
• My Amazon Wish List

So all someone has to do to keep up with me is subscribe to my FriendFeed feed, not to all those different services. Not only that, but it also has a full vote-up and comment system where people can give input on the content you publish.

It’s an extremely powerful platform, and if you’re into Twitter and other “connectivity applications” like it, I strongly suggest looking into FriendFeed.

Links

[ FriendFeed ]

I just spent like 20 minutes browsing videos over at Mark Dudlik’s site (markdudlik.com). I ganked like a third of those that I saw, too, so it’s time to throw him some blogger love.

Seriously, it’s a very unique site with content that I don’t see other places.

[ Mark Dudlik's Blog ]

I’ve fixed the comment weirdness. Sorry if anyone’s lost anything recently…

My buddy Jason just launched his new site — toolsforexpression.com. From his own description it’s about:

Learning, education, technology, constructionism, psychology, and lifestyles built on these things.

If any of these topics are of interest to you I would check it out.

[ Toolsforexpression.com ]