15 February

I am so anonymous

Me.I’ve always been a bit wary of revealing too much information about myself online. Given some past incidents with (admittedly indeterminate) potential for danger to my person, it’s been clear that there is no anonymity online. That said, I’ve taken some solace in the fact that my name is common. So common, in fact, that I don’t even mind stating online that I live in Minneapolis, because last time I checked, there were a column and a half of Scott Andersons in the Minneapolis phone book, and I’m not even one of them!

But I’ve always kind of had this idea that I’m “the” Scott Anderson of the Internet. I figured that I’m so immersed in this stuff and have been for so long (having created my first website in 1994), and I’ve encountered so few other Scott Andersons online that I must, therefore, have the greatest online presence of any of the world’s (approximately) hundred megabazillion Scott Andersons.

A quick Google search taught me how wrong I was.

It’s not just that there are a lot of other Scott Andersons online; they all seem like they’re more me than me: musicians, writers, photographers, all manner of creative activities. And I (the real Scott Anderson) didn’t even show up until page 5 of the results!

So now it’s clear to me that I need to become a little less anonymous! Either I need to plaster my name all over everything I do, or I need a less common name. Given my inherent laziness, I’m inclined to go with the latter. I wonder if Griddlecake K. Catafalque is taken.

A fix for a fix in WordPress 2.1

One thing that surprised me when I started using WordPress again is that its search function only searches on blog posts, not on static pages. I suppose if most WordPress sites are 99.9% blog posts, then it probably makes sense, but I have enough static pages on my site that I’d like to make searchable to warrant changing this.

Fortunately, someone has. Unfortunately this “Search Pages” plug-in is out of date and no longer works with current versions of WordPress. I dug in a bit and figured out why: the plug-in alters the SQL query that performs the search, but the substring it replaces in the query no longer exists! So I hunted down the place where the query occurs in the WordPress core, adjusted the plug-in as needed, and it works!

Here, then, is my hack of the Search Pages plug-in, modified to work with WordPress 2.1. (I’m not sure which other versions of WordPress it will or will not work with.)

[ search_pages.php.tar.gz ] [ search_pages.php.zip ]