Building a Wordpress sideblog (plugin) that works

I am now using the Wordpress Loop to output my asides, details below

Okay, so first of all to clarify things, I am not going to actually code or build a (new) sideblog plugin for wordpress here, I am going to comment on existing sideblog plugins and compare them. In regard to the promising title, I will than come up with a sideblog alternative, which will (definatly) work on everyone’s blog.

You probably wonder how people display those small articles about their daily ramblings, quick notes or links they have found on the internet on their blogs. You might also have read something about ‘asides’ in Wordpress on other blogs.

In order to display those miniblog articles (or sidenotes/asides) on your Wordpress blog, you could either

1. Use a special sideblog plugin (examples listed below)
2. Hard code a piece of content into your theme template
3. Include a php file which is updated externally
4. Do a mixture of all those three things (which I do)

1. Existing Sideblog or Miniblog plugins for Wordpress

At first I have tried out KatesGasis’ sideblog (v.3), but for me it did not work out like the author described his plugin. The sideblog showed, but the pages however disappeared and my blog was creating random 404 errors. Some months later, other bloggers were also facing this problem. Finally, the 404 issue would be addressed by the plugin author himself. Future versions of the Sideblog plugin were released, but without any effect. It is currently in built 3.6 or so, but still does not work for me. It is rather nice and simple, but without a fix to the 404 issue, worthless for on-site use.

The next plugin I have tried out was Miniblog. The original author of this plugin was Ryan Poe, but he gave up the coding on this project and turned it over to Joe. After some juggling through the right site, finding the right version and getting it installed correctly (the docs were missing in the first zip file, which made the plugin display dodgy) I tried it out and was quite satiesfied. The tagging system (simpletagging) still worked, no 404s, pages were loading fine and the sideblog showed. After having posted another entry to my miniblog, it also showed up. How gross, because I set it to display only one record. Fiddling with the source code solved this problem, but another problem was added: In combination with the in-series plugin (by REM state), entries that are part of a series are shown above the miniblog entries.

2. Quite confusing, and annoying. Since I did not want to drop the in-series plugin, I decided to hard-code my asides into my theme templates. Soon I was annoyed as well, also I did not have an archiving function of my posts as I was adding them in direct html code to the template.

3. I used the following code to ease the update process by only having to edit one external file, rather than navigating all the way up to my theme folder:

This of course was also no solution to the missing asides/sideblog problem, as the archiving option was missing.

4. Recently I came across a plugin called Front Page Excluded Categories, Instructions and FAQ can be found on the official wordpress.org website. It does what its name suggests: Exclude on specific category from showing on your blog frontpage. I figured out (nothing new to some I guess), that I could use this to hide my asides category from the frontpage. Then use the categories feed and re-insert this RSS-Feed into the main site template (theme) using another RSS-Feed plugin or some magpie-feed code. Voila, problem blown away! It works out of the box. You can use a RSS Importing Plugin such as Friends RSS Aggregator or FirstRSS or (what I am currently using) jRSS. If your feed is getting “douged” up, run it through Feedburner and import the (cleaned) feedburner RSS.

This guy (geeked.org) had a similar idea, but did not get it to run.

have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
 

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(you need to fix the php tags though! e.g. move the brackets. I need a better code highlighter, seriously!)

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