Anthology of Ideas

Version 2.2 of INAP has been released albeit a little behind schedule. Visit the main information page here. If you have any trouble with it you can email me at admin@anthologyoi.com.

Areté literal translates to English as virtue or excellence, but to the ancient Greeks it is the concept of being the best at anything. Originally only applied to soldiers and their combat prowess, the concept eventually spread throughout Greek society to apply to anyone who was good at a skill– a potters areté was pottery. However, the term was not just a word the the Greeks, it was the driving force of the culture, and promoted the isolationism and the patriotism of the individual Greek polies.

Just a few little tips for WordPress: If you don’t want the titles of posts to have the » character before them for SEO purposes just use: < ?php echo trim(wp_title('&raquo;',false), '&raquo; ');?> I was sick of my index.php being used to display pages, so I added the following to the top of my index.php to force WordPress to use single.php for all pages: < ?php if(is_page()){ include(&#039;single.php&#039;); exit; } ?> I wanted to be able to use javascript in some of my pages so I added the following to my header.php: <?php if(is_page()){ $j = get_post_meta($post->ID, &#039;header&#039;, true); if($j != &#039;&#039;){ echo $j; } } ?> Now anytime I need special style or javascript code added for a particular page I just add a custom field with the name header.

I was sick of having a half dozen different plugins to add meta tags and fix the robots, so I wrote a plugin that prevents duplicate content from being indexed by Google, adds useful meta tags, and ensures that all posts are at one single permalink (using 301 redirects of course). This is more a shell of a plugin than an actual plugin as there are no options, and there are obvious flaws such as it doesn’t allow you to use paged posts.

In the footsteps of Hemingway I thought a good step while trying to decide what to do with the Creating a World section would be to give a few short stories. Baby is born, dies, declares war. Mother’s son, Mother’s pride, Mother’s murderer. Empty valley, flood, bodies floating away.

This minor revving fixes a bug with magic quotes and one which effectively disabled custom theme templates.