jeremyrandall / blog /

I came across the “WordPress Theme Guide” series at Urban Giraffe and think it’s helpful for new WordPress administrators and hackers. It’s a good resource for understanding the WordPress code flow and theme configuration. In addition to the posted articles, there’s a paperback version and a PDF version available for purchase. Read the articles at their WordPress Theme Guide page.

They have several other articles about the inner workings of WordPress, available at their Inside WordPress page.

I’m sitting here with writer-friend Kate for our second “blog from Kate’s couch day,” but Kate refuses to blog because she’s tired. She’s tired because she was up, so I’m told, at 3:41am with a “headache.”

We’re trying to get together on a somewhat regular basis to spark each other’s creativity by doing these “creative writing about whatever random stuff we end up writing about from the couch” things.

Kate just asked what we should do for lunch and suggested we go out for tacos. Then she slipped in, “and you can help me take all this laundry to the laundromat.” Nice try, laundry gnome, nice try. Now she’s singing, “I hate doing laundry, do do dee do doo,” to the tune of The Simpson’s theme song.

So much for sparking creativity.

Update: her response is posted here: Dear Jeremy Randall

• Day-after-Thanksgiving vegetarian/vegan Thanksgiving dinner with new friends was fantastic.
• Emails and text messages received today have been making me smile.
• Horatio Hornblower DVD borrowed from the Library was fun and I’m going to borrow more.
• Chilly with crisp sunlight outside, cozy with steam heat inside.
• Helped comfort a dear friend last night who’s going through a breakup.
• Dinner plans with rockstar friend “Southern French” tonight.
• Upgraded this blog software and updated the spam comment filtering system.
• Checked backups and tweaked settings.
• Had some turkey meatballs for lunch (I’m about 65% vegetarian right now)

Jebus, have I been busy! I’ve been interviewing for a new job, have been writing a lot and have been volunteering my time helping with some web sites and online communities. And I’ve been feeling really great about all of these things!

Today I’m at my friend Kate’s house and we’re both sitting on the couch writing on our respective laptops as some Harry Potter movie plays in the background. Kate’s an amazingly talented writer and we do some great work when we can get together and bounce ideas off each other.

I’ve been doing some creative blogging elsewhere and have decided to shut down that blog and move the posts I’ve written there over the last few months here to this blog. The topics on that blog are technology, design and health issues. I’ve found that these things are near and dear to my heart and I’m looking forward to incorporating them here, both the old posts, and writing new ones. I’ve always had a bit of a problem defining what this blog should be; I’ve found it hard to figure out which parts of my personality and interests to blog about here, since this site’s domain name is my real name and I’ve had this weird sort of pressure to “be my own brand,” if that makes any sense.

As I’ve become more of a writer and have started to meet and build relationships with other writers and bloggers, I’ve been impressed at the way many of them just write from their hearts simply because they are writers, artists, creative people. I’m going to do that more here. I still work to write things that are appropriate and work-safe, here, but I’m going to be doing more off-the-cuff entries, more diverse topics and, well, just more writing.

So here we go on this next phase! Oh and I’m going to maintain the date stamps of the entries that I’m moving here to this blog (with a similar explanation posted near the first one).

I noticed recently that one of my Wordpress sites had started skipping post numbers. It used to just go in order… 1, 2, 3 onward as expected. Suddenly post numbers were incrementing several at a time, seemingly randomly. What’s up with that?

I started looking around and found the database had multiple entries per post. A little more digging and I realized that Wordpress 2.6 had added versioning (is “revisioning” a word?). Each time a draft was saved, Wordpress would save it as a new entry with the post_type set to “revision” (versus “post” for the final version) and the database would increment the id by one. Mystery solved.

Versioning can be really valuable — it’s a key feature of content management systems and wikis — but for some of my blogs I only want my final version to be saved and available. So, how to turn it off?

In wp-config.php, simply add the following line to turn off revisions:


define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);


And if you’d like to remove revisions that have already been saved in the database, issue the following command within mysql:


delete from wp_posts where post_type = "revision";


Before you do that, though, you may wish to list all the entries that are set as revisions:


select ID, post_title from wp_posts where post_type = 'revision';


And compare them to the entries set as posts:


select ID, post_title from wp_posts where post_type = 'post';


I’m posting this entry on September 9th, 2008, although I’m writing it on November 25th, 2008.

What’s that, you say?

Okay, so I started blogging at another site about technology, design and health issues in September 2008 (the date stamp on this post) but I decided in November 2008 (when I am actually writing this) to shutdown that blog and move those posts here. I’ve decided to keep the original date stamps of the posts I’m moving to this blog, so this entry is to give some context to what is coming, for folks reading chronologically. Make sense?

So yeah, technology, design and health issues, plus photos and more writing about San Francisco. Here’s the explanation from the future:

I’ve been doing some creative blogging elsewhere and have decided to shut down that blog and move the posts I’ve written there over the last few months here to this blog. The topics on that blog are technology, design and health issues. I’ve found that these things are near and dear to my heart and I’m looking forward to incorporating them here, both the old posts, and writing new ones. I’ve always had a bit of a problem defining what this blog should be; I’ve found it hard to figure out which parts of my personality and interests to blog about here, since this site’s domain name is my real name and I’ve had this weird sort of pressure to “be my own brand,” if that makes sense.

As I’ve become more of a writer and have started to meet and build relationships with other writers and bloggers, I’ve been impressed at the way many of them just write from their hear because they are writers, artists, creative people. I’m going to try to do that more here. I still work to write things that are “appropriate” and “work safe” but I am going to be doing more off-the-cuff entries, more diverse topics and, well, just more writing. I think this is all part of being a part of the bigger world in which we all live.

So here we go on this next phase! Oh and I’m going to maintain the date stamps of the entries that I’m moving here to this blog (with a similar explanation posted near the first one), so the post numbers are going to be a little strange for awhile. Oh, technology!

This post is that “similar explanation posted near the first one.” Enjoy!