Posts Without Titles And How Wordpress And I Are Getting Along
So yesterday I started experimenting with titleless posts, which isn’t so hard to do. Half the time the hardest part of a post is coming up with a catchy title. But if what I’m blogging really isn’t all that long or doesn’t contain much original thought, why give it a title?
Because RSS feeds want titles, for one.
The titleless move was not only based on content but a design idea as well, one stolen from Kottke.org where the blog is a series of short posts interrupted by longer, more thorough posts and the like. The shorter posts don’t have titles on the blog, but they do when they pop up through the RSS feed, which makes subscribing easy and the display of posts on sites like RVABlogs that much easier. So I guess until I can figure out how to make titles not show on the blog but pop up in the RSS feed, I’ll have to keep coming up with titles.
By the way, if anyone out there has any suggestions on what I can do to fix this issue, I’m all ears.
Which leads to my brief thoughts on WordPress. While I’ve played with WP a bit in the past, there certainly is a bit of a learning curve moving to WP and PHP from Blogger’s more or less straight HTML. PHP will do what you tell it to do, for sure, but there are certain nuances in WP’s stuff that I’m still trying to figure out. Which is why I’ve not only had this recent issue with posts but why I’m also still on the default template. But I’m making tweaks here and there with the display and all. Hopefully there will be a slick new design in the next couple weeks, but we’ll see.
So please continue to bear with me as I get the hang of this puppy. There’s some slick stuff in here and I’m just starting to get the hang of it.
November 21st, 2007 at 11:50 am
I have been using Wordpress for a while now and have several sites running on it. The best part about Wordpress, concerning themes, is that they are infinitely configurable. When looking for a theme, I look at the framework, once loaded I can tear it apart and remove and add as needed. Not that I am a PHP genie or anything, but editing with examples and using the break / fix method works well for now.
November 21st, 2007 at 11:53 am
I’m a huge fan of the break/fix method of webdesign. Most of the time I learn stuff either by “stealing” what others have done and taking it apart and putting it back together again. That’s what I’m trying to do here. I’ve got about 25 themes on my computer that I keep looking at and picking apart to see what happens. It’s just the small tweaks that I can’t get, like the title situation. It’s hard to find a template for something like that since it’s a reflection in the RSS feed, not the actual site design.
November 21st, 2007 at 12:50 pm
There are two methods you could probably go about to accomplish what you’re wanting:
1 - This is the more involved method. There’s a lot of documentation out there about what is called “The Loop” in WordPress. Basically it’s the section that displays your post(s) on any page. There’s all kinds of meta data about the posts available within the loop. You could use one of the additional post fields (should be near the bottom when you’re writing a post) and let’s say you added a field with the name “No_title” and gave it a value of “1″. You’d then need to edit your “Loop” in the template to check and see “If No_title == 1 then don’t display the title” or “If No_title != 1 then display title” (second might be easier). This should still let the title display in your feed, but it won’t display on your actual site anymore.
2 - There are some plugins for what are called “asides”. The main author of WordPress (Matt Mullenweg) actually started the idea of them, and they are EXACTLY what you’re talking about. Their little brief entries with no title, but still support comments and stuff. In general you’re going to need to download an Asides plugin, and most likely a theme with Asides support in it (although some of the plugins may take care of hiding the title on their own). Then the general way to make it work is you write your post, give it a title, then you assign it to a category that you determine when setting up the plugin. Let’s say you create a category called “Asides”. When setting up the Asides plugin you would tell it that category has your titleless posts. Then when writing an entry, you assign it to the “Asides” category. From then on whenever your blog displays that post, (whether it’s in your normal blog stream or on the posts individual page) it should ignore the title.
Anyhow, that’s a big wall of text, sorry. I’d recommend trying option 2 first (getting an Asides plugin). If that doesn’t quite get you to where you want to be, you’ll most likely need to venture into Option 1. Option 1 really isn’t all that hard, but will require a level of comfort and very minimal knowledge of PHP syntax.
Hope it helps, let me know if I can be of any assistance.
November 21st, 2007 at 2:03 pm
I see somebody beat me to it on Asides. I think that’s the plugin Waldo uses on his blog for his little posts.
November 21st, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Why don’t you just create a category called “Asides” and stick your asides in there?
In your templates (probably home.php/index.php and single.php) you could do something like:
if(!is_category(’#')) :
// code to display title
endif;
Where you replace the # with the id of the “Asides” category you created. Since RSS feeds have their own template (confusingly not in the theme directory) this shouldn’t affect anything in your feeds.
November 21st, 2007 at 2:13 pm
I’m always available for chat on wordpress issues. Hit me up on gchat if you need some more pointers.
November 26th, 2007 at 9:52 am
All: Thanks for the advice. Asides are now working!
Matt’s #1 is kinda what I was looking for and thanks to Ross for getting that to happen for me.
But the Asides Plugin, that’s pretty nifty. I’m gonna have to figure what else I can do with that puppy…