As it were...

Here's what I want to do with my custom content type.

1. Get a multi-dimensional array of all the of the posts in a custom content type, arranged by parent/child relationship.
2. Feed that into a WordPress Menu.
3. Whenever a new post is made, it updates that Menu, whether by wiping it out and re-creating it, or being smart enough to put it in the right place.

Additionally, I want to:

1. Do this for several content types.
2. Make each of the mentioned content types a main node on my primary nav, so that all their children are drop menus.

Any ideas?

Take a look at the primary nav on http://fhnsports.com/. Right now that's a regular WordPress custom menu, and all the menu items are regular Pages, but I need to recreate it in a different way.

In our new system all those Sports page are custom content type elements, and Editors will NOT have access to edit them. I want to build a menu where everything under the HQ nav item is Pages, automatically added as they come into existence. Then the sports areas are built from my custom content type, existing in the menu based on criteria I determine (does the school have that sport? etc).

It's almost like I want to combine the results of two wp_nav_menu calls into one menu.

I've considered doing exactly that, hardcoding the menu wrapper, and then simply running the two wp_nav_menu calls inside that.

I know WordPress can automatically add pages to a custom menu, but can we have one where it'll automatically add posts from a custom content type?

I've been freelancing now for almost two years. Last November I took a contract to build a WordPress plugin for Varsity News Network. It was a big job and they realized they would need me for a lot more than they could afford so we started talking about working for equity in the company.

Almost a year and a half later VNN has been growing pretty solidly and a few weeks ago we took investment. Now we're Big Time.

The obvious questions are how this is going to affect my life. Firstly I'll be working full time on VNN. As part owner instead of employee I have some flexibility in when and where I work though, so I'm not entirely losing the Freelance Freedom.

Secondly I'll be continuing my own company, codeventure, but in a project manager role, and having the coding done by sub-contractors. I have a guy right now that I think I can keep going full time. Heavens knows I was going full time.

The dream of course is that VNN will hit the startup lottery and sell for a bazillion dollars someday soon, but the reality is that it's going to be a lot of work for years. THEN sell for a bazllion dollars. :)

Anyone who's worked on a startup knows that hard work, passion, and a great product CAN result in success, but there are no promises at all. We shall see what happens.

The other day we got a hamster for the girls, and they named her Violet. Here's what my eldest said to me this morning when she came down from bed.

"Can I tell you something cute I just saw, dad?"

"Sure", I replied.

"This morning when I checked on Violet she was curled up sleeping at the bottom of her ramp! It was so cute! Either that or she's dead."

So gruesome. Happy Halloween!

One of the things that's always frustrated me about Twitter is that it's very very hard to find your own tweets from more than about a month ago. I've always wanted something that would save my tweets, and tell me things about them.

There are lots of services that will do this for me, but then I'm paying a monthly fee and I still don't really own the data, it's stored someplace I can't really get at it.

This is where ThinkUp comes in. It's an open source social media analyzation tool that you can install on your own server. Just like all the services you need to let it access your twitter account, but unlike the services it's your own piece of software doing it, you're not giving them unfettered access to your data.

I've been running it for several days now and I'm very impressed. It does a good job saving my data and telling me good things about it. They made it really easy to make it run at intervals; you can do old fashioned cron, run it manually, or make your favorite rss reader ping a url every so often to do it.

It's in active development, has good documentation, and there's an irc channel for live support.

I highly recommend it.

The other day my wife and Sophi were joking around. Sophi was standing by the stairs and my wife was on the couch, holding some scissors. Sophi pretending to talk incessantly, and my wife said "hush child!". Sophi said "Make me!". My wife said "I'll cut your tongue out!", to which Sophi replied "No you can't, I can run, and you can't!" Because you can't run with scissors or course.

Our neighbor across the street gave the girls a magic set, and they were discussing the stage names they wanted to take. Sophi said "I don't care, as long as I get to be the beautiful assistent."

This morning Sophi was washing her face with some special face soap, and yelled from the bathroom "HA! Face soap is like shampoo for your eyebrows!"