I’ve created this plugin to test a “choose your own adventure” story in a dashboard widget using a simple switch statement and query strings. I borrowed the story from a Kingdom of Loathing PDF, which can be found here.

Click here to download Kingdom of Loathing: The Home Game: Pirate WordPress Dashboard Widget Edition

This is one of those projects that’s full of really awesome stuff that you just can’t see. On the face of it, it’s a little reference tool that displays the contact information of assigned chaplains by code number, and it remembers your code for the next time you need to reference it. This site also automatically updates it’s listings from a remote database and writes it’s own reports. It also features a heavily-modified backend so that a user can make updates by hand and context-appropriate database information and it’s just one of those sites where just about everything got touched. The front end is kind of ridiculously simple, but to make that go required crazy complex stuff.

*:  They got the client, came up with the crazy idea, implemented the design, and ported the whole thing to mobile. Basically they got to do all the sexy stuff and I got to write code.

That was fun, but the real excitement came when they wanted to completely restructure the entire site, and go backwards from a Multisite to a single WordPress install. This required a bunch of things: several weeks of building an entirely new database by hand so as to preserve all of the data, meta-data relationships, and authors, building a location-aware theme to deliver different branding based on subject, exhaustively reprogramming all of their advertising code, and building a fleet of custom widget plugins to display all the new data we liberated for them.

“A great weight was lifted off my shoulders since I started working with Meredith. She is incredibly flexible, reliable and professional — I couldn’t have asked for better. Mer goes above and beyond what I would have expected from a freelance developer to make sure that I’m happy and comfortable with any changes. What would have been an otherwise difficult and stressful redesign process has been a dreamy breeze.” — Doris Nhan

My name is Meredith, and I go by a lot of titles, depending on who I’m talking to. If I’m talking to another business owner, I usually call myself WordPress Developer. If I’m talking to someone who may not be all that tech savvy, I just call myself a programmer. But, if I’m talking to other techy types, particularly other web pros, I get real honest:

I’m the website unfucker.

Yeah, I know, I’m not you’d call squeamish around strong language.

Here’s the thing: WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world. This means that everybody everywhere knows at least a little bit about how to use it. This means that most geeks out there have a specialty technology, and they also do WordPress, too, and most employees of companies that have WordPress sites can do quite a lot of tinkering with their existing site. Most of the time, this is just fine, but sometimes, this can lead to all sorts of problems.

It also leads to business owners across the world screaming “Please, someone unfuck my website!”

And that’s where I come in.

It turns out that, while WordPress developers are in high demand, what people need more is advanced website support. Clients don’t necessarily need developers to code up projects for them, they need someone with all the same skills as a developer to dive into their existing site and unfuck it up. Clients have often already invested large sums of money into their website, and they would rather fix what’s broken than spend all that money all over again. And, increasingly, they’re coming to me.

WordPress unfucking is bit more complicated than you might think, and this is why you really need a skilled developer to do it. Most of the time, the problems are in the theme, so you need someone who speaks PHP reasonably well, is fluent in all current and deprecated WordPress functions, who understands HTML, and who can word with CSS. Sometimes it’s not, which usually means more PHP and frequently means that the problem is in the database, so you need to know MySQL and you need to have an understanding of how WordPress uses it’s database. These aren’t wildly uncommon skills, they’re all useful for a developer, but they’re all critical for a successful website unfucker.

Here’s where I get to brag a little. I’ve unfucked leading news and information site SmartBlogs.com, I’ve unfucked best-selling author Patti Digh’s website, 37Days.com, I’ve unfucked the site of leading strategy and consulting firm, EblinGroup(.com), and I’ve unfucked marketing and brand expert Mary Ellen Slayter’s site, RepCapitalMedia.com.

If you like, I can unfuck your WordPress site as well. I’m available! Just fill out the form here, and I’ll get in contact with you. Fair warning, I charge $90/hr, and I don’t offer discounts. Don’t let that scare you, though, one of the reasons I can charge that much is that I can get a lot of unfucking done in an hour.

The solution I found was adding this code to your functions.php file:

function bd_shortcode_killinfeed( $atts, $content ) {

if ( ! is_feed() )
return apply_filters( ‘the_content’, $content );

return ”;

}
add_shortcode( ‘killinfeed’, ‘bd_shortcode_killinfeed’ );

Once you add that, all you need to do is wrap whatever content you don’t want in the feed in [killinfeed] tags. Once you do that, your problems disappear. From your feed.

The cool part is that this code totally works in reverse. Say you want to encourage people to subscribe to your RSS feed, and as an incentive, you tell them that there’s exclusive content in posts on the feed. Add this code to your functions.php file, and you’ll now have a shortcode [addtofeed] that will publish content exclusively to your feed, and vanish on your blog.

function bd_shortcode_addtofeed( $atts, $content ) {

if ( is_feed() )
return apply_filters( ‘the_content’, $content );

return ”;

}
add_shortcode( ‘addtofeed’, ‘bd_shortcode_killinfeed’ );

Easy as pie. This is based on the code posted by Jason from DesignPX. Thanks dude!

Ingredients

• Fruit. Pineapples and peaches are classic grilling fruits, but I discovered apples to amazingly well. You can grill pretty much anything that isn’t too watery, and if you want to grill little chunky fruits, like strawberries or cut up melon, have some skewers ready.
• 16 oz ricotta cheese
• 8 ox whipped cream cheese
• A liquid sweetener. Honey, molasses, agave, Karo, even simple syrup is fine here. You can also substitute artificial sweetener if you really want. Granulated sugar need not apply.
• corn tortillas
• cooking oil
• granulated sugar (yes, I know what I just said)
• salt
• garam masala spice powder

Sweet Ricotta Spread

Let your cream cheese and ricotta come to room temperature, then combine them with a couple of tablespoons of honey, to taste, but don’t make it too sweet. Stir it thoroughly, and refrigerate.

Spice Mix

1 part salt, 1 part sugar, 3 parts garam masala, more or less. You won’t need a huge quantity of this stuff, so don’t go crazy.

Directions

Time to fire up the grill and get your fruit ready. The bigger your fruit stays, the easier it’ll be to move around on the grill and the more forgiving it’ll be in cooking time. (example) Smear a little oil on your fruit, sprinkle with your prepared spice mix, and slap it on the grill.

How long should you cook it? You’ll be about halfway done when the scent starts attracting curious bystanders, but overall it’ll be 15-20 minutes, depending on the phase of the moon and heat of your grill and whatnot. You’re looking for soft, hot fruit, attractive grill marks on all sides, and an overall golden brown deliciousness. While you’re there, grill your tortillas.

Once everything is cooked, slice up your fruit into little manageable pieces, smear a dollop of the ricotta spread on a tortilla, load up some fruit, and serve it forth.

Sadly, I have no photos of the final product, because people were too busy shoving it in their faces. Which isn’t really that sad, if you think about it.

Sometimes, we learn about the spirit of Christmas from the most unexpected place.

J.E. Ignatius McNeill is a laptop wrangler in Raleigh, NC who spends the better part of his free time daydreaming about robots that fall in love and aliens who are allergic to milk. You can find out more about him at  twitter.com/dreamrock.