Not very long ago I wrote a post that mentioned my favorite WordPress plugins. I wrote that post because I saw some folks who might need some help doing simple tasks, like creating clickable footnotes in their blog posts. I left a couple of comments mentioning WP-Footnotes¹ to these fine folks, because I’m all kinds of helpful like that. They were going through the trouble of coding in a ^{footnote with a superscript} and then adding a _{subscript at the bottom of the page}. Of course, the bottom of the page may have also been a <sup> — I don’t know because I didn’t actually look at the source page. I just know that they used one or the other. I think that my this plugin is a way better way to do that. — changed it because it’s not my plugin, though it is easily my favorite.

Look at the footnote indicator right there ↑². Now click it. What happens? It’s freakin’ awesome. No more scrolling back and forth to see what the hell is going on. Of course, to get that same effect without the plugin, you can add an in-page link. But that’s a real pain in the ass. Like this [back] Why create that much more work for yourself?

The footnotes plugin does all that much more beautifully and all you have to do is hit spacebar, put double parenthesis (( around whatever it is you want to define/add to your footnote ))³, hit the spacebar again and then finish whatever it was that you were saying. Easy as that.

I look in my reader today and what do I see? The same people I told about the WP-Footnotes using <sup> and <sub> still. Le sigh. You know, if you’re going to load up your site with so many plugins and gadgets that your site gets bogged down from all the scripts running then how about using a useful plugin? Especially if it’s going to save work for you and make your markup a little bit neater.

There is one caveat though: the links in WP-Footnotes don’t work in a reader. They’re styled, of course, but they’re not clickable. So, there’s that.

Need help installing it?

1. Go to your plugin page in the admin panel
2. Click “Add New”
3. Click “install now” and then click “yes” when the alert box asks you if you really want to do it.
4. Click “Activate”
5. Go to the WP-Footnote page in your “Settings” menu
6. Follow the directions
7. Use the double parenthesis around whatever text you want to be footnoted (is that a word?)
8. Finish your post

And, finally, when someone who’s been using WordPress for 6 years tells you about a bomb-diggity plugin that will make your job easier, well… duh.

So endeth the lesson.

By the way, I found this awesome footnote at Poliblog a few years ago⁴. I find lots of interesting stuff from other bloggers. I’m just sayin’.

^{It’s clickable too. But such a pain. And then you have to code a new “Go back” link by that little “tip” section (or whatever you want to all it) and…ugh. See? Pain in the ass.}

Update:

Kelly tells me that if you hover over the footnote link in the reader then you can read the text without jumping to the bottom. Awesome sauce! I did not know that. So, I checked there (and noticed my stupid typos) and hovered over the links here. Guess what? It’s the same thing! No need to click at all. Hot diggity!

1. Which should be downloaded from the Codex but the manual is here.
2. See that? Wheee!!! Click the little arrow to get back to where you were.
3. I hard coded those parenthesis so you can see what I’m talking about there.
4. Though Dr. Taylor could really benefit from a pagination plugin. Clicking “nextpage” is so Web 1.0

This is the price of subscribing to someone who breaks her site. *sigh*

My sincere apologies. I should be done fixing things in a couple of days.

Update:

Here is an excellent guide on preventing an attack/cleaning up after a hack attack on your WordPress blog. If you’re running WP it’s probably a good idea to read that article and then bookmark it. It’s an incredibly valuable tool in fighting the damned link spammers¹

According to that article, it probably was that long forgotten Drupal installation on my server that left me open. Grrr. I did check for any other forgotten directories and managed to get that taken care of.

At any rate, go ahead and check that out. And I’m taking a break from republishing blog posts today. There are a lot that aren’t going back online, so I guess this was a good opportunity for me to clean the crap up. Oh, joy!

1. Who should suffer horribly from untreatable burning gonorrhea in their eyes.

So, while I was out and about I paid attention to some things on various WordPress powered blogs. I looked at their design, of course, and their functionality. Then I looked at their source code so I could suss out what kinds of plugins they might be using. I’ll confess: I’m not very good at that part¹. I love Chrome’s “inspect element” function, but even this poor browser seems to get all kinds of wonky when I open way too many tabs².

Anyway, I ran across a couple of sites that were just way bogged down. I mean one even managed to hang Firefox, with only one tab open. I was like “WTF?” But Firefox has been acting really shitty lately, so I’m chalking that experience up to that. Ok, I lied. I’m not. It stalled Chrome too. I was going to tell the blog owner, but then I got over it. Who the fuck am I? I mean, they might want their front page link to single post comments to be broken and way too many external scripts to try to load at the same time. I will advise here, though, that I know from experience that sometimes there really are too many plugins. Especially if there’s one that has even a single line of fucked up junk stuck in the code.

Ok, that’s my bit o’ wisdom for today. I’m working on getting a new theme up here and possibly working on a portfolio site³. I found out today that WP-Footnotes has been taken over and an updated version was finally added to the Codex sometime last summer. I almost lost my mind when I saw that. As I said on Twitter, I love that plugin. It’s my favorite. I’ve been using it forever and a couple of days. I think Live Comment Preview is the only plugin that I’ve been running longer. I’m addicted to footnotes, what can I say?

What? You didn’t notice?⁴

I did leave a comment to someone else that they should consider installing both the Footnotes and the Live Comment Preview (though LCP looks a lot better without the Gravatars enabled) because they are so bomb-diggity. Especially if you’re going to manually add footnotes⁵ The comment preview is cool and it’s use is apparent for most people. I had the WP-Edit Comments thing for a while, but between that Nicole chick⁶ and SouthJersey PUMA coming in with their drive-by/editing nonsense I had to disable that bad boy. It seems buggy on all the other blogs on which I’ve encountered it anyway.

Then I found out about Jetpack.me. It’s newly released and is absolutely fabulous. I already had most of the plugins that come bundled in it⁷, so I just replaced them with Jetpack. Hellz yeah. I could’ve used the ShortCode Embeds thing before, though. Like when I was busily fucking up my links and archives pages. Yes, I liked fixing them⁸, but c’mon! This would have been cake had I had that plugin. You probably won’t see the Twitter widget here, though. Sometimes I get Ambien drunk and then tweet and, man, that gets ugly.

Kelly asked me if I liked the “After the Deadline” feature of Jetpack. At the time I couldn’t answer. I hadn’t tried it. But I just did.

I like it. It, of course, underlines all my little idioms that I like so well. Then you click on the red line and a little box pops up to offer suggestions on how to fix your errors. While you’re doing that, you’re unable to change the text⁹. When you can select an option or hit the “edit text” button and go back to your work. It’s nice. I suggest to Kelly (and whoever else) to go ahead and install the Jetpack.

I should probably get around to fixing my own shit now. I need to figure out why my uploaded images are all wonky and that related posts issue isn’t just going to go away. I was having fun today though and I’ve only got until Monday for all the messing around I can handle. I just need to stop getting so damned distracted by every damned thing.

By the way, it was raining all day today and then we went under a flash flood warning. Not an hour later it started snowing and now we’re under a winter storm warning. Ohio weather is definitely never boring.

1. I just like to pretend I like code. Woo hoo!
2. You’d think I’d stop doing that, right? Pshaw.
3. I have nothing to put there. I just really want to play with some jQuery.
4. Apparently you haven’t noticed them on my whole front page and every single post for the last few years. I’m just sayin’.
5. Which is a huge pain in the ass if you’re using inline links.
6. Copyright thing
7. And for some reason it touts shortlinks as a feature, but I have shortlinks on my 3.1 install. I don’t get it.
8. Because I had to learn how to fix them.
9. I can see me fucking that up. Big thanks to Automattic for not letting me mess up my posts.

Except that’s wrong. WordPress could support larger sites and I specifically remember Times and People Mag blogs being featured on their site– though I think they may have been hosted at WordPress.com. I couldn’t find any references to back me up, so… I can remember that, though, because the first time I decided to try WordPress was when I was moving to self-hosted and I was trying multiple free blogging programs. It was after Lil’lady was born and I’m pretty sure it was the winter of 2004 or early 2005¹. I was looking through the web archive and had a giggle at the memory of trying to figure out how the hell to get that thing working. I tried WordPress and Textpattern and something else that I can’t remember². I settled on WordPress because of the sites using it, their available themes and the support forum. At the time, the WP.org support forums were really popping and users were happy to help noobs get their footing.

I was still happily blogging on Blogger with my political blog³and was getting more serious with the politics. So, I wanted to put my personal stuff somewhere else and why not self hosted? I was reading at different places that you were teh sux if you didn’t self host. Of course, back then I didn’t know shit about anything except basic HTML and how to fix up my Blogger blog. So I had to learn all of that shit. It was tons of fun. I remember picking out the name of my first “rea”l site. It was stupid and long and, actually, makes my head hurt just thinking about it. I don’t remember exactly. I remember my first Yahoo! Geocities site. Mwahaha! That was horrific and pitiful. Anyway, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to my WordPress blog, but every so often I’d write something about the fam or my religion or something. Then I decided that the name sucked donkey balls and came up with something different. The whole time I was learning how to theme WordPress and add plugins (back then users had to add lines of code to get plugins working. That’s where my tagline came from, you know. “I like to break things” refers solely to my breaking the crap out of my site every time I “updated” my theme. I remember how many times I changed my pseudonym, my site name(s) and, holy shitballs, the themes. I was a theme slut, for sure.

Ah, the memories! What is it about this time of year that always makes me want to walk down blogging memory lane?

So, I was looking for proof of WP being able cache pages and, of course, I went back in time and, well, lost a few hours of my day. I used to be such a WP fangirl. I mean, after I figured out how to do this and that and then I got really into the WP community. I remember I was going to blog for this WP “magazine” and sent a couple of posts in to the dude. He was supposed to pay us. He didn’t pay me⁴ and I stopped writing for him. I think it was 5 posts? That motherfucker has a popular theming company now, by the way. Gods, I hate him. Mostly because his “magazine” idea fell through but he never did pay me.

Anyway, so my point was that it was possible to cache WP powered blogs when HuffPo went live back in May 2005⁵. I don’t know why Huffington chose to start her blog on MT because she’s a huge fan of getting whatever she can get for free– content from other sites and content from HuffPo bloggers, for instance. MT wasn’t free back then and it wasn’t that much easier to publish with it, though it did use static HTML pages. I can’t imagine Six Apart gave their software to Huffington out of the goodness of their collective heart. According to this article, though, they didn’t seem to care. Personally, I think Six Apart fucked up by not forcing them to pay the fee. Whatever Arianna’s reasons for picking MT I doubt it was because WordPress couldn’t do the job. I guess it could’ve been a security issue as MT was closed source and WP was open?

I wanted to leave a comment on the Balloon Juice post because of that comment. I didn’t really care what software HuffPo was using to scam the left blogosphere, but it irritated me a bit to read that WP was incapable of running that it. That reaction was based on my years of being a WP fangirl, of course. Since I needed proof that I was right and my beloved WP didn’t suck⁶, I had to go digging. And, well, when I go digging I tend to get lost in what I’m reading which means this post has taken a long time to write. At least I’m consistent in that.

Just for giggles, go back to the June 1,2005 edition of HuffPo. Now look down the middle column. What do you see? Lemme help.

SF 49′s Training Video: Lesbian Porn, Racial Jokes, Anti-Gay Slurs

And there’s a picture of blurred-out boobies.

I only mention this because the new argument against HuffPo is that they’ve only recently started using sensationalist headlines. Isn’t it nice that they’ve just amped up their use of sensationalism rather than just adopting it? Aww… So, here’s a look at it two years later. They’ve added the content scraping, the gossip column and the boobies.

All this digging around about WordPress v. Movable Type with regards to the left’s favorite online gossip mag has stirred something in me, though. I’m going to redo my site. Aren’t you excited?

1. I thought I started on version 1.4, but that’s wrong. So maybe 1.5? I’m going to look around and see if I don’t have a copy on a disk somewhere.
2. I only remember Textpattern because I really liked it and Google is my friend.
3. I was going to put a link here to the Wayback Machine archive of my old blog. And then I was going to point to another blog that had me linked in 2005. And then I decided to say fuck it all because why the hell do I need to prove any damned thing?
4. I seem to get that a lot.
5. At the link you’ll notice that the first comment is from 6 years ago. That’s 6 years ago from today– February 2011-6= February 2005. Don’t ya love math?
6. Besides the fact that WP is the most popular self-hosted blog software in use right now. I’m of the mind that, considering MT went partially OS, that they didn’t suck that bad back then.