Technogearophilia

WordPress is a great blogging platform and overall CMS. Part of its utility comes from its in-built capability to display excerpts from posts and pages, which makes displaying search results and archives much more elegant.

This is, however, not without its flaws. One the most common problem with excerpts is WordPress that WordPress shortcodes don’t work in excerpts.

When one of the most commonly utilized plugins for WordPress is Alex Rabe’s NextGEN Gallery plugin, which heavily relies upon shortcodes, this is a problem.

Fortunately, WordPress’ Shortcode API has within it the capability of easily and quickly fixing this issue.

Below is the default PHP statement to display a post’s excerpt in WordPress:

< ? php the_excerpt(); ?>

The problem with the_excerpt() function is that it echoes the excerpt directly to the screen without interpretation. This causes the shortcode itself to display in the excerpt rather than the code it was calling.

In order to have NextGen Gallery entries appear in the post excerpts, simply replace that line wherever it occurs in your blog’s theme files with the following:

< ? php echo do_shortcode(get_the_excerpt()); ?>

The do_shortcode() function actually runs the shortcodes and returns their results as a string. Hence, it will allow your NextGEN Galleries – and anything other shortcodes – to display properly within post excerpts.

To a large extent technology doesn’t change people; it only changes the means and venues of the expression of their basic natures. This is quite evident with the advent of Web 2.0 and social media.

People are people and they gather in the same sort of cliques and self-segregate within the “confines” of social media in the same ways, though often based on different selection criteria, as they did and still do in real life (IRL).

And people often have issues maintaining a balance in their lives and Social Media becomes just another vice in their lives or a replacement expression of a previous vice.

Pick Your Poison

It’s “same old, same, old,” in the digital world because we’re still Humanity 1.0 and nobody has identified an upgrade path for us. So settle in with a cool glass of Facebook and we’ll do a few shot of YouTube later.

To many people’s minds the war between the various web browsers looks like a schoolyard brawl between two rambunctious boys, with a quiet – possibly special needs – kids sitting off to one side utterly unconcerned and oblivious to the fight raging beside him.

Mmmmmmmm…Glue Good

Yessir; that’s old Internet Explorer off to side eating glue while the other browsers get rowdy, trying to figure out who’ll be king of the internet playground – or so it’s really easy to think.

The thing is though that the “glue” IE is munching on is business critical Microsoft applications such as Office and SharePoint, and a plethora of other critical web-based or web-enabled systems that were designed to work natively with IE but which either do not function correctly with Firefox or Chrome or which require modifications to those browsers’ settings – Firefox users, think about:config – in order to work correctly.

Firefox, Chrome, and all the lesser contenders can fight between themselves for the recreational market all they want. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer doesn’t need to be the playground’s biggest bully; it’s busy at work – more like the nerdy straight-A student than the special needs kid.