Daily Archives: November 25, 2007

Customising WordPress MU

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Last year, before my trip to France, I thought about starting a web site where anyone can set up a blog about their travels. Plenty of them exist already. None of them are any good!

WordPress, which my blog now runs on, is pretty good and mature. They have a multi-user version, called WordPress MU, which would suit me nicely. It’s very extensible through a plugin architecture, so it should be relatively easy for me to add some decent geotagging. I will chronicle my efforts here.

WordPress has two classification mechanisms: categories, which are a fixed (more or less – by default you can add categories at any time) list, and tags, where you just type whatever tags you want. I want to disable (sort of) categories, and let users only use tags. I say “sort of”, because the categories are going to be a site-wide hierarchical list of places. Users won’t choose the place through the category hierarchy. Instead, they will type the name of a place and the Google Maps geocoder will look it up for them. The coordinates of the article will be saved, and the post will be categorised automatically. That’s the idea, at least. I will reuse the geocoding interface used for Zemobo.

So my first task is to remove the ability to select a category when writing a post. This will also have to be removed from the RPC thing that applications like Windows Live Writer (which I am using now) use. No idea how to do that. I think it will actually involve hacking the existing code rather than using plugins.

You can follow my progress here: http://arunstephens.com/category/travel-blog/.

Save Journeyman

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Journeyman is a new show for NBC this year, airing Monday nights at 10:00, after Heroes. It’s about, Dan Vasser (Kevin McKidd, Rome), a reporter for the San Francisco Register, who seems to suffer from regular headaches. Now, that doesn’t sound like an interesting story, except unlike most headaches, Dan’s headaches are accompanied by time travel. It’s kind of like Quantum Leap for the 21st century, except Dan doesn’t take the place of someone from the past. And there’s no Sam (although there is his ex-girlfriend, Livia, also a time traveller, who helps him out from time to time, much to the initial chagrin of Dan’s present-day wife).

In each episode, Dan tracks the life of someone, and attempts to put things right. He’s still learning the rules of time travel, and in the latest episode he learnt the hard way how changing history can affect the present.

Dan’s wife, Katie, knows about the time travel (Dan proved it by burying her engagement ring he was getting fixed under the deck of their house in a locked box with the newspaper from before they met), and, until Dan changed history, his brother Jack, a cop, was also beginning to believe him.

But I am writing this not to give you a rundown of the show, but to encourage you in America to watch it! Because otherwise it might be cancelled. It’s doing pretty poorly in the ratings. It does have decent lead-in with Heroes, but this second season of Heroes is nowhere near as good as the first. It’s only up against CSI: Miami on CBS and, it turns out, a new(ish) show I’ve never heard of, October Road, on ABC (up till last week it was against The Bachelor, which I didn’t know they were still making!)

Please watch Journeyman! (Especially if you have a Nielsen box!)

UPDATE: Apparently there’s a bit of a campaign to save Journeyman: See http://savejourneyman.funurl.com/ and http://save-journeyman.blogspot.com/ for more details.