When I redesigned this site’s WordPress theme, I decided I wanted to show the most two recent posts at the top followed by the next 8 posts with just the title and a link to the post, so that the front page does not scroll forever. That’s simple enough to do with the template tag query_posts(), but I ran into an unexpected problem with my initial approach and the Twitter Tools plugin.
I wrote the last entry on my iPhone using the WordPress app. Everything went fine until I inserted the WordPress post break to cause only the introduction to appear on the site index. After I saved that change, it looked on the iPhone app as though the post were truncated to that point and the rest of my edits were lost.
I had saved it as a draft on the server, so I logged into the panel and checked and in fact everything was there, including the post break code. I’m glad I didn’t lose any data, but it’s frustrating that the iPhone WordPress app doesn’t support breaking the page that way. And it’s not a very reassuring way for it to fail when it shows the post as truncated.
I wasn’t too worried as I had saved it to the server and presumably could restore from a revision, but I don’t know what would have happened if it had been only a Local Draft. Hopefully this will be addressed in the upcoming new release of the app.
I use the excellent wp-amazon WordPress plugin to insert Amazon associate links into this site. Unfortunately the version from the web site hasn’t been updated in a long time and it doesn’t work in the newer releases of WordPress. In looking at the support form I found a link to this patch.
I followed these instructions and lo and behold it worked. Posted as a public service to other WordPress users.
This site is now running Wordpress 2.3 which came out a couple weeks ago. I’m excited about the built in tags support. Not sure exactly how that works but since I have been tagging things by hand for ages I’m hoping this will automate that for me (yes, I am aware that tagging plugins have been available for years; I just never used them).
EDIT: If you look at the top of this post you will see that it is indeed tagged and that the feature does work. The theme I use for this site is a modified version of Ocadia which apparently doesn’t support tagging out of the box. I had to update it to put in the the_tags template tag code, but other than that the tagging works out of the box.
One change is that now instead of the tags linking to technorati’s tag search engine they link to this site’s tagging system. That’s different behavior than I’m used to, but I think it may actually be better so I’m going to leave that alone for now.
