This might seem a bit lame to those who actually know what they’re doing, but I have been bashing my head against the wall trying to figure out how to grab and display more than one post in a category using the archive.php file.
I’m using the archive.php file instead of creating a specific category file because I want to keep the layout the same with the least amount of editing whenever I do need to make a change. Copy pasta maybe easy, but it soon gets tiresome and is needless extra hassle.
After some frantic “help!” posts on twitter (thank you @wpbeginner for responding!) and friendfeed plus a little searching of my own, all roads seemed to lead to this page in the wordpress codex.
Specifically, this solution:
<?php
$categoryvariable=$cat; // assign the variable as current category
$query= ‘cat=’ . $categoryvariable. ‘&orderby=date&order=ASC’; //concatenate the query
query_posts($query); //run the query
?>
Now, dumping this just before the while (have_posts()) : the_post(); line, ensuring you swap out ($query) with (’showposts=10&cat=’.$cat) will give you what you want - upto 10 posts of the category selected by the user.
Sadly, this will break the displaying of your tags, which simply won’t do! Off to the drawing board again!
My starter for ten was to try creating my own bunch of if statements to alter the query based on whether it was a category or a tag just before my while statement. No good, broke the whole page instead of just a specific functionality. Then a lightbulb flickered inside.
There’s already an if statement determining what to do based on the users actions right at the top… why don’t I just sneak them into there? I’m cutting down on additional if statements and making the code cleaner. So, I bodged together the code and got the following:
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<div class=”item entry”>
<?php $post = $posts[0]; // Hack. Set $post so that the_date() works. ?>
<?php /* If this is a category archive */ if (is_category()) { ?>
Not bad for someone who only knows basic HTML and lacks any knowledge of how wordpress functions internally. Tho, as I said, it’s still prolly lame to those who actually know what they’re doing - but I’m not them, and this was my victory
If you know of a better way of doing this or if this opens the site up to a vulnerability, please let me know in the comments.
Well, as the dust settles on moving from Leeds to Sheffield, my attention returns to working on Vertical Slice.
Not only did I finally crank out a new episode
But I’ve also been tweaking the new website over at dev.verticalslice.tv, not to mention filling it with all of the episodes produced so far. The plan is to migrate dev into being the new www and sliding the old tumblr based one into being a blog for the podcast.
Of course this means setting up a host for it, which I’ll get round to later on.
I’ve also split off the videos into its own account on youtube, this way I’ll be able to keep vertical slice content on its own and let me continue to upload utter trash without getting in the way.
Then there is the facebook presence.
So far, it had only been a group… A poorly visited group.
So, instead I have set up a fan page and hope to keep that updated and running instead of the languishing group. Of course, I could always do with extra fans - especially when you can secure a decent URL once you hit 100 fans.
Many apologies for no episode of Vertical Slice last week, this was due to my constantly being on a train to Sheffield and chasing round and meeting people in order to secure a new flat there.
That, and the “studio” (read: living room) also looks like this right now:
I do have a spotlight episode that I have been editing on and off as well as plans to record a quick episode outside, provided it stops bloody well raining long enough…. that, and if I can find somewhere that won’t have me drowned out by the traffic!
Date of moving into the new place is the 20th, which means I’m gonna be without the net for a week or so (will… not… cope!!!).
However, once I’m back up and running in the new place (which has better acoustics than my current locations, so it’ll mean better sound!) I should be getting right back to schedule once again.
There have, also, been a few developments behind the scene that I can’t talk about right now… but it will mean a boost to the show if I manage to pull it off.
And finally, I do have plans to move away from using tumblr as the grunt behind verticalslice.tv but development of the new site is very slow as there is only me pratting around with it right now and I have *no idea* what I’m doing in PHP!
If you want to see how things are shaping up just clicky clicky, if you feel that you can help just drop me an email and I’ll be more than happy to work with you. You’d also get a copy of the eventual template to use as you wish, as long as you’re not selling it to others.
Work on Vertical Slice continues. I have an interview with The CodeMonkeys that is in editing right now.
There is now a domain for the place, sitting on it’s own at www.verticalslice.tv. It’s still powered by tumblr until I can afford hosting of my own and figure out how to power it. In addition to the new domain, I’ve begun uploading non-coolshite branded episodes to a blip.tv account in order to take advantage of their itunes distribution, which now means the show is in the podcast directory - linkie.
This takes the strain off of my home net connection and makes it far simpler to publish the episodes, especially since the RSS feed generating app I was using has decided to randomly no longer output anything when I export to xml :S
In a little extra thing from today, Louis Gray posted something he does in response to people reposting and/or blogging about the items he posts to his sites. It’s a good idea and one that I have also decided to do as well. So, whenever someone blogs about or links to Vertical Slice I’ll pop a link to it in the bookmarks and tag it with “verticalslice”.
Of course, in setting this up it made me realise that one of the reasons why I’m not getting many viewers of the show is because no-one is telling anyone about it! Well, apart from one.. cheers Keith
This isn’t for lack of asking either, I’ve mentioned it to so many sites I’ve lost count yet the result is always the same - I’m ignored. No-one wants to pay any attention, which makes me wonder why.
The one thought I keep returning to is that the show is crap and not worth anyones time, yet this is incongruous to the general reception it gets from those that see it (unless they’re lying to me in order to protect my feelings). Maybe it’s just I’m an odious person that no-one likes… a certain possibility.
Whatever the reason is, lemmie know. It’ll make things easier for me to either determine whether I should keep doing the show or just give up and do something else.
And if you do like the show - tell people about it! Spreading it to others is the only way I’ll be able to keep making them.
Well, I’ve been playing around with Garageband - side note: now I know where some of the music in my fav podcasts come from! Was flicking thru the sample loops and going “OMG, that’s blahblahblah show!” every so often >.<
Anyway, main reason for this is to solve the problem of there being very little music in my show. Though, I do have a friend of my GF making some 8bit music for me, I thought I’d fill the gap until then and give Garageband a try.
First, a little disclosure: I’m shit with music. I enjoy listening to it, but I’m totally buggered when it comes to making it - not a damn clue. Which means whatever I make out of this app will likely be pure dross.
After about a couple of hours I finally end up with a 3min track that I will be using in the “Gadget Show Live” footage episode that I’ll be uploading a little bit later today.
If you want a little sneak peek or if you even want to use it in your own shows, just grab a copy here as you’re free to use this in whatever way you want, just as long as you slip a credit to me and/or a link to this site.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The money finally came in… and quickly went out as I splurged on some much needed hardware and software.
First up was the single most needed item - a real camera!
Bye bye lil’ webcam at last!
In the end, instead of the 200 to 300 quid I wanted to spend; it turned into 450 as I stumped up for a Canon HF100 flash based HD camera. What made me break the limit? A mic input! This means I’ll be spending on a tie-clip mic tomorrow and hopefully retiring my samson c03u mic from general use in the shows.
In the most recent show I used the onboard mic from the camera in order to gauge the capabilities (sucky!) which is why I’ll be looking for some mics to plug into it and didn’t sync up separate audio from my samson because of the next purchase…
A macbook and a copy of final cut express 4.
Yes, Vertical Slice has gone dirty and is no longer produced 100% on windows.
And because I had a whole new video editing app to contend with, I didn’t lump syncing audio onto my shoulders too - as it turns out, the only things to give me trouble were the differences in chroma keying and garbage matte between Premiere and Final Cut. That and a little flap about where the videos were hiding on the memory card - it wasn’t an outright video file, imovie nabbed them easily tho after Final Cut claimed there wasn’t any devices to capture from >.<
Still, the result of a brand new camera and editing platform can be seen here below… well worth it I think!
Oh, and I’ll post pictures of the latest edition uber shiny to my network. (the screen is the only thing I find annoying about this macbook!)
Well, at the suggestion of my GF I put together a makeshift green screen out of some green material and a 4×4 slab of plywood. Total of £15 spent on materials… not bad
A few pins down the sides and those creases cleared up nicely. However, the crappyness of my webcam is beginning to really show up now. I had to use the zoom since the board was just a little too small, this has lead to some pixellation on the video.
When messing about with the chromakey effect in Premiere, I had to use 4 of them at some points and I still couldn’t get rid of the green halo without causing my neck to vanish too (and it does in some clips).
It is becoming clearer every video I do that I really need to be investing in a new camera that can keep pace with the meddling I am getting up to. I also have a bit of news that cheered me up no end.
Next week I’ll be announcing just what that news was… Until then, please enjoy the first vertical slice using a green screen!
Thursdays episode of vertical slice sees my exploration of how Adobe Premiere works and an attempt to streamline integration of my sources.
Previously, I used SnagIT to record a section of my screen as I scrolled down the page. This took a silly amount of time, was quite fiddly and is far from a smooth movement.
Instead, I simply grabbed the webpage as a jpeg and cropped it down to a reasonable size for dumping into my sources.
Once in there, I turned to the effects panels and began playing around with the settings and figured out how keyframing works.
I was quite surprised at how such a simple thing can really improve not only the production quality of the project; but also made my life so much easier - not only can I do this with webpages, but it allows me to bring in various images and give them a bit of life too.
This has also had the knock on effect of making the timeline somewhat more complex than the simple overlays it had previously.
However, in the mini-euphoria of figuring out these effects, I had to remain mindful of not going “star-wipe” crazy and sprinkle them all over the damn thing. I’m hoping that the end result is much improved… I still need to tackle the issue of lighting tho, something that is going to require a bit of smart investment unfortunately.
Tuesdays video is to show the random side - I hope to produce more random stuff, sometimes ingame footage; sometimes in meatspace.
It’s more of a whimsical kinda thing to break up the flow and to provide me with a stash of vids I can call up should it be needed. For this video it was more of a “wow, there’s some odd names tonight” and then one game a guy started playing the A-Team theme tune and then the Flight of the Valkyries. I just had to grab them!
Wednesdays I hope will become “Buttonmasher Test Day” (people will be looking for stuff to watch while they wait for the Zero Punctuation rush to die down!) and will be the time slot for the weekly videos. I really, really wish to use this episode as a means for getting interaction between viewers and the show. So, with that in mind I’d like for you guys to try making the intro, the think-time clips and the outro. Those used will be added to the credits.
I would love to be able to give prizes away for this, so if any of you know someone in a position to give me crap to give away please send them my way!
Oh, and when I said I was doing Vertical Slice on a budget of zero, I wasn’t kidding.. have a look at the “studio”!
The mic, mouse and webcam trail off to a half-deck Toshiba L20 hooked up to an old 15″ tft of mine - also known as my TV PC for the bedroom.
