If you use this theme here are a few steps to get your started and is basically the process I go through.  Before creating the Wordpress theme I’m assuming you have XHTML/CSS sources to work from.

1. Copy your existing CSS into style.css
2. Copy your images into the images folder.  To make everything work right, I recommend using the same file structure as a wordpress theme with your CSS and image folder in the same directory.
3. Copy the html head and banner protion of your design into the header.php file.  The banner portion of your design is anything that is the same across all parts of your site.  Typically this is logo, menu, search bar, etc.
4. Copy the footer portion of your design into footer.html.  Like the banner, the footer is anything at the bottom of your design that is the same across all pages.
5. Next, start the homepage design.  You can use the index.php file or copy index.php to a home.php file.  Copy the necessary code from your design template into the wordpress template, surrounding the php tags with your code where necessary.
6. Then do the inside or single page template by modifying the single.php page.  Similar to the homepage you’ll take your inside page template code and surround the php code in single.php with it.

Download WordPress Page Feeds (873 bytes)

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: WordPress Page Feeds
Plugin URI: http://www.devtrench.com/quick-and-dirty-wordpress-page-feed-plugin
Description: Adds functionality for rss feeds for pages
Version: 0.1
Author: James Ehly (aka devtrench)
Author URI: http://www.devtrench.com
*/

add_action('do_feed_page','do_feed_page');

function do_feed_page() {
  header('Content-Type: text/xml; charset=' . get_option('blog_charset'), true);
  $more = 1;

  $pid = $_GET['pid'];
  if (is_numeric($pid ) && !empty($pid)) {
    $pid = mysql_escape_string($pid);
    $pages = get_pages(array('child_of'=>$pid,'sort_order'=>'DESC'));
  } else {
    $pages = get_pages(array('sort_order'=>'DESC'));
  }

  echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="'.get_option('blog_charset').'"?'.'>'; ?>

<rss version="0.92">
<channel>
	<title><?php bloginfo_rss('name'); wp_title_rss(); ?></title>
	<link><?php bloginfo_rss('url') ?></link>
	<description><?php bloginfo_rss('description') ?></description>
	<lastBuildDate><?php echo mysql2date('D, d M Y H:i:s +0000', get_lastpostmodified('GMT'), false); ?></lastBuildDate>
	<docs>http://backend.userland.com/rss092</docs>
	<language><?php echo get_option('rss_language'); ?></language>
	<?php do_action('rss_head'); ?>

<?php foreach($pages as $page) { ?>
	<item>
		<title><?=$page->post_title?></title>
		<description><![CDATA[<?=$page->post_content?>]]></description>
		<link><?php echo get_permalink($page->ID); ?></link>
		<?php do_action('rss_item'); ?>
	</item>
<?php } ?>
</channel>
</rss>
  <?php
}
?>

To use it, place the file in your plugins folder and then call your feed like this:

I'll post back with an advanced version of this plugin once I get time to write it. Feel free to make feature requests here.

However if you are on a shared host like I am, then the checked out files might not have the right permissions for your setup. My host is running PHPSuExe and that means that all executable files can only be writable by the user (644 for files and 755 for directories). But the checked out files and directories are all writable by the group (664 and 775). What to do?

I just SSH in, cd to the blog directory, and do a recursive chmod that removes the group write privilege from all files and folders. For example if your blog is in the typical cpanel root:

cd public_html
chmod -R g-w ./

Works every time.

I've also been having the itch to learn the Perl programming language, and I thought this would be a good project to get my feet wet.

Strategy

Since the majority of blogs I read are in written in WordPress, it's pretty easy to take advantage of the GET string that can be used to access each post. The GET string looks like http://www.devtrench.com/?p=2. Normally, post id's start with 1 and auto increment from there, so all we have to do is figure out what the id is of the latest post, and write some code that will loop over a scraper that many times. Sometimes the latest post id will be hidden in the HTML of the post somewhere, and other times you just have to guess at it for a while until you figure it out.

Code

Here's the Perl code that I'm currently using to do this. It's meant to be run from the command line, and I output the data to a file using '> output.txt' after the command. Also, I ripped off most of this code from PLEAC-Perl, which is an online Perl cookbook. Cookbooks can really accelerate learning a language when you want to do specific tasks like this.

Hopefully this code is commented enough for you to understand what is going on.

This was a fun experiment for me and a great way to finally get around to learning Perl. I always find that if I create small tasks like this for myself that learning a language or framework is much more interesting and rewarding. Now if you want to do this in PHP, which is what I usually program in, you can follow the same logic using curl as your user agent.

Hint 1: If you use this code as is it will print out HTML. Surround the HTML that it generates with basic <html> and <body> tags and create your own styles in the <head>. Then you can view it in a web browser and print to PDF.

Hint 2: The blog I was trying to scrape did not allow me to hotlink images from my HTML file, but saving the page as HTML from FireFox was a workaround for that, and then I saved that created page as a PDF.

From the README file:

= Upgrade instructions from v2.0.6 =

Due to the new wordpress update system, the upload directory can no longer be within the plugin folder; wordpress deletes it. Therefore the plugin directory is now the uploads folder in the wp-content folder. ENSURE YOU MOVE DOWNLOADS HERE BEFORE UPGRADING! The plugin will convert the urls to the new directory on activation.

This is stupid, and I was lucky, because I did a backup before upgrading to WP 2.5.1. And BTW, it does not convert the urls - I had to do that manually in the database.

So, I think I'll be a little more careful about using the automatic plugin updates from now on and be doing a backup first.

DEVTRENCH's Wordpress Dominion

I still wouldn't recommend blogging at a free host/blog tool, but at the very least you can use your account to get some links, I guess.

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