I’ve been playing around with backing up my tweets lately. At this point I’m using the Twitter Tools plugin to create a weekly digest. Since I created a Tumble-blog not to long ago to share social stuff like this I also wanted the tweets to go to tumblr. Part of this was just a way to clean up Tumblr and not create a new post everytime I tweet.

Now, having the tweets on the blog is mostly for me. I didn’t want to bombard people that are subscribed to the RSS feed with this weekly mashup of all my tweets, but still be able to have the RSS feed to send to Tumblr or for anybody that wants it.

This is what I ended up doing:

function tweetRSS123($query) {
	if ($query->is_feed && !is_category()) {
		$query->set('cat','-1');
		}
return $query;
}

add_filter('pre_get_posts','tweetRSS123');

I got the idea somewhere on the web that I can’t remember. The big change that I made was !is_category(). Which just says if it’s a category archive, don’t do anything. So it won’t remove the category from RSS if you actually take the RSS of that category.

So far it seems to be working. It’s hard to tell if it’s going to get along with the W3 Total Cache plugin, but I think I’m finally at a point where it’s going to work. It’s going to be really awesome if this works because I just spent an hour throwing together a plugin to send it to Tumblr just-in-case, but I’d really rather not use it.

If You Want to Use It

So there are two ways of using this snippet in your own theme. The way I’m doing it is to put this in the functions.php file for your theme, which gets treated just like a plugin except that it’s on a per-theme basis. This is where you can put any PHP function that are specific to your theme.

The other way would be to to add just a little bit more code and install it as a plugin, which is probably what I’ll be doing a little later when I get some free time to throw that together. The advantage of using something like this as a plugin instead of in your functions file is that it stays around for any theme that you use. If you forget to add this to the next theme you use though, your category is going to show up again.

You’ll have to remember to change the ‘-1′ value to the negative of the category ID that you want to exclude. The value is negative because we want to exclude it. If it were positive it would only include that category, which probably isn’t a good idea for your RSS feed.

Last week when I was in the CSS-Tricks forums, somebody wanted to modify the functionality of Chris Coyier’s anythingSlider. Not a huge change, he just wanted to make the slider advance to the next panel when you click “Go”. Made sense to me. By the time you click “Go”, you’re done looking at that panel and are ready for the next one. If it doesn’t advance until after whatever delay you’ve setup, it could be confusing.

Basically what we want to do is make the slider advance to the next panel when we click go, which is the same as advancing to the next panel after we click the start/stop button if the slider ends up playing. It sounds complicated, but it will make more sense when we look at the code.

Both YouTube and Vimeo recently gave an option to watch videos in HTML5. I switched right away knowing that every time I try to play an HD video on YouTube, my Macbook fan spins up because of the heat caused from flash processing. On the Dell Mini I just bought, I couldn’t even watch HD videos on youtube because HD video in flash was too much for the atom processor.

When I saw that YouTube and Vimeo were offering HTML5 instead of flash video, I immediately tested both of the above mentioned issues. The fan in the macbook stayed quiet and the Dell Mini didn’t have any problems when I watched HD content with HTML5 video instead of flash. This is an example of the power of HTML5 video and why Apple decided to skip flash on the iPad.

The other thing that I really like about this is the fact that it pushes the HTML5 spec forward that much more. Obviously Google is involved in developing HTML5, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to see this on YouTube. Vimeo, however, is not involved — at least that i know of — in developing the HTML5 specification and just wants clean, efficient code. HTML5 is a good way to do that.

Finally, Adam Curry recently explained on “The Cranky Geeks” that it’s going to take a long time to derail flash video because of all the money invested in technologies used for ad agencies such as pre-rolls, but I think it would be pretty easy to develop a similar system that work in HTML5.

All in all, this is good for everyone except Adobe and flash developers. I’m not so worried about the flash developers though, the good ones have the skills to be useful in more than just flash video.