To follow along, you’ll need to be comfortable with editing a couple of your theme’s files, and be comfortable with the basics of PHP.

Limiting the categories on your home page can be done by adding a few lines of code to the top of your theme’s index.php file.

<?php if (is_home()) {
    $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
    query_posts("cat=12,23,6&paged=$paged");
} ?>

For “cat=” on the 3rd line, list the numbers for the categories you want to appear on your home page (or you can put a minus sign in front of the category numbers to exclude specific categories). The WordPress documentation for query_posts says you can do this with simpler syntax, but you can’t. The documentation is wrong. If you follow the suggestion there, your “Newer Entries” and “Older Entries” links on your home page won’t work. They will just continually re-load the most recent posts. The code I’ve given here is explained nicely in this WordPress support forum post.

So with this code, my home page includes only the categories related to my professional work. For my personal blog, I needed a way to get posts from all the right categories to appear together on a page. The answer is simple: I created a single parent category that encompasses all the categories I use for my personal posts. So the page for that parent category serves as the “home page” for my personal blog.

I also wanted my sidebar to change depending on whether you are viewing the “professional” pages or the “personal” pages. Achieving this involves two steps. First, add the following code to the top of your sidebar.php file. The category and page numbers you see listed are the ones where I want the “professional” sidebar to appear, which I call $home_sidebar (so you should substitute category and page numbers appropriate for your site). Note the ability to pass an array to is_category is new with WordPress 2.5.

<?php
$home_sidebar = false;
if (is_category(array(12,23,6))
  || in_category('12') || in_category('23') || in_category('6')
  || is_page(array(345,440,496,501)) || is_home()) {
      $home_sidebar = true;
}
?>

The second step is to check the value of $home_sidebar whenever you want to vary what appears in the sidebar. For example, to vary the category links in your sidebar, use code similar to this (again, substituting your category numbers). You’ll want to explore the options for the wp_list_categories function to get the exact appearance you want:

<ul>
<?php if ($home_sidebar) {
    wp_list_categories('include=12,23,6&feed=RSS&order=desc&title_li=');
}

else {
    wp_list_categories('child_of=26&feed=RSS&title_li=');
} ?>
</ul>

Note my use of child_of. This is the number for the parent category I created for all of my personal posts. This is a very convenient way to get all of the child categories without having to list them individually.

I’ve used this approach to make my blog look like two blogs. But you could easily extend this approach to subdivide your blog into as many mini-blogs as you like.

There were 3 problems with how I implemented this feature in the previous (2.0) version of Shashin, but they only became clear to me after hearing feedback from people using Shashin 2.0 in a wide variety of WordPress themes. One problem was that the steps involved were just too complicated for most people’s needs (but the more complex options are still there, if you need greater control of the configuration than the new “easy” way).

The second problem was my attempt to manipulate the title of the page containing the [salbumphotos] tag. Shashin 2.0 tries to dynamically append the title of the selected photo album to the page title. In a rational world this would be easy, but WordPress makes it extraordinarily difficult to isolate and manipulate the title of a page, as reported here. I thought I had come up with a work around. But, as it turns out, my solution was not reliable across all the different WordPress themes that are out there. So, with Shashin 2.1, I have removed all the code that tries to manipulate the page title. It now simply displays the album title as a caption on the table that contains the photo thumbnails. This is much cleaner and shouldn’t cause conflicts with any themes.

The third problem was the [salbumphotos] tag, which is used to display thumbnails for all the photos in an album. In Shashin 2.0, a page with the [salbumphotos] tag won’t play nicely with sidebars that use the wp_list_pages function (for listing links to all the pages on a site). The [salbumphotos] tag only worked correctly if you used it in conjunction with Shashin album thumbnails. You couldn’t just go to the page directly from a sidebar link. This is fixed in Shashin 2.1.

Shashin 2.1 also has a few minor bug fixes, the most important of which is that you can now once again see the photo thumbnails in the Shashin admin panel.

I should point out that, if all you want to do with your Picasa photos in WordPress is display your album thumbnails on a page, and then link them to a page that displays the photos in each album, then I recommend kPicasa Gallery. It has similar features to Shashin in this area, but without Shashin’s management overhead. But if you want to do more than just that, then I recommend Shashin .

The past few weeks have been the height of silly season in the Democratic race, culminating with the amazingly uninformative debate last week. I think I knew less after watching it than before it started.

I went to the Obama rally last Friday, and I think it’s safe to say it was the largest crowd I’ve ever been a part of (it was estimated at 35,000). It felt just like a big rock concert, especially since will.i.am was there to provide an opening act. I was lucky to get a ticket that put me within about 100 ft of the stage (the tickets were free, but getting my hands on a “blue” ticket, which put me near the stage, called upon ticket hustling skills I haven’t exercised in probably 15 years). I expected people would be excited to see him, but there was a level of excitement during his first few minutes on stage that I’ve only seen before in clips of early Beatles concerts. There were a couple of big guys next to me who were picking up shorter people for a few seconds each, so they could catch a glimpse of him. A little old lady even shuffled her way up to them for a turn. The speech was good, but since I’m such a politics junkie, it was familiar.

The results for the Pennsylvania primary will start coming through in a few minutes. I’m actually glad it’s over. We’ve probably gotten about two dozen campaign calls from the Clinton and Obama folks over the past few days. The polls show Clinton ahead by about 7-10%. I’m probably unduly influenced by my experience at the rally, but I think Obama will hold her to a tighter margin. My prediction: Hillary by 4%.

Other than the new look, the big change is that I’ve split my blog in two. Posts that show up on the home page concern web technology and my projects. Everything else is still on the site, but is in my personal blog. There’s also a link for it at the bottom of the sidebar.

For my RSS fanbase (yes, I’m trying to be funny…), you can get all my posts from this feed, or just the personal blog posts from this one.

Under the hood it’s still one blog. Figuring out how to get WordPress to display everything as if it were two blogs was an interesting challenge (one that has frustrated a number of people, judging by the threads in the WordPress support forums). It’s not just a question of limiting the topic categories that show up on the home page. It’s also a question of how to group the other categories together, and how to get the sidebar to show the appropriate navigation controls for the current context (i.e. listing the correct subset of categories on the home page, as well as on each different category archive page). I’ll write up a how-to post soon.

If Stuart Adamson - the former frontman of my favorite band Big Country - were still alive, today would be his 50th birthday. But he died alone in a hotel room 7 years ago, in an apparent suicide while on an alcoholic binge, in the wake of his 2nd divorce. It’s an unfortunate aspect of human nature that the most creative and talented among us are more often than not tortured souls. As Wikipedia puts it, “In many ways, Adamson was the sound of Big Country, supplying much of its distinctive guitar work, as well as being lead singer and main songwriter (both music and lyrics). In terms of being an instrumentalist, a vocalist, and a prolific songwriter, he is matched by very few contemporaries…”

I wrote a post about his guitar skills and songwriting a couple years ago, so I won’t repeat myself here. Instead I’ll link you to two remarkably different live versions of The Storm, one of my favorite Big Country songs. I love the epic sweep of the lyrics. They capture a compelling sense of grim determination in dark times. The scene of communal loss conjured up by the song is timeless - it’s a story that could have taken place a thousand years ago or yesterday. And the guitar work is pretty cool too (I remember my college roommate being flummoxed by all the chord changes as he tried to figure out how to play it).

The first is an acoustic version, and the second is an electric guitar version (note the second one doesn’t really get going until about two minutes in).

My former officemates at the U Penn School of Medicine Information Services Department have put together a Web Symposium, scheduled for July 15-16. They have an impressive list of speakers lined up.

I recognized many of the names of the list, as it includes some of the most well known people in the world of web user interface design. But I was surprised to see the names of a couple people I personally knew. I worked with Dana Chisnell for a short time in 2000, when she was brought in to consult at a small start-up where I was working (Finexa - a company that did not last long). And I met Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg at a coffee shop when Glenn Greenwald came through Philadelphia to promote his first book a couple years ago. I contributed a post to his Blue Force site, but it wasn’t long after that when I started to come up short on time for regular political blogging.

The price for attending the symposium is a bargain. Several of the speakers typically make the rounds at conferences that cost 2 or 3 times as much. So if this is a topic of interest for you, definitely check it out!

The only other change I made was to add mp4 as a video type that Shashin will recognize (it’s not documented as a supported video type for Picasa, but it does in fact accept them).

Download Shashin 2.0.4.

Update: I’ve received a few reports from first-time Shashin users who are having trouble activating Shashin properly, despite this fix. This seems to be happening to only a small number of people, and I haven’t been able to track down the cause yet. If you are having trouble with Shashin under WordPress 2.5, please leave a comment on this post and let me know exactly what’s going wrong.

This is the one real problem with building an application that relies on Google’s RSS feeds - I have no control over when they might change the feeds, or what kind of changes they make.

There are also some other minor fixes. Here’s a list of the changes in 2.0.2:

• Adjusted for new location of the content_url in the Picasa feed
• If you select the option to display your photos at Picasa in a new browser window, it actually works now (the formatting of the anchor tag was incorrect).
• Shashin now performs a preg_escape when detecting the URL for the page containing your salbumphotos tag. This fixes a warning that was being displayed for some URLs in PHP 5.
• Shashin now correctly detects your WordPress installation directory if you’ve installed it in a subdirectory (except for paths in shashin/display/highslide.css which are hardcoded - you’ll need to edit those by hand).

There are minor new features too: a new tag that lets you display sets of album thumbnails alongside their titles and descriptions, an option to prefix album titles to photo captions, and if you choose not to use Highslide, you can open the links to Picasa in a new window if you want.

All the details, including instructions for using the new features, are on my Shashin page.

If you have any questions or run into any problems, please use the comments on this post.