GigaPanic! is a WordPress plugin I was planning to write. I even have notes for the steps it had to perform. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it is supposed to do. Let me explain.

I have a notebook problem. Not notebook computer, but actual notebooks filled with lined paper. Every year, I go to Target after their back-to-school sale and buy a bunch of notebooks for around 12 cents each. Most of them stay in the car, so whenever I am out and about, I can grab a notebook if I need one. Now, because it is easy to grab a new notebook, I end up with a lot of them that are mostly empty but have a few pages of important notes. And this leads to problems.

I grabbed one of these many sparsely-used notebooks off of my desk the other day, in case I needed to take any notes while my eldest son was at Cub Scouts. In the back, I found a whole to-do list of WordPress plugins that I either wanted to update new features, etc.) or write. The list is many months old, but most the list makes sense, even if it is out of date. Then there is GigaPanic!

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Starting with version 2.8, WordPress automatically puts relational link tags in the heads of posts. This is not a bad thing at all. Not only are they standards compliant, but they can improve browser performance due to prefetching of the linked pages.

So how does WordPress pick the next and previous posts for the links? It links to the next and previous posts chronologically. Now if your blog is single-subject, that may be just fine. But if you have multiple categories, this may mean that the links are not ideal. In fact, even if you don’t factor in categories, some posts are simply more long-term than others. For example, WordPress want to link my post about the TTFTitles Wordpress Plugin to a post about being rejected from BlogRush. Given that TTFTitles is still widely used, but BlogRush doesn’t even exist anymore, it seems like a poor link choice has been made.

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[08-Jun-09 Updated to note 2.7.1 compatibility.]

The Atropos plugin lets you set an expiration date for your posts. This is done in a new Advanced Options section of the post edit page.

Just pick your month and put in the date and year and your post will automatically be deleted at the end of that day. Note that the expired posts are DELETED. Be sure that you want to do this. I disavow any responsibility if you delete your entire blog because you weren’t being careful.

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[09-Jun-09 - Checked against 2.7.1. After an upgrade, you need to deactivate and reactivate the plugin to turn off revisions again.]

While the WordPress 2.6 upgrade has not gone smoothly for a lot of people, one new feature that has yet to bite too many people is post revisions. Whenever you save a change in a post in WordPress 2.6, it saves a copy of the old version as well as your changed version. If you hit ’save’ a lot while writing, that can add up to a lot of extra crud in your database.

Now, these can be turned off by editing your wp-config.php file, but that’s a bit gross for a system like WordPress where everything else can be done through a nice web interface. Better solution: the No Revision plugin. [read more]