Monthly Archives: August 2007

Domain Names and Personal Publishing

Here’s a great post that further ties up the sometimes loose ends of domain names and personal publishing. In that post, Isabel Wang references Jon Udell’s post on “Hosted lifebits” commenting that GoDaddy, Dotster and Demand Media all currently, or have at some point, explored this connection.

This makes sense in the light of my previous post on Spokeo. Instead of aggregating and scraping from my contributed content available at a multitude of web communities behind their password protected URLs, those databases containing my personal artifacts ought to be truly mine. In this way, aggregators need only have access to my public URLs: syndicated feeds and other content.

Stop WordPress Returning 404 When Accessing Empty Categories

If you’re using WordPress 2.2.1 — like I am — you might have run into a little problem navigating to a category page that has no associated posts. This was resolved a couple years ago with ticket #1969, but those changes don’t appear to be in my 2.2.1 installation.

It’s a very easy fix: open up wp-includes/classes.php and look for the handle_404 function. Add !is_category() to the main expression and viola! no more 404s for empty categories…