Layered Thoughts

Problem

Oftentimes when building out a CMS style Wordpress site, you’ll run into instances where you’ve added pages to your site that you don’t want to show up in the main navigation. This is especially true if you’re utilizing a drop down menu navigation system that can access your multi-level pages.

There are two ways to go about hiding these pages from your navigation menu. The 1st is to manually edit your menu code (most likely in your header.php file) to exclude individual pages by hand. While this work, it’s A) Clunky as hell and B) prone to breaking if a page is deleted and another one added, for instance.

Solution

Download and install a plugin called “Exclude Pages From Navigation“. What this plugin does is add a small context menu on the right sidebar of your edit and add new pages (seen on the right) that allows you to check off whether you want that page to show up in the automatically generated Wordpress menus.

By unchecking that box, you hide your page from showing up, allowing you to use that page for whatever you like without having to worry about people stumbling upon it through your menu system.

I’m gonna basically be breaking this site today playing with different free themes from the Wordpress.org site…Figured it was time for a refresh, so I’m planning on finding a nice layout and then customizing it to my liking. Hopefully I’ll have it sorted out by tonight.

Problem

When you’re developing locally for a client, you want to try and replicate the server environment as closely as possible. That’s why using tools like WAMP are so great because they provide you with a pretty much stock version of a typical server setup that will work for 99% of use cases when it comes to developing and deploying a Wordpress site. But sometimes, things break. And when they break, they don’t make sense.

A perfect example is using a default install of WAMP and trying to setup “Pretty Permalinks” with Wordpress. An example of pretty permalinks is setting your permalinks to /%postname%/ instead of the standard www.domain.com/p?=23. Obviously a favorable setup for SEO and usability.

But if you were to set the permalinks to that with a default WAMP install, your site will start throwing up 404 pages for all pages that are linked to with the new permalinks. The problem is that mod_rewrite is not turned on by default with WAMP, so Apache is incapable of rewriting URLs according to .htaccess rules that Wordpress sets when you modify your permalinks.

Solution

In your taskbar in the bottom right of the screen in windows, left click the WAMP icon, go to Apache, then Apache Modules, then make sure that “rewrite_module” is checked. Checking that will automatically restart WAMP and will activate mod_rewrite, allowing you to modify your permalinks however you want while not breaking anything!

So in both my own personal projects as well as projects I’ve been working on with other people, I’ve gotten to know Wordpress pretty well. It’s a surprisingly powerful platform, and while it does have its shortcomings (like sidebar management), it can be transformed into a pretty powerful CMS platform if the right tweaks are applied. So lately I’ve started keeping track of all of the different little “off the beaten path” tricks that I use somewhat frequently on Wordpress setups, especially on sites that are meant more as CMS sites than typical blogs.

Some of the tricks might seem brain dead simple and leave you wondering “Why are you showing me this?” while others I hope are things you might never have heard of. But the purpose of this series is to simple build up a pretty complete set of tips and tricks that someone using Wordpress as a CMS can reference when working on their own projects.

I’ll try and go into a little bit of explanation for each trick for both why you would use it as well as why it works the way it does. That way, you’re not just copying and pasting code into your site, you’re actually learning from what is going on. So tomorrow is the day I’m planning on kicking off this series. I have a good amount of tricks saved up so far so I’m going to try and post every other day or so to get this series full of all of the good stuff.

I’ve now read two of Rand’s books, both The Fountainhead as well Anthem. The Fountainhead is one of the longer books I’ve ever read and was surprisingly engrossing considering the subject of the book. It also taught me to appreciate philosophical fiction, or a fiction with a point as I like to describe it (Yeah, fiction has a point, but Rand used her fiction to purvey her entire philosophy, which the vast majority of fiction authors do not do).

I read Anthem yesterday (it’s a little over 100 pages, pretty easy read). As Rand said herself, the purpose of the book was not the plot or story, but instead the values put forth by it. And that becomes pretty obvious as you read through the book. No character is ever developed enough to really go one way or another with how you feel about them and no location is ever detailed enough to paint a clear picture as to what it looks like. It’s almost refreshing in a way, a very open ended short story.

I think the most significant thing I took from the book was a quote in Chapter 11. The quote perfectly portrays Rand’s Objectivist viewpoint, her “self-centered, selfish” philosophy where no other man is greater than oneself and that our happiness should not be dependent upon others but instead should come from within. Here it is:

I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

The reason I love this quote so much is because it aligns with a lot of my own life ideals and I think a lot of entrepreneurial minded people can also find some inspiration in it. I’m often asked why I want to make a lot of money in life. I respond by saying that it’s not the money that matters, the money is a byproduct of the satisfaction people get from using my product that I built and am proud of. If they weren’t satisfied, they wouldn’t pay me.

My happiness comes from knowing that I built a product I’m proud of that solves problems for others. Even if no one else uses it, I’d still be happy that I built a great tool. But knowing that others need it makes it even more powerful. And that is all the justification that is needed. There is no higher goal that needs to be fulfilled to justify my desire to make a good product that makes money. If that makes me happy then that is all that matters.

I don’t know what to make of a situation where I pour milk into my bowl of cereal and find that the milk is a white frozen slush. I’ve never had to wait for my milk to melt. This is a new one.

I’ve got an interesting idea for a post, just never got to it tonight. In keeping with my “post a day” routine, I wanted to make sure to get something up here tonight. I’ll have my planned post up in the morning. Shit it’s late. Peace

Alright so I did my 7th workout of the last 8 days. Other than feeling pretty sore in the legs, I’m overall stoked with myself. As long as I make sure to get to the gym at the right times (the Pacific Beach 24 Hour Fitness is a Bro Fest, dudes with their hair done wearing nice clothes and shit) it’s an awesome experience. Yesterday I even pulled off an hour and forty five minute workout!

Right now I’m just trying to get my whole body back into workout mode, trying to get over that initial soreness shock that comes with not working out consistently for a long time. Probably in another week or so, I’m hoping to either find a good workout plan to follow or just design my own (designing my own would simply take longer, so I’m still up in the air about it). Since I’ll probably design the workout plan in a spreadsheet, I’ll be sure to upload it here for anyone who might want to follow along.

Other than that, I’m just trying to get my life back on track in regards to productivity. I have a bunch of projects I want to do personally as well as professionally so I need to step my game up and make things happen. As I go through that, I’ll probably be writing some posts about how I’m overcoming certain addictive qualities I have with using the Internet.

Also, I’ve adopted a little system that Jerry Seinfeld apparently uses to stay consistent with a long running project. He simply has a big calendar on the wall in his workspace that he puts large red X’s on each day he does what he’s supposed to do. As the “chain” grows, he becomes more and more reluctant to break it. Simple, but it seems pretty cool. I’m going to test it out with this blog. I printed out a simple month of May calendar using Microsoft Word and I’m going to put an X over each day I write a blog post. I’m obviously getting a late start as it’s already the 10th, but hey, it’s something. 1 day down! Peace

Our bodies have a great way of reminding us of whether we’ve been working out frequently enough or not. Back a few years ago, I would work out 6 days a week and developed thick calluses on my hands where my fingers reached my palm as well as right below my thumb. The knurled grips of the weight bars beat up my hands enough to the point where weight lifting gloves were unnecessary. After finishing my 2nd workout this week yesterday, I sat in the car on the way home wondering why my hands ached so much. I looked down at my left palm and saw bright red marks under each finger. Running my right fingers over the marks, I could feel smooth skin below. Nothing rough at all. No thick skin to protect my hands from the weights. It’ll be a good day when those calluses are back.

Well, I’ve learned that the difference between saying you will do something and actually doing it can sometimes be pretty devastating. So rather than promise to write here more often and promise to do anything else anymore, I’m just going to actually do the things instead. Letting my actions speak for themselves I guess. I went to the gym yesterday, it was nice to go again. I’ll be going today when I get home from school, two days in a row! haha. Til then…