Daniel, from Daily Blog Tips, found an interesting plugin called WP-Chunk which can truncate long URLS which may occasionally turn up in comments.

For Example,

A URL like:
http://www.domain.com/test/subfolder/x=123/article=id8A133F52D0FD71AB86256C
would become
http://www.domain.com/test/...86C

If you're interested in truncating these long URLs, and don't mind adding a new plugin to your WordPress installation it looks quite handy.

I did want to share a quick CSS related alternative to anyone who wanted to avoid adding to their WordPress install. As you can see both here and on Daniel's post concerning WP-Chunk, the code box allows for scrolling when a URL is too long to fit in it. This is accomplished by adding a small line of code to your CSS stylesheet. You can do something similar for comments.

Simply find the identifier which represents comments and add "overflow:auto" this instructs the browser to turn any element containing long strings to scroll instead of pass beyond the boundaries. Alternately you can also use "overflow:hidden" like I do in my comment section. This allows the long URL to exist but hides it from displaying on the page.

It's not as good a solution as WP-Chunk but it can certainly work for you.

My secret web related ambition is to start a podcast. While I have plenty of ideas for topics and formats branching into podcasting fills me with trepidation.

When Darren Rowse posted a link to Blogger & Podcaster the other day I was totally intrigued. Right now the podcast doesn't seem to be available but there is a copy of the magazine available on the site. If you're at all interested in Blogging or Podcasting be sure to check it out.

The digital copy of the magazine is free and the podcast should be coming soon.

Last week was extremely stressful. Between hunting for a new host, planning a trip out of town, and dealing with another new issue on this site's backend I'm totally burned out.

I'm challenging myself to form sentences right now let alone come up with things to blog about. Thankfully I have a few stock topics saved and, while reviewing those, I had a shot of inspiration for this post. 4 Things you can do to fight blogger's block.
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I've been working on a template for a new site and recently had to add a special function to the sidebar.

Because I expect this site to see a lot of traffic in the archives I wanted a way to promote the new posts when visitors were looking at old ones. Something I've done in the past, which has always worked nicely, has been the inclusion of a list of the most recent posts in the sidebar. Using a WordPress conditional tag and the WordPress Loop we can setup an item to show off the recent posts and hopefully push traffic through some of the newer sections of the post.

This post is part of a series which will outline the steps you can use to get your recent posts listed in your sidebar. With a little bit of playing around you can also use these methods to accomplish some other goals - but I'll leave that up to you for now. In this post we'll cover the basics of the is_single Conditional Tag.
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Up until last night I was very happy with my hosting provider. Last month I even signed up for a two year package because the everything was going so smoothly.

Last night everything went south. Pages were loading slowly and ultimately not at all. Then, out of the blue, I started getting error messages telling me that the MySQL server was basically going AWOL. For whatever reason the MySQL server decided that it couldn't handle the load that this site was putting on it.

I contacted my host and discovered that according to them "WordPress is not an ideal solution for most users." They went on to tell me that I needed to find better blogging software.

Obviously I expressed my dissatisfaction with this and explained to them it was time for me to find a new hosting provider.  For two years WordPress has run fine on their servers.  They even recommend using WordPress!

Suddenly Sunday night, though, their server just quit.  So here I am, searching for a new host.  Anyone have any suggestions?