January 13th, 2005
Planet Xavier
#558
Coming attractions
Within the next month, I plan to roll out a new feature for pX: the exclude command. It’ll go something like this: if you include a simple line like #exclude Planet Xavier (not case sensitive) anywhere in your post, that particular post will be ignored by pX.
Why in the world would you want to do that? I’ve noticed that many of you have slight qualms about getting all your posts syndicated by pX. Justin, for example, posted a call to action on pX some time ago. Various others went through their old posts, deleting them en masse.
Many of you, furthermore, will be able to stick that line of code in an HTML comment, like so:
<!-- #exclude Planet Xavier -->
So far I’ve found it to work in Movable Type, Blogger, Bloglines, and MSN Spaces. It also presumably works in TypePad, WordPress, GreyMatter, Blosxom, Radio, Manila, etc. You may have to stick the comment in the middle your entry’s text to get it to work.
The comment technique doesn’t work in LiveJournal, and I’m not confident that it’ll work in Xanga (someone please test it out for me). But you can stick the exclude code somewhere in your post (like at the end, in a really small font), and it’ll still work.
This isn’t necessarily the code that pX will use. I came up with something a bit convoluted, so that you won’t accidentally exclude yourself by saying something like, “I hereby exclude Planet Xavier from my list of bookmarks.” (Not that you’d ever say such a thing.)
If you find the code too hard to type, and you’d like pX to use something simpler, please let me know; we can work something out.
You can thank the wonderful developers of Planet for getting this all to work.
3/27/2005 @ 9:46 PM
Minh’s Notes
Old stuff
I’ve upgraded pX again. Plus: The exclusion mechanism finally works now!