The website updating has been coming along, and I thought I’d just give some information on hacks/modifications I’ve done to WordPress, as well as some other website-related news.

1. When I imported my old entries from Movable Type, I noticed that not all of the line breaks were preserved, which left all of my entries looking squished. I found this support forum post which detailed some changes you could make to the Movable Type import code to insert line breaks on empty lines, which will preserve breaks between paragraphs. I made these changes and re-imported the entries, and it all seemed to work great, until I noticed that my auto-generated excerpts (which are the first 55 words of an entry) stopped working. I started poking around in the function that displays these breaks, and realized that the change to the import code must have inserted an ‘\n’ character into the empty excerpt field. Since the excerpt was now technically non-empty, WordPress would show that instead of auto-generating one. In order to fix this, I edited wp-includes/formatting.php, line 1483 (in function wp_trim_excerpt) and changed:

   if ( '' == $text) {

   to

   if ( '' == trim($text)) {

   So now WordPress considers the ‘\n’ as empty, and auto-generates the excerpt.

2. I installed the Configurable Tag Cloud which is similar to the built-in Tag Cloud widget, but is more…configurable. I did notice one weird behavior, which was that my long tags were breaking out of their containing div:

   

   I looked through the widget code, and noticed that for some reason, all spaces in tags were being converted to non-broken spaces (tag-cloud.php, line 202):

   $tag = str_replace(' ', ' ', wp_specialchars( $tag ));

   So I just commented that line out, and everything was happy:

   

3. I was looking for all my entries related to my marathon training, and couldn’t find them, and then I remembered that I had made them in a separate running blog. So I went ahead and exported them from Movable Type and imported them to WordPress. You can find most of them by clicking on the national AIDS marathon training program tag, or by browsing the Fitness catagory.
4. Finally, I changed the favicon to match the new look of the site: . You will probably need to clear your browser cache to see it.