June 14, 2008

HOW TO : Create dynamic pages in WordPress

I have decided to run the Chicago Marathon again this year. But this time, I am running it for a cause. I am raising money for the ASHA foundation, a non profit entity helping to educate the poor and needy in India. As part of the fundraising process, I wanted to share my training information with the folks that are donating for this cause and hence the need for this post.

I was looking into creating a dynamic page in wordpress (the software that powers this blog) that would list all the posts related to my training for the marathon. Google came to the rescue as usual and pointed me to the “InLine Posts” plugin by Aral Balkan.

You can do create a dynamic page by

1) Download the “InLine Posts” plugin from here : http://aralbalkan.com/wordpress

2) Unzip the file and upload the contents to the plugins folder in your wordpress install. It is located in the wp-content folder.

3) Activate the plugin by logging into the admin interface of your wordpress install.

4) Create a new page and add the number of the post you want displayed in the page by listing the post ID in the following format : [[POST_ID]]

Tools of the trade : IBM Page Detailer

I discovered IBM Page Detailer, a tool to analyze web traffic between a client and a server in a graphical format, while listening to the brilliant Steve Sounder’s lecture on “Even Faster Web Sites” from the Google I/O 2008 conference. And credit goes to Ray for posting the list of videos from the Google I/O conference.

Am still playing around with this tool, but it looks like there is a lot of potential here. Rather than acting as a proxy, like most of the HTTP analyzers do, this tool actually places a probe in the clients network stack. And not to mention that it is free to use :).