So today, I decided to modify it slightly to fit my desire for a simple design. The Prologue theme was developed for a multi-author environment. Since I’m the only author on this blog, I made a few tweaks.

I added my latest tweet to the top right corner. I added post titles to all the pages. By default, Prologue doesn’t use titles. Lastly, I added my friend feed stream to the sidebar. I think it looks nice. Thoughts?

I do wish I had the option to use the WYSIWYG editor on the post box that displays on the main index page when I’m logged in.

Update: After reading this post about adding the WYSIWYG editor to prologue, I’m now rocking TinyMCE at the top when logged in.

• MediaPost Publications – Shift From Traditional To Online Media Contributing To Ad Economy Slowdown – 06/16/2008 – Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fpublications.mediapost.com%2Findex.cfm%3Ffuseaction%3DArticles.san%26s%3D84682%26Nid%3D43911%26p%3D321097
• Application Flow Chart : CodeIgniter User Guide – A great diagram that could be used to describe any web development framework like Django, Rails, CakePHP, and the Zend Framework
• Rands In Repose: We Travel in Tribes – Twitter is a social network, yes, but it?s a social network without the superpoke scrabtaculous zombie noise and, for that, I?m thankful, because I?ve got work to do. Yes, I could spend days tidying my profile and scrubbing my friends list, but to w
• #6813 (Viva la bookmarklet – quick posting from around the web) – WordPress Trac – Trac – My Quick Post plugin getting implemented into WordPress 2.6 core as Press It
• The future of PHP –

• FriendFeed Comments WordPress Plugin – Development on a Shoestring –
• Fold-Ins, Past and Present – The New York Times –
• Google Code for Educators –
• Ryan Jerz :: Reno Blogger, Reno Blog >> The Terri Patraw Experience: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (allegedly) – Good example of blogger integrity in the face of threatening lawsuits
• Little Einsteins: Race for Space DVD Giveaway – My first giveaway on disneyfrontier.com

Copy Categories to Tags – The Plugin

In my continuing effort to duplicate existing categories associated with posts as tags, I offer up this plugin. Remember, my goal is to phase categories out in favor of tags. So I don’t want to do just an abrupt change over switching my categories to tags. Instead, I want to duplicate them, and transition away from categories. First in the templates, then cleaned out of the database.

DOWNLOAD here

Here’s the process:
For each post, get a list of the categories. For each category, determine if the category (term_id), exists in the wp_term_taxonomy table. If it does, it will have the taxonomy of “post_tag”

Does the category already exist as a post_tag?

If Yes
Retrieve the term_taxonomy_id for that term, and insert it into wp_term_relationships. Also, update the count in the wp_term_taxonomy table for that post_tag – important for tag clouding.

No
Create a new record in the wp_term_taxonomy table referencing the same term_id but with a taxonomy of post_tag. Set the count to 1 on insert.

In either case:
Retrieve back the term_taxonomy_id, and insert that into wp_term_relationships for the post.

In order to copy categories to tags, I need to better understand how tagging is done in the database. There are three WordPress tables that make up categories and tags. These tables also contain the names of your blog roll categories.

1. wp_terms
2. wp_term_taxonomy
3. wp_term_relationships

1. wp_terms: This table stores the actual category or tag name. It also stores the slug (the name used in the URL for category and tag pages). The slug is usually the lower case version of the tag with spaces replaced by dashes. There is also a term group field. I’m not sure how/where this is used.
2. wp_term_taxonomy: This table defines if the term is a category, post_tag or link_category. For each item in your wp_terms table, there is an entry in the wp_term_taxonomy table. However, there may be multiple references to the wp_terms table. For example if you have category, tag and blogroll category named Internet, there will be one entry for Internet in the wp_terms table and three entries in the wp_term_taxonomy table. Also, if a category is a child category of another category, the parent category is stored in this table. The id stored in the parent category references the wp_term’s term_id, not the term_taxonomy_id – so it’s not exactly a recursive table.
3. wp_term_relationships: This simple two column table maps the terms in wp_terms to the object – i.e. the blog post.

Here is a simple ERD of the relationships:

Later, I will post the actual SQL/PHP code I use to duplicate my categories as tags. Stay tuned.

Anyway, good times.

In the meantime, you can get Mikkel’s version here: QuickPost for WordPress with tags and the option to disable comments at blog.detersmart.dk

Alex King and his team over at Crowd Favorites has been working with the Yahoo and the Yahoo Shortcuts team to create an awesome WordPress Plugin. For those who don’t know, Alex King is an awesome plugin developer and has been working with the WordPress team since its inception.

Yahoo Shortcuts basically looks for key terms and provides shortcuts to content that might be relevant. Examples would be maps, stock tickers, and photos. By using the Shortcuts API, Alex was able to filter the content of a post through these shortcuts to allow the author to include some of this rich content in their post.

I’m using it on this post and it picked up Yahoo Shortcuts and WordPress and linked them to their respective sites. If I reference that Alex is located in Denver, CO, it will pick that location up and provide a map. It also found a few images of Denver from Flickr, one of which I included in this post. All the images it pulls from Flickr are creative commons and the attribute is added as needed to the photos.

The plugin is beta and has a few quirks. First, I couldn’t use it in Safari (this post was done in Firefox). I’m sure this has more to do with the version of TinyMCE included in WordPress and it’s poor support for Safari. Second, when I went to review the post in the shortcuts editor screen, I saw a few foreach errors related to flickr (I think it was the comma in Denver, CO). And overall, it’s slow.
Despite these issues, if you are looking for ways to spruce up your blog posts, I recommend this plugin. It’s only going to get better. And congrats to Alex and his team on working on such a great project.

You can download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yahoo-shortcuts/

Check out Alex’s post about it here: http://alexking.org/blog/2007/12/13/yahoo-shortcuts

Also, Alex and Jeremy Zawodny did a screencast demo of the plugin here: http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?cl=5251111