The burning hulk of what was once Twitter is sinking into the swamp; as much as I will miss what it was, it is unquestionably time to abandon what it is now. Before I did that, though, I wanted to leave a note on my account, telling people where they could find me; and if I was going to send anybody here I figured I should make sure everything at Strange Radiation was working properly, so I spent the afternoon cleaning the carbon scoring off the matter collider and otherwise getting the place ready for visitors.

This is where it’s going to get a little nerdy. You have been warned.

Technical Notes: Implementing a Post Comment Count for Lovecraft

The most interesting aspect of that process, for me, was the chance to address what struck me as a nagging absence in Anders Norén’s beautiful Lovecraft WordPress theme: the lack of a comment count on in the post metadata field on the index page. Unable to find an explicit solution online — it seems as if the question has been asked a few times but never answered — I taught myself just enough about WordPress child themes to do it myself. If you want to do the same, create a child theme (as detailed, say, here), and then, in your function.php file, duplicate the bit of the Lovecraft parent functions pertaining to <div class="post-meta">. Into that bit of code, insert a single new line at the appropriate spot:

<p class="post-comments"><a href="<?php comments_link(); ?>"><?php comments_number( '0 comments', '1 comment', '% comments' ); ?></a></p>

Presto! That’s it. While I was in there I also got rid of the part of the same div that put the author’s name on every single post, because dude, it’s just me in here. No css changes were needed. If this helps YOU customize things, great; just don’t forget to back everything up before you get out the wrench.