Uplift of Enlightenment

I was playing around with some caching options on my blog, because the response time has been reportedly slow lately. I found a relatively decent configuration especially thanks to the W3 Turbo Cache plugin, but now my beloved shoutbox ‘Schreikasten’ (formerly displayed on the right side as a widget) did not work properly anymore. Although I will look into what exactly the problem was again, until I find a solution, I will have to disable the shoutbox for now. I am not sure what to do with all the stuff that I would have posted there. Usually that stuff was not worth to open a whole entry for. And visitors where able to drop a line without the context of a blog post in it. However, I prefer a faster website. Maybe I will collect my findings in a regular post once enough has been accumulated, like stromkopf does. Any other ideas besides going twitter?

If you have a wordpress blog (or any other kind of website), you might come across this problem some day: you want to fetch multiple RSS feeds and merge their entries in chronological order into one feed. Don’t panic, I might have found the solution for you. On my WordPress blog you can see I have RSS feeds for the blog posts, the user comments and now also the shoutbox entries. Most visitors were not aware of the different RSS feeds on my page (and who could blame them?), so I decided to combine them all into one big feed. Here is what you need to do…

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Since a while I was kind of missing something like a wall or guestbook on my blog. Why? So you can leave comments that are not related to a particular post and (most importantly) not rely on Facebook and the like for staying in touch. Even though i am still registered at Facebook, Google+, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Delicious, Twitter, Deviantart and i don’t even know where else, I was getting a bit annoyed. It sort of feels like a couple of years ago with all the Instant Messengers out there, remember that? Everyone had their favorite and to stay really in the loop with all your important contacts, you had to maintain a bunch of separate buddylists on every one of them – at least until the rise of Jabber, Trillian, Pidgin, Adium…

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Its pretty simple to remove pingbacks and trackbacks from your sidebar actually, but the required change is overwritten by any wordpress update since it is done directly inside the wordpress files:

1. Open the file wp-includes/default-widgets.php
2. Find line with $comments= get_comments( array( 'number'=> $number, 'status'=> 'approve') );
3. Change line to $comments= get_comments( array( 'number'=> $number, 'status'=> 'approve', 'type'=> 'comment') );

Your pingbacks and trackbacks should be hidden from the default recent comments widget.

Edit: I tried stromkopf’s suggestion to use a plugin and it works perfectly. To get it, go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-recent-comments