After trying out the Sideblog plugin for WordPress for two months on Fanmode, I’m reasonably comfortable with it so I added the plugin to create a sideblog on this site’s left sidebar.
Naturally, there were complications.
For some reason I can’t discern, the plugin automatically includes paragraph breaks. There’s a CSS workaround for that but, unusually for me, I was content to let that be.
However, I got it in my head that I was going to exclude the sideblog entries from the list of recently written posts. This proved particularly complicated since neither the get_archives (which has been deprecated) or wp_get_archives WordPress functions allow posts from a particular category to be excluded. The solution is to custom code that. It looks complicated but it works perfectly.
The author of the code, rembem, noted:
There is one disadvantage: only post that have ONLY category 18 assigned, are excluded. If a post has other categories besides category 18 assigned, it will not be excluded.
However, that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. I’ve got a few posts that have multiple categories including the one I want excluded and none of them show up on the Recently Written lists. So, not only does the code work great, it works better than the author expected.
