My blog was suspended for 7 hours

Yesterday I made a new post in which I put a link on a forum. After pressing the “Publish” button, my blog got suspended immediately. I sent a mail to wordpress and they kindly replied to me and re-activated my blog. It turned out that the site hosting the forum is on a blacklist at wordpress. So I removed the problematic post. I was afraid that I lose my blog but fortunately I got it back.

Stupid pop-up at the bottom of wordpress pages

Problem
I just noticed that there is a new pop-up widget on my wordpress.com blog at the bottom (see the screenshot). How to get rid of that?

Solution
Install Adblock Plus and add the following filter:

wordpress.com###infinite-footer

See this post for another example.

Shorten the URL of your wordpress posts

If the URL of your wordpress post is too long, then you can use this trick.

Screenshot (inserted from here):

Of course, there are tons of URL shortener services, but who knows how long they keep your URLs…

April fools

Today I found the following stats on my admin page:

Convert your wordpress blog to a PDF book

Problem

You have a wordpress blog (.com or .org), and you would like to convert the whole blog to a PDF book. That is, convert every post to PDF and then join the pieces. The final result should be a single PDF, like a book.

Related work

An easy, simple, and free solution is offered by LJBook. Just upload your exported blog, and they generate a single PDF out of it.
However, I had a problem with it. My blog contains lots of source codes and unfortunately those blocks are not treated correctly by LJBook. So, I had to find another solution.

My solution

Here is a sample PDF and my whole blog (up to March 6, 2011). With my method, you can generate such an output.

The current version of the script (written in Python) is available here.

Steps to follow:

• Download the script above and put it in a directory. In this directory, create a subdirectory called “pieces“. The script will download the HTML files here, and the PDF outputs are also stored in this subdirectory.
• Customize the beginning of the script: blog name, username, password, etc.
• The HTML to PDF conversion is done with WKhtmlToPDF. Here you will find more info about this tool and how to get it. Download it and store the binary here: /opt/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf-i386.
• Optional: disable the side bar on your wordpress blog. I don’t think you want to see the side bar on each page in the PDF book :) Refer to this post to figure out how to hide the side bar.
• Now everything is set, you can launch the script. If everything is fine then the script will download each public post on your blog and convert them to PDF. Warning! When you launch the script, it will delete all *.html and *.pdf files in the directory “pieces“!
• Once you have all the PDFs, enter the directory “pieces” and join the PDFs: “pdftk *.pdf cat output book.pdf“. If you don’t have pdftk, install it (sudo apt-get install pdftk).
• When ready, don’t forget to set back the side bar on your blog.
• You might want to edit the final PDF. It is almost sure that it will contain some empty pages; you can remove them with a PDF editor.

Hide the sidebar on wordpress.com

Problem

You want to hide the sidebar(s) on your wordpress.com blog.

Solution

Refer to the post Widgets on static pages or single posts by Panos, everything is detailed there.

Lessons learned for me: My current theme (iNove) is a good choice as it supports the possibility to deactivate the sidebar (under Appearance -> Theme Options; this option applies to the blog in general – all dynamic and static pages). Extra for me: the pages without the sidebar become large, I prefer that. There are some themes listed under the link above that have no sidebars but the text is very narrow.

I also posted this question to the forum.

Archives List Generator for wordpress.com

Problem

I wanted to have an “Archives” page that lists the titles of my posts. This way, I could find the post I’m looking for much easier. Unfortunately I didn’t find this functionality on wordpress.com. I was searching for a solution and I found WordPress ListMaker v2. However, the author provides an EXE only and his program requires your username. This is something I would never give out… On the other hand, I use Linux, so I prefer open source solutions.

So I’ve decided to write a Python script that produces an HTML output, similar to WordPress ListMaker v2.

Demo

You can see my Archives list here. It was generated with my script.

Download

Visit https://github.com/jabbalaci/Archives-List-Generator. Source code is here.

Solution

In a previous post I showed how to get the list of your blog posts. This script is an extended version, it simply produces a formatted HTML output.

Usage:

Modify the beginning of the script: precise the address of your blog, your username, password, etc. Then just simply execute the script. You can redirect the output to a file, then paste the contents of the file to your wordpress.com blog.

_{[ @reddit ]}

Get the list of your posts on wordpress.com with a Python script using the MetaWeblog API

Problem

You have a blog on wordpress.com and you want to get the list of your posts. For this task, you want to use a Python script.

Solution

#!/usr/bin/env python

import xmlrpclib
import sys
import pprint

pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(indent=4)

# you can use the HTTP or the HTTPS protocol below:
server = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy('https://NAME_OF_YOUR_BLOG.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php')
result = server.metaWeblog.getRecentPosts('NAME_OF_YOUR_BLOG', 'USER_NAME', 'USER_PASSWORD', sys.maxint)
pp.pprint(result)
print
print 'Number of posts: %d.' % len(result)

The script will download the list of all your posts. If you want, for instance, the latest 20 posts, write 20 instead of sys.maxint.

Links

• MetaWeblog API (included in wordpress, there is nothing to install)
• XML-RPC Support in wordpress (announcement about the list of supported blog APIs on wordpress)
• Python XML-RPC library documentation
• The Atom API (he talks about the MetaWeblog API too)
• Post WordPress entry with Python (an example how to send a post with Python)
• Using Blog API’s (list of blog API methods that are supported on wordpress)

What next?

I would like to have an “Archives” page that would list the titles of my posts. This way, I could find the post I’m looking for much easier. Unfortunately I didn’t find this functionality on wordpress.com. I was searching for a solution and I found WordPress ListMaker v2. However, the author provides an EXE only and his program requires your username. This is something I would never give out… On the other hand, I use Linux, so I prefer open source solutions.

So the next project is to complete the Python script above to produce an HTML output, similar to WordPress ListMaker v2. I’ll do it when I have some free time.

Update (20110223): The script is ready, see this post.

Learn more about wordpress.com

“Learn WordPress.com is a step-by-step tutorial that includes lessons on how to start a blog, customize your site, and connect with other bloggers in the WordPress.com community.” (source)

The guide is available in a printer-friendly version too (66 pages at the moment).

This tip is from here.

Disable emoticons on your wordpress.com blog

Problem

WordPress.com converts emoticons (like “:o”) to small graphics. After a while they become annoying, at least for me. How to get rid of them?

Solution

Go to the admin panel, visit Settings -> Writing, and untick “Convert emoticons like :-) and :-P to graphics on display”. Then Save Changes.

Credits

I found this tip here.