May is flying by – it really is true that the older you get the faster time goes by. This week I have some information about WordPress, photos, plastic, a lake monster, cleaning and more. Enjoy!
I am not a WordPress Exclude Categories Stealth Ninja
Ok, so I admit it. I thought I had the exclude category code all worked out but I ran into a couple of problems. One was anticipated as a possible issue with my RSS feed but the second was completely self-induced and caused by trying too many things simultaneously and not paying close enough attention.
But, first, I will start with one small success. The digest post was not sent to Twitter late last night. I guess by suppressing the post based on it’s category from appearing on the front page that Twitter Tools didn’t notify Twitter of a new post. It’s also possible that since the post came from Twitter that Twitter Tools does not automatically send it back to Twitter, which might put you in an unending loop. I read something about this on the homepage for the plugin but was not entirely clear on it. I also found out that, at least for me, Twitter Tools sends the post at around 11:40 and publishes it at midnight. I was actually still up and watched it happen.
Exclude WordPress Categories for Hidden Twitter Tools Digest Posts
Last week I wrote an overview of the WordPress plugin, Twitter Tools. In the article, I discussed the option in Twitter Tools to send all of the your daily tweets to WordPress as a digest post. While I like the idea of using WordPress to archive twitter, I don’t want a daily post of my tweets listed on the front page or in the archives as I consider it to be content padding and really boring for most readers. Since you can assign a category to the daily post digest, I researched the wordpress code needed to exclude categories from the front page and from archives and then spent part of this morning testing and implementing it on this site.
This ended up being more complicated than I anticipated. The template used on this site references the categories in numerous locations and I had to add code and make changes to this template in the following locations; front page, archives page, category list in sidebar, list of recent posts in sidebar, and list of recent posts in the footer. Below I will outline the steps and the code needed to send your daily twitter postings to your WordPress blog but to not have them displayed.
