If my previous “aside”:http://open-dialogue.com/blog/?p=247#respond had you a bit confused, I was celebrating my success at _finally_ being able to get a new hack to work. I’ve often had cause to write a quick one-liner, but I hated wasted all that space because once I published it, the metadata takes up more space than does the actual content itself. I hated the way it looked, but I also hated not being able to spiff up my briefer thoughts. So, I found “Matt’s Asides”:http://photomatt.net/2004/05/19/asides/, but I couldn’t get it work. Matt hacked “The Loop”:http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop to have it check a specific category and then format it differently when it displayed. This allowed users to take up less space with very short posts while still allowing readers to submit their comments on the content.
The problem was that The Loop in my template’s index was structured differently, rendering Matt’s hacks ineffective when I tried to implement them. In point of fact, trying to put them into my code took my site offline due to syntax errors. Several hours of searching the Web for upgraded hacks yielded nothing helpful, so I resigned myself to not being able to use the hack after all.
The solution came in looking for a reasonable substitute. I’d settled on using a linklog to accomplish a similar function, and in the process I found a plugin called “wp-recent-links”:http://rebelpixel.com/projects/wp-recent-links/. Part of the install process for this plugin involved replacing your templates index with the copy provided in the .zip file. In looking at the code, I realized that The Loop syntax looked very similar to the one that Matt “cited”:http://wiki.wordpress.org/PhotoMatt/index.php in his write-up. So, I tried substituting again Matt’s hack code into The Loop syntax for my new “index”:http://www.open-dialogue.com/blog/files/index.phps file, which actually worked this time. So, I then used a “little snippet of code”:http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/asides/ ((bottom of the page)) from another source to format the bullet of the aside and hacked my stylesheet to gives my asides a little bit of extra flare.
Since different template authors structure their index files differently, the only problem I had to overcome was finding an index file that was close enough to the original such that it would allow Matt’s Asides hack to actually work. A learning experience, to be sure.
I realize that this has probably bored most of you to tears, and for that I apologize. But in the event that someone else would like to implement this hack and run into similar problems, I share my experience in hopes of reducing the number of headaches that someone else might face. Feel free to “contact”:http://open-dialogue.com/blog/?page_id=220 me if you have any problems or questions.
