Paul Johns

I’m not sure what the title of this post means. I just type what the voices tell me to.

Today I added asides to the sidebar of this web site. I decided to go the DIY route and handcoded the PHP and WordPress tags myself instead of using a plugin. Then I spent quite a while with some if, while loops on almost every page to make sure that all other pages excluded the Asides category, and that if anyone figures out the link to an asides permalink page, or more likely, if a search engine indexes it, there will be no way to comment. If an aside shows up in a search or archive page, or if someone types in the URL directly to the Asides category, it will only show up as an Aside, and will not have the extra metadata (unless you’re on the permalink page). I also removed asides from the RSS feed, so that there is some sort of value for actually visiting this site.

Then I made the main part of the index page longer by showing an excerpt for the two most recent posts instead of just the latest post. At first I was going to show the entire first post and have the previous posts below that, and maybe I still will, I don’t know yet. I just want everything to look natural, accessible and kinda relaxed, not forced. The truth is, I’ve been itching to add some freakin’ content other than just posts and links, but I didn’t know what. Asides are perfect because of the reason everyone uses them: you have something to say, but you don’t want to make an entire post about it.

If anyone reading has any questions about the code to pull any of this off, send me an email, or comment on this post.

Special thanks for helping me pull this off goes to the following pages:

• Excluding Categories from RSS Feed
• Conditional Tags
• wp_query

Thanks for reading!