I have finished updating the comments template to separate out the trackbacks and pingbacks from the regular comments made by visitors. This will mean that visitor comments and discussions don’t get interrupted by machine-generated comments.

I made these changes based on the code from Noscope’s modifications. The alterations I made to this were minor: mostly to clean up the code to my own coding style and to adapt it for my theme, rather than the default.

This mod is a pretty good idea and I’d recommend it to anyone running their own blog.

The login page has been changed to better reflect the theme for the site, rather than using the default Wordpress one. I found a nice plugin that takes care of the changes in a way that doesn’t require re-editing files after a system upgrade. You can find the plugin at the Binary Moon blog.

After writing down some of the things I wanted to achieve for the future of this blog (for my 50th post) I decided I should probably make a start on them! I’d already modified Wordpress to make the “more” link (the link on the front page that says “Read more of this entry”) link to the simple page URL and not to an anchor that occurs after the opening paragraph. For my next mod I thought I should continue in this vein and alter the RSS (and Atom) feeds to include the full post text, rather than an excerpt. This turned out to be ridiculously easy!

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Another update after only 11 days. This one is again a point release, to version 2.2.2. Ah well, updates fix bugs (however minor) and are quick and painless. I just had to make sure that the custom changes I’ve made to the core Wordpress files were added back in after the update. This is really easy using Subversion’s diff function and then applying that as a patch to the updated file. Ah, the wonders of version control.

I actually came up with a nice way to list all the files that were changed by the update:
svn stat | grep -v '?' | awk '{ print $2 }' | sort

For next time I should come up with a way to just FTP these files across automatically. Shouldn’t be that hard; if I find a way I’ll post it here.

This marks the 50th post that I have written for this blog. The inaugural post was published on the 29th of May - almost exactly 3 months ago - which means I should get cracking writing some more! So far there have been 10 comments, including 3 that I wrote myself. Accompanying those are 7 spam comments that were picked up by Akismet, which is an extremely useful plugin.

The blog layout has changed slightly in that time. I have been adding various plugins, such as Similar Posts and WP-Notable (which I later removed as the output didn’t validate) as well as some. I have added in the register/login links to the header, advertising to the post pages and W3C validation links in the footer. I also went into some of the guts of Wordpress and changed the “Read the rest of this entry…” links to take you to the top of the post, rather than at a point after the opening text. I feel this is a better way to go.

Things that still need to be done:

• Change RSS feeds to always show the full text of a post, even if I use the <!–more–> tag.
• Add in some (valid) code for linking posts to Digg, Technorati and whatever people use. (I’m open to suggestions.)
• Integrate Openads into Wordpress for the advertising.
• Look at integrating a web analytics package that doesn’t need JavaScript (I have Google Analytics for that).

I have just finished updating the site to Wordpress version 2.2.1. The upgrade was pretty quick and painless, mostly due to me using version control for all the site files, and I haven’t noticed anything broken yet. If you do find something that doesn’t work, please let me know!