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Episode: 977
Title: HPR0977: Setting Up a WordPress Blog: part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0977/hpr0977.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:57:44
---
Hello.
This is Frank Bell again with what is the second of what looks like is going to be a series
of four podcasts on setting up a WordPress blog.
The first one was on installation.
This one would be about basic navigation of the administrative interface and certain
important items within that interface.
The third one will be about appearance and themes and the fourth one about maintenance.
Originally, this was going to be the one about appearance, but as I tried to lay that out,
I realized that the number of the things I needed to talk about in reference to configuring
the appearance needed to have the groundwork laid as regards how you navigate WordPress
and what some of the terms and features are.
I'm going to approach this from the standpoint of someone who has full administrative access
to the administrative interface.
WordPress does have the capability of configuring various levels of administrative rights.
I'll mention those in more detail a little later, but for anyone who's setting up a personal
blog, which I would expect that the great majority of the folks who might listen to this
would be doing, they're likely to have the full run of the house as it were.
For someone who's never seen the backside of a WordPress blog, I've uploaded some screenshots
of four or five of the representative pages of the administrative side.
You can download those from my website.
The link is www.pineviewfarm.net, Fourslash, Misk, Mike, NDS, Sierra, Charlie, Fourslash,
capital W, capital P, hyphen, screens, as in screenshot, screens with an S dot zip.
You, I do not have FTP access available for visitors, but if you put that link into your
browser and head in that direction, the file save as dialogue should appear.
When you're first logged into WordPress, you will be looking at what WordPress calls the
dashboard.
On the right-hand column is WordPress news.
There are links there to the WordPress development blog and to the WordPress planet blog.
The links, by the way, will be in the show note, any link that I mentioned I will try to
remember to put in the show notes.
Those are configurable.
If you hover your mouse over the title bar, a configure item will appear and you can
click on that to configure how many posts are displayed at a time.
You can even change the RSS feeds if you wish.
In the center at the top, there's a display of your current status.
That displays on the left-hand side, the number of posts you have, the number of pages,
the number of categories and the number of tags.
On the right-hand side of the status display are the total number of comments, the number
of approved comments, the number of comments awaiting moderation, also called pending comments,
and the number of comments tagged as spam.
You can click on any one of these items and it will take you to the appropriate place
in the interface.
If you click on the post item, it will take you to the list of posts.
If you click on the spam comments item, it will take you to the list of spam comments.
From there, you can manipulate the item in question, edit, delete, or what have you.
Underneath the status display, there is a display of the most recent comments.
Underneath that, a display of the most recent incoming links from other blogs or websites.
On the left is the menu itself.
I am going to list all the different items on the menu, but I am not going to go into
detailed discussion of every item and every sub-menu item.
Let alone every setting.
I figure that if you can get WordPress installed and then you go to the setting for reading and
you see an item that says, display X number of posts per page, you can figure out that
if you put 10 in there, 10 posts will display and if you put 15 in there, 15 posts will
display.
I am not going to try to beat people with death with trivia.
The top menu item is the link to the dashboard itself.
It has three sub-menu items, home, updates, and a Kismet stats.
I will talk quite a bit about a Kismet later on in this podcast.
The updates item will take you to see the list of any updates that WordPress has published.
I will discuss that in the maintenance podcast and the home section is the display that
I just described to you.
Next is the list of posts and sub-menu items include all posts, add a new post, post categories
and post tags.
Then media and this gives you two items, add new and look at the library.
The add new will open up the WordPress uploader which you can use to upload pictures or podcast
or anything you want to upload in the way of a binary file or even a PDF or a text file
for that matter.
Once it is uploaded, a dialog displays which shows the link to where it is stored and
in the case of a picture, for example, gives you a choice of the size to display it at,
however you want to thumbnail if you are not for entering the alternate text for someone
who might be visually impaired and trying to read your site for the screen reader.
It is a very, very useful, oh, and it can also give you a choice as to whether you want
it aligned to the left, aligned to the right or centered, a very handy little tool which
I think was introduced sometime in the early stages of WordPress version 2.
The library item under media gives you a chance to view the items that you have uploaded
with the WordPress media uploader, including thumbnails of pictures.
If you want to go back and find an old picture that you want to use again, this would be a
fairly handy way of doing it because with the default configuration WordPress starts
a new, shall we call it, gallery within the library for every month.
So if you are trying to wait through these links using an FTP client, you've got a lot
of waiting to do to find this stuff.
Next comes a links category where you can add links for other blogs, new sites, Linux
distributions, whatever you want to provide links to for your visitors to be able to click
on and visit.
Under there you can look at all your links, there's a dialog for adding new links and
a dialog for creating link categories.
I'll talk a bit about categories later on.
The next item is the Pages menu which gives you the choice to view your existing pages
or to create new ones.
I'll talk more about pages later.
Then there's the comments item, there's no sub menu for the comments, there's a list
of the comments and at the top of the list you can sort by all comments, comments awaiting
moderation, spam comments, much like you can from the dashboard.
Next is the Appearance item and that includes sub menus for themes which regulate the appearance
of your blog.
You might consider a theme again to what in some types of software refer to is scan
the theme, determine the placement and size of side bars, header, footer and the main
content window and other items that are viewable to the public, widgets, menus for building
custom menus and displaying them, and an editor which you can use to directly edit the
PHP and CSS files of the theme that you have selected.
I'll talk quite a bit about the Appearance item and how to use it in the next presentation
on Appearance.
Below that is plugins followed by users where you can add users and WordPress parlance.
A user is anyone who has a WordPress login and password to your site.
A user may be administrators, they may be editors, an editor being someone who can write
and publish his or her own posts and can edit other person's posts, authors who can write
and publish their own posts but cannot edit other person's posts, contributors who can
write posts but cannot publish them.
I once had a contributor for a short while before we sort of drifted apart and the reason
I made him a contributor was he couldn't spell.
At all, some people can spell, some people can't, he was one of the can't.
So anything he wrote, I wanted to check for spelling before taking it public and he was
quite happy with this arrangement because he knew he couldn't spell.
He was a great thinker, a wonderful logician but spelling just was not his thing.
The next to the last item on the default menu is tools and frankly I've never done
much in here.
There's a little tool that they say is for clipping bits of stuff from the web.
I've never seen fit to try it.
There are import tools for importing content.
If you're moving your database from say a Tumblr type blog, you can use this and it claims
it will import a Tumblr database.
I've used WordPress the whole time I've been blogging so I've never had any reason to
look into this.
And there's an export button which says that you can use that to export your content.
I tried that once quite a while ago when it was still new and it didn't work for me
and I never bothered to troubleshoot it.
I was already regularly exporting my content using PHP, MyAdmin.
That works nice and smoothly and I'm quite happy to just continue with that and not try
to troubleshoot this thing.
Anyone by the way who might have a hand about why it didn't work for me if you're happening
to listen to this, drop me an email, I'll include my address at the end.
And finally there are the settings, items on the menu.
And the settings are the general settings and I mentioned what I thought were the important
one of those in my previous WordPress podcast.
Settings on writing post, settings on reading post.
And this is where you find the one I mentioned earlier about how many posts should display
on the front page.
There's another one in there I'll just mention and that's to set a static front page.
You seldom see this used with someone who's doing a personal blog but quite often see
it say with an organization or a company that's using WordPress, they'll set a static
front page with contact information more like a traditional website than a blog and have
the blog portions elsewhere.
There are settings for discussion and that refers to how the blog is going to respond
to comments that people might make.
Media, I've never even configured anything in there but the only thing I notice when
I look at it that look like it might be adventurous to assess where you can set your path to where
content uploaded using the WordPress media uploader would get stored.
What you have to do with whether you wish to allow web crawlers from search engines to
crawl your website or whether you wish to give them a no follow request.
That menu item does say that you cannot ban the spiders from your site if it's on the
internet but you can request them not to crawl your site.
Most of the bloggers I know are quite happy to have just about any search engine, any
legitimate search engine, I guess, crawl their site because they're looking for visibility.
And the last one in the default menu is permalinks.
Friends, do you want your permalinks to your post to be referenced by an excerpt from
the post name or by the post number?
That sort of thing.
Across the top of this whole display, when you're in the administrative interface, there
is a very narrow menu bar on the far left hand corner.
It gives you the option to jump to see the public face of your blog.
Next to that, there is an item says new where you can create a new user, a new post, a
new page, a new link, or jump to the media uploader.
When you're on the public face of the blog and you are logged in, that menu bar is still
present.
It does disappear if you log out.
And then it changes slightly.
The item that says new is still the same, but the item in the far left no longer says visit
the public part of the site.
It gives you links to the most used dashboard items, such as appearance, widgets, dashboard,
and so on.
So that provides for quick navigation, shall we say, from the living room to the kitchen,
and not just to the kitchen, but to the kitchen, to the particular kitchen drawer that you're
trying to open.
Generally, I've found that the default settings are just fine.
A WordPress has been providing blogs software for a long time.
Over the years, they've figured out what most people would consider a usable.
Many of the other items are items that you might configure once and then never touch
again.
I think when it comes to, say, the reading settings, I think I might have changed how many
posts display on the front page twice in the almost seven years that I've been blogging.
Mainly because I want the link to post to be longer than my sidebar.
Sometimes plugins might add their own menu items.
A plugin is a program, sometimes little, sometimes not so little, that adds some functionality
to the blog.
I use one called stat press, for example, which is a hit counter.
It's fairly heavy for a plugin.
It actually adds three or four tables to the database in order to store the information
that it collects.
It adds its own stat press menu item with several submenu items to the main menu bar.
I use another plugin called My Local Weather, which displays the temperature and an icon
of bright sun or the sun with a cloud over it or a moon behind clouds to tell what the
weather is in my locality.
My local weather added a little item to the settings menu for me to configure my location
for it to get the weather information from Yahoo weather.
Speaking of plugins, that leads into the next topic that I wanted to talk about, which
is plugins and widgets.
As I said, a plugin is a program that adds some functionality of some sort.
The functionality may be visible to the public, such as the My Local Weather plugin, or
it may be strictly behind the scenes, such as the stat press plugin.
Initially, when I first started using WordPress back in the version 1.5 days, the only way to
implement a plugin was to add PHP code to call that plugin to the appropriate file in
the WordPress directory.
These days, many plugins can be manipulated with widgets.
Widgets are not plugins.
Widgets are something that WordPress came up with from manipulating the appearance of
items that people wish to add to their sidebar or their footer.
In default, there are several types of widgets included.
There are widgets for pulling in RSS feeds.
Widgets for posting links, such as a blog roll, or that list of Linux distribution sites.
There are widgets for displaying archives in a monthly format and posts by category,
which I'll get to in a moment.
Many plugins these days are available as widgets.
If they're meant to be visible to the public, to affect what the public sees on the screen,
the plugins, in many cases, can be implemented by downloading the widget, or WordPress's
word for it, is widgetized, plugin, and manipulating the plugin after it's activated in the plugins
page.
You go to the plugins page, you activate the plugin, you go to the widget page, and
then you stick the widget onto your sidebar or into your footer.
Not all widgets are plugins, but some plugins are widgets.
Another item I want to mention is pages and posts.
Our static content, posts are dynamic content.
At the hacker public radio site, the item that displays when you click on the contribute
link on the front page, the item that explains how to contribute a podcast, and WordPress
turns would be referred to as a page, whereas the list of the podcasts as they scroll from
the top down the page, those are posts.
Pages are useful for, on a bout page, why you started, why you're blogging, maybe capsule
biographies, posting guidelines, things of that nature that you want to have continually
available for a visitor to consult, even if no one ever consults that you wanted available.
Posts can be divided in the categories.
Pages cannot.
Now this leads me to categories.
Links and posts may be assigned to categories.
Post categories and link categories are separate.
They inhabit two different tables in the database.
They are not interchangeable.
I'll give you an example of the usage of post categories.
One of my categories is recipes.
If you go to my blog and scroll down the page till you get to the categories listing,
one of the categories that displays is recipes.
If you click on that, you will see all the recipes that I have posted over the several
years that I have posted recipes there.
Here's an example of the usage for categories and links.
I mentioned that there are links, widgets.
I like to listen to old radio shows, especially old birding mysteries.
Shows like the shadow, mystery as my hobby, casey crime photographer, Neuro Wolf, just to
pick a few.
I wanted to share these radio shows with people who visited my blog.
Not by streaming them or anything like that, but simply by letting people know where
they could find them if they had similar interest.
So I added a category to my links, which I call OTR, which in the loose confederation
of old radio fans is what we call it, old time radio.
I selected the five sites that I have had the best luck with for streaming or downloading
old time radio shows and put those into my links listing and put those sites into the
OTR category.
Then to display those links on my sidebar, I went to the widgets item, selected a links
widget, gave it the title of old time radio, and told it to display the OTR category.
Then I moved it to the location where I wanted it on my sidebar and Bingo, there are the
links sitting there for anyone who stumbles over my site who likes old time radio and wants
to see if they can find an old Jack Benny show or George Burns or an old murder mystery.
As a footnote, to the best of anyone's knowledge, mine and of those persons who provide them
on the internet, these old time radio shows are in the public domain, most of them being
60 or more years old.
The one other item I want to mention in terms of overall configuration is Comet spam.
Comet spam has been a problem with blogs for a long time.
The most common motivation for Comet spam is to increase somebody's Google juice by
getting more links out there to be indexed in cataloged by search engines.
I know that Ken in some of his community news podcast has from time to time read some
of the Comet spam that HPR gets.
So typical Comet spam these days is something like, I find this site wonderful site.
I really like the way you write, keep up the good work and I will visit you frequently
every day.
Pretty regularly identifiable, but when it comes in in batches of 20 and 30 and 40 and
sometimes as many as 100 and a 24 hour period, you can't keep up with it one by one.
And that's just me.
I'm just a small fry in the back orders of the interwebs, but they don't care.
They just want to get out there where Google or some other search engine can see them.
Credit Press includes a plug-in called a kismet, a kismet traps Comet spam.
It works very, very well.
I recommend strongly turning that on and using it.
You have to get a validation key from the a kismet people to use it.
Once you've got that key, your plug-in has access to the a kismet database of Comet spam,
which is continually updated.
For some reason, just the past few weeks, the amount of Comet spam has increased significantly
to my site and I will then confident no more than 3 or 4 slipped through a kismet's net.
And a couple of those got caught in the moderation queue, so they never saw the light of day.
Maybe one or most two slipped away and became visible to the public and I caught them just
by looking at the dashboard and seeing them in the list of recent comments.
So I recommend strongly, if you're concerned about Comet spam, but you want to allow
Comets, use a kismet.
There are also some settings in the discussion item underneath the settings item that can
be used to help control spam.
For one thing, you can set the blog not to accept Comets, or you can set that all Comets
from moderated and have to be reviewed by a moderator before they are allowed to be
seen by the public, or you can leave comments unmoderated and rely on the kismet.
They're also in that page 2 blacklist.
One blacklist contains a list of words, which if any one of those words appears in the
name URL contents or hyperlink in a Comet, we'll cause that Comet to go into the moderation
queue.
The other blacklist, which in my case I have empty, will send the Comet into the spam
queue.
I do not get a lot of comments, so it doesn't trouble me to have to moderate one or two or
three or four spam comments a week.
The other setting in there that can help keep down spam is a setting for how many hyperlinks
you will allow in a Comet.
Mine is set that any Comet that has more than two hyperlinks gets sent to the moderation
queue.
Every once in a while, this traps a legitimate Comet when one of my visitors is, say, responding
to a link I posted by posting some links that he or she thinks are relevant, so the worst
is there might be a delay of most half a day or so before that Comet gets visible to
the public.
When I first started using WordPress, when I was self hosting out of my guest room, a
Kismet would not work for me.
I never bothered to try to figure out why, instead I went to the WordPress plugins page
and got a plugin that works similar to a cap job, only, instead of requiring someone
to decipher an indecisurable picture, it required someone to type in the answer to
a riddle, and that worked quite nicely until I moved my blog out to a hosting site and
then could use a Kismet.
I hope anyone who is considering blogging or setting up his or her own blog finds this
useful, and I'll be back in a couple or three weeks with the next one, a podcast about
tweaking the appearance of your blog.
If you want to email me, you can email me at Frank at PineViewFarm.net, PineViewFarm is
all one word, no spaces, no punctuation, and my website is www.PineViewFarm.net.
Thank you very much.
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