Showing hierarchical category structure in sidebar

You may have noticed I upgraded my wordpress to 2.xx, once again. 😉 It involves reapplying all those tiny modifications you forgot you ever needed to tweak that. My changes to the default wordpress theme:

  • adjust feed url to leave out the “feed:” part. I understand they want a new protocol for binding feed links to feed reader applications… Sorry, that’s not what I expect from a feed link; it must be the effective link to the xml feed and nothing else!
  • Adjust post date format to show the time too.
  • Change the header image.
  • Add some page counter code to the footer.
  • Probably some other stuff I’m forgetting right now..

But anyhow, what this post is really about, is that I finally figured out how to have hierarchical categories! I thought it really depended on the theme and searched the php files to find out where I could hack some hierarchy in. But it turns out the default theme supports this by default! 🙂 That’s a nice surprise. I wonder why they don’t enable that by default? Why would I otherwise want to make a hierarchy in my admin and not see it on the front page?

Ok, almost forgot to explain how to enable it:

  • open sidebar.php
  • find “wp_list_cats(‘sort_column=name&optioncount=1&hierarchical=0’);”
  • change the hierarchical param to 1

mm, somehow have the feeling I already did this tweak before….

Mobile rss

When I bought my phone, I asked the salesman whether it sported a built-in RSS feed reader. The poor chap never heard of RSS before. 😉

I searched SourceForge and came up with RssReaderMidlet. Feedburner seems to come out with an RSS reader too. It’s currently in closed beta, but still seems worth to keep an eye on..

Good timing

Yups, I have my phone for 2 weeks, actually 1 ‘usable’ week, and now its price dropped more than 100 euros! in the same store! 🙂 tow 😉
So anyone who doesn’t have a (decent) cell phone:
=> buy the W800i now! 😉

Guess what

I am doing late at night? Making backups! =) Because the host provider fails to put backupping back up! (funny sentence :)) This time I’ll copy the backup to my local machine too. 😉 Should I burn it? :-p

I’m giving up…

*rant alert*
Okay, I fear I’ll have to face the truth: HostForWeb (the web hoster for this site) truly succeeded to mess thing up totally. First I couldn’t believe it: which web provider creates daily backups and fails to notice when something goes wrong? This server has been trouble from in the beginning. Complaints about the slugginess were heard, but not solved. They were talking about too much IO on our VPS. D’uh, if you have disks crashing, the RAID configuration becomes more stressed. 😉 So finally, some disks probably stopped working totally, giving some signal to support. That’s too late of course. Still, after some time, they were solving the problem and everything seemed alright, no data lost. Except, there was a permission error on a temp dir which stopped the mysql server from working. So they decided to restore a backup. Alright for me, except… they forgot they didn’t make backups the last weeks… So data got lost!

I’m telling this all in one post, but I can reassure you reality was less smooth. It took days & weeks until they would admit this! Either HFW is totally understaffed, either there are too little experienced support people. In general I would not complain that much about HFW support, but this incident was simply over the edge.

Data loss could have been easily prevented. In my case, I only lost some mail and posts, but suppose you use your site for more serious ($ping$ping$) stuff? Still, I’m quite pissed off since I just wrote 2 rather long posts about my cell phone and about SED monitors. Oh well 🙂

Anyhow, I tried to recover as much as could from any cache I could find on the internet. Google seems to cache quite fine, except the latest posts who were only a few days on the net. So I tried several blog searches which all had some pieces; some more than the other, if you digged deep enough.
The funny thing is, I just upgraded my wordpress the night before the data loss. So I _had_ a backup of the database, I _had_ a backup of my wordpress. If only they didn’t nicely overwrite my home dir with an older version :roll eyes:. So for me, it was a quite frustrating experience. 😉

Sorry for ranting so much, but as you can see, I still can’t accept the facts.. ;-p

What I will do now, is repost all old posts with what I recovered from the internet caches. Where information is lost, I’ll link to this posts to clarify. I’m currently not in the mood to rewrite everything (I even can’t remember all the freaky details I like to whine about ;)). I will keep the original dates, so it may become a little confusing. =)

WordPress upgrade

Finally upgraded my wordpress to the 2.xx series. Seemed to be about time. 😉 I hesitated a bit because I feared I would need to do special tricks to keep my Coppermine plugin working, but it seems to have survived quite fine, great plugin. 😛 😉 To keep my blog in a solid state while upgrading, I installed a site-unavailable plugin. Worked OK. For spam catching, I thought I’d give the now included Akismet plugin, ….

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Mattiesworld meets Orangeworld

It finally happened! I bought a cell phone. 🙂 The mobile market is just HUGE. There is a huge number of available models, even within one company! I was astonished. 🙂 I tried the Nokia site and the Sony Ericsson site, whether they could help me out which profile I have. Nokia and SE seem like the major brands to me. I don’t know how big SE is, but somehow I felt comfortable with these 2. They didn’t seem to help much though…

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