Hi Ho, Everyone! Time for another website update:
– I found a real, gen-u-wine bug in WordPress! Well, not WordPress itself, but rather JetPack, a collection of add-ons put out by the WordPress team. As you might recall, I added the “infinite scroll” feature from JetPack to my site not too long ago. This automatically loads more stories as you scroll down the page. However, I noticed that if you clicked on a category (say, “History Blog”), WP would load the first seven posts from that category and then start loading stories from the front page instead of continuing with posts from the selected category. I posted about the issue at the WP support forums, and Jeremy Herve, author of the Infinite Scroll plug-in, quickly replied and said that he’d fixed the bug! So if you use JetPack and have having the same problem, expect it to be fixed in the next update.
– Jeremy also suggested that I could fix the problem immediately by switching from the default permalinks structure to Pretty Permalinks. By default, WordPress links look like this:
http://example.com/?p-123
There’s an option to change this so that the links look like this instead:
http://example.com/2013/01/17/post-title-goes-here
I’d wanted to change the permalink structure for a couple of years now, but was afraid that it would hurt my Google PageRank and kill any internal links on my site. Jeremy told me that it wouldn’t, that WordPress would handle everything automatically. So I switched over… and he was right! So you’ll now notice that my links look like this:
http://jimcofer.com/personal/2013/01/15/quick-take-new-zealanders-and-the-kiwi/
– I also want to thank Jeremy for replying so quickly to my issue and reassuring me about switching the permalink structure. That was some FAST and FRIENDLY service, my man! Thanks again!
– I also ditched ShareThis for WordPress’s own JetPack sharing solution. There’s no real reason for this, aside from the ShareThis bar not appearing on occasion in some posts. I just figured that the WordPress solution would be more stable and robust. Try it out and let me know how it works.
– I’ve also done some work under the hood, mostly retiring plug-ins that do things that WordPress now does natively. I don’t expect any issues to come of this, but if you see anything unusual, let me know!
– Lastly, I’m going to overhaul the Contact Me page this afternoon, since I no longer use a few of the instant messaging services listed on that page. I’m also getting tired of the current round of header images, and will probably swap those out early next week.