Category Archives: Pedantry

Custom Query String 2.7 Broken in WP 2.3

Matt Read‘s lovely WordPress plugin that allows an admin to specify how many results are shown in a category archive, search, or index page had served me well for a while, but is presently not supported by its creator.

As a courtesy to the folks at Anime なの, I have listed this site only using the RSS feed for the Cartoons category; the other content here doesn’t have anything to do with the core theme of that aggregation site. I noticed earlier today that my most recent article regarding Sayounara Zetsubou Sensei didn’t show up on the なの, and started investigating. Turns out the RSS feeds for each of my categories was no longer being generated properly.

WordPress database error: [Table 'wp_burrowowl.wp_categories' doesn't exist] SELECT cat_ID FROM wp_categories WHERE category_nicename = 'cartoons'

I had previously noticed that an odd error was showing up on my category pages, but since those get very little traffic (which is saying a lot for a low-traffic site like this), so I had put repairing the error at the back of my to-do list. The broken RSS feeds, on the other hand, struck me as far more interesting and hence a touch more urgent. A quick search on the web for the text of the error revealed a number of other sites afflicted by the same problem, and another search on the WordPress Forums got me just what I needed, somebody else with this issue and a work-around.

Turns out that in addition to messing up my Similar Terms plugin, which utterly broke my site, a more subtle issue had cropped up in WordPress 2.3 that changed the relationship between individual posts and the category system. This one’s a little more complicated than a simple find-replace in a text editor, so for the time being we’ll have to live with only getting 3 articles per screen, whether it’s the front page, a category archive, or search results.

Time to roll up my sleeves and dive into some more PHP, I guess.

Update:
With a little help from the Version 2.3 New Taxonomy page, I think I’ve got a real fix going. On lines 252 and 265 of Custom Query String 2.7, the now-defunct “categories” table is accessed. Switch the table to “terms” instead. There is no more “category_nicename” nor “cat_ID” these days, so replace the former with “slug” and the latter with “term_id.” The RSS feeds appear to work properly now, and both search results and category archives show more articles than the front page, as intended.

No, literally!

I know it isn’t nice to pick on people about grammar when they are speaking without teleprompters and notes, but some offenses are hard to let slide. I previously poked fun at Mitt Romney for his repeated failings during a Republican forum, but now it’s Senator Joe Biden’s turn to raise the hair on the back of my neck.

I often hear people refer to something as being literally some metaphor-or-other. I understand that they are just trying to draw dramatic attention to a metaphor, that they meant figuratively, and that if they had a chance to write the same statement down they probably would have gotten it right. Senator Biden just couldn’t stop himself:

As we try desperately with a bare majority in the United States Congress to alter the course this president has set us on, a course that not figuratively [but] literally has us careening off the tracks internationally and domestically, there is one great big boulder that sits in the middle of the road: it’s Iraq.

What a travesty of a statement. What butchery of the language. In these days when the sitting President of the United States sounds like a nincompoop on a regular basis, we’re in danger of becoming numb to these kinds of shenanigans. Let’s tear this statement apart a little, shall we?
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Sparkline Graph

Thirty weeks of activity in a glance

Edward Tufte described a sparkline, a term he coined, as “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics.” They have been embraced by a number of information visualization buffs, and now a sparkline graph showing the weekly activity of Burrowowl.net appears next to the search tool. With two axes and shading, the following is all conveyed in a glance:

Each bar’s height represents the quantity of article written to this site.
Each bar’s color indicates the quantity of comments, darker bars representing more discussion, lighter bars representing less. The most recent week is set in red to draw attention to it.
Each bar represents one week of posts.

No explicit scale is shown; all heights and colors are relative to the other data. Graphs of this sort are meant to be read and understood immediately, much like a natural word is more quickly-absorbed, understood, and put into context than an acronym or unfamiliar jargon. If you see a row of tall bars followed by a dip, it means that I was slow in posting during that period of time compared to normal. If you see a dark splot of bars amongst very light ones, those were times of more frequent discussion.

Hat tip to Information Aesthetics for calling my attention to this form of informational graphic and putting a name to them so I could look around for the proper tools, and hat tip to Sean McBride for writing the PHP that actually generates the graphic.

Currently I’m showing 26 weeks, half a year, though that may change. Sean McBride’s WordPress plugin can operate out of the box at daily, weekly, or monthly granularity, and is quite configurable.