UPDATE: Put your WordPress GTD into a Zoho Notebook, along with your Bloglines and most everything else you need at your fingertips.
I spent a lot of time this week trying out different online and server-side apps to help me get into GTD mode. Nothing was quite right for me, and eventually I decided I needed [...]

UPDATE: Put your WordPress GTD into a Zoho Notebook, along with your Bloglines and most everything else you need at your fingertips.

I spent a lot of time this week trying out different online and server-side apps to help me get into GTD mode. Nothing was quite right for me, and eventually I decided I needed to just pick something and be done.

That’s when I came up with the idea of turning a Wordpress install into a GTD app. Here’s how I did it:

• Install Wordpress
• I created the following categories:
  • GTD: Inbox
  • GTD: Next Action
  • GTD: Reference
  • GTD: Projects
  • GTD: Someday/Maybe
  • GTPD: Project 1
  • GTPD: Project 2 (and so on)
  • Abandoned
  • Done

The logic of my categories might not suit your needs, but I’ll explain it so you can get ideas from it. First, the GTD element: in GTD you have an Inbox for brand new tasks you’ve just thought of. Every day you’ll process the inbox and stick things into more specific sections. Next Action is where you stick the ones you’re going to do something about immediately. Someday/Maybe is the stuff you may do someday, but not immediately. Reference is just what it sounds like. Projects are the various projects that each of your tasks belong to. I added “Abandoned” and “Done” to keep track of stuff I’ve decided not to do and stuff I’ve completed, for future reference.

I made a separate category for each Project. I could’ve made a sub-category, but that didn’t work too well in the tag cloud (more on that later). By sticking the “GTD” and “GPTD” in front of certain things, I kept them grouped alphabetically. Then I made a tag-cloud style “heatmap” with a plugin called catcloud and put that in my sidebar. Now I can glance at the cloud and the categories that have the most stuff piling up immediately catch my eye and get priority treatment. (Alternately, you could use a regular category list and set it to show the numbers of posts in each category).

Here’s how I use it. I open a new post. The title is the task, i.e. “Pick up juice.” I leave the post empty unless I have notes on that - say, “Safeway’s having a sale on that.” I put it in the Inbox category. Later, when I process everything in the Inbox, I change each item’s categories to move them where they should be. When I complete or abandon them, I move them to the Done or Abandoned categories.

Also, with Cat Cloud, you can have it exclude certain categories from the cloud. I set my install to exclude GTD: Reference, Abandoned and Done because those are just going to pile way up with posts over time. I created links to those categories in the blogroll so they’re still easy to access from the sidebar.

If you want to keep the install private even from prying bots, you can put it in a protected folder on your domain or use this wonderful plugin: Angsuman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin. It prevents anyone from seeing the blog unless they’ve logged in (making it very nice for private blogs or blogs people pay to read, too).

If you have a fresh install of WordPress with plugins deactivated and no special tweaks, it most certainly should not be telling you that you don’t have permission to do things. If it does:
This is a javascript error. I noticed the glitch when I was trying to create new categories - which is an Ajax [...]

If you have a fresh install of WordPress with plugins deactivated and no special tweaks, it most certainly should not be telling you that you don’t have permission to do things. If it does:

This is a javascript error. I noticed the glitch when I was trying to create new categories - which is an Ajax function. A helpful user on the WordPress forums discovered the solution:

Go into your wp-includes/pluggable.php file. Find this code, or something very similar to it (mine was slightly different, but most of the lines were exact). Now, make a copy of this file before you proceed, because then if it screws something up horribly, you can fix it.

$cookie = explode('; ', urldecode(empty($_POST['cookie']) ? $_GET['cookie'] : $_POST['cookie'])); // AJAX scripts must pass cookie=document.cookie
foreach ( $cookie as $tasty ) {
if ( false !== strpos($tasty, USER_COOKIE) )
$user = substr(strstr($tasty, ‘=’), 1);
if ( false !== strpos($tasty, PASS_COOKIE) )
$pass = substr(strstr($tasty, ‘=’), 1);
}

Replace it with:

$user = $_COOKIE[USER_COOKIE];
$pass = $_COOKIE[PASS_COOKIE];

Here’s a tool that will generate a custom WordPress theme for you - it has tons of options and it shows an ever-changing preview that updates Ajax style every time you make a tweak. I’ve never seen a generator this good before. I’m going to be creating a bunch of sites sometime soon, so I’ll [...]

Here’s a tool that will generate a custom WordPress theme for you - it has tons of options and it shows an ever-changing preview that updates Ajax style every time you make a tweak. I’ve never seen a generator this good before. I’m going to be creating a bunch of sites sometime soon, so I’ll definitely be trying it out.

I’ve been researching the best ways to tell search engine robots just exactly which parts of your WordPress site they should index, and which parts to avoid. Robots.txt is one obvious way to go about this, but there’s no shortage of conflicting opinions about just what to block. The goal here is mainly to avoid [...]

I’ve been researching the best ways to tell search engine robots just exactly which parts of your WordPress site they should index, and which parts to avoid. Robots.txt is one obvious way to go about this, but there’s no shortage of conflicting opinions about just what to block. The goal here is mainly to avoid duplicate content in Google, which will toss pages into the Supplemental Index. But I’ve seen Yahoo index some pretty bone-headed pages before, so there are multiple reasons to do something with your robots.txt file.

Then I found a really interesting little chunk of code you can stick in your header.php file. It tells the bots to follow links in every case, but only index single posts, static pages and the home page:

<?php if(is_single() || is_page() || is_home()) { ?>
    <meta name="googlebot" content="index,noarchive,follow,noodp" />
    <meta name="robots" content="all,index,follow" />
  <meta name="msnbot" content="all,index,follow" />
<?php } else { ?>
    <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,noarchive,follow,noodp" />
    <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
  <meta name="msnbot" content="noindex,follow" />
<?php }?>

At this point I think I’m just going to leave that for a bit and see what happens. I’m not wild about messing with robots.txt - I’m not confident I know what I’m doing with it. I do have my wp-admin folder blocked, but that’s it. I can’t figure out why anyone would want pages from wp-content indexed either, but some people recommend leaving them in so… yeah, I’m just going to see what this code does.

Yesterday I tested Feedburner Plugin V2.2 on one of my sites. My main concern was that it not change the feed in any way visible to readers because I don’t want to lose my current subscribers. When I accessed my test feed, I noticed it added a direct link to the comments below the post [...]

Yesterday I tested Feedburner Plugin V2.2 on one of my sites. My main concern was that it not change the feed in any way visible to readers because I don’t want to lose my current subscribers. When I accessed my test feed, I noticed it added a direct link to the comments below the post - that was the only change and I didn’t consider it a negative one.

As promised, now the plugin has Feedburner tracking all my subscribers, no matter what feed reader they use (also includes Feedburner email subscriptions, if you’re set up for those). Turns out I have a lot more subscribers on some of my sites than I realized.

If you use Spam Karma 2 and you also want to use WP-Cache to keep your website running when it gets dugg, there’s a fix plugin that corrects the problem of cached files not getting flushed after a comment approval when you run those two together.
It was news to me, anyway.

If you use Spam Karma 2 and you also want to use WP-Cache to keep your website running when it gets dugg, there’s a fix plugin that corrects the problem of cached files not getting flushed after a comment approval when you run those two together.

It was news to me, anyway.