New Look

I know.. it’s the out-of-the-box WordPress 3 theme. I’m going to keep it this way for now because it’s simple, clean, and I am not a designer at all. Until they start making some nice wordpress 3 themes, I’ll just be sticking with this. I’ll try to clean it up a little bit and add my own flare when I get around to it.

New Domain

My Magento forum username, my IRC username, etc. has always been Prattski. It’s just a nickname I’ve had for a long time. It was available, and much better than ‘devzone’ over at my other ‘pratthost.com’ domain.

Fresh Start

I am starting to do a lot more freelance now, so I plan on continuing the blog, but adding more to it as well. I just wanted a fresh start for my new domain name, and a fresh start with wordpress 3. All of my old posts should be here. If you notice anything that needs a little attention, please let me know!

When I saw that WordPress 2.7 released yesterday (Dec. 11th), I didn’t really think much of it. After all – I don’t have any complaints about what WordPress is doing for me now. However, I decided to take the couple minutes to check out the video that they posted about it and I quickly realized how stupid I would be if I didn’t upgrade!

I’m still exploring all the new features and I’m still in awe at the new user interface, but it is truly amazing. Check out the video for yourself! No need for me to list all the new features – the video does a fine job:

I am building a WordPress website for a friend of mine, and he requested that there be 5 posts on the home page, and 30 posts per page after that. Anyone familiar with WordPress knows that, out of the box, it cannot do that. You only have one option: “Blog pages show at most.” This value is global, so it effects every page.

I spent a while searching the code, searching wordpress.org, searching google, asking on IRC, until finally I came across a plugin that sounded like what I needed. But, I was bummed to find out that it was built for version 2.3 (I have 2.6). I searched the comments, and it sounded like people had found that parts of it worked with 2.6 still. So, I downloaded it and gave it a shot.

It’s called, “Custom Query String Reloaded.” It was re-created by named “Moshu”, and I found it on his blog. After installing it, I made a query for “is_home” and set the posts to 5. Then I set WordPress’ settings for “Blog pages show at most” to 30. That’s all there was to it!

Download Custom Query String Reloaded