I’ve always had mixed feelings towards Tumblr. I really like how you can easily post about anything, but then again I think to myself, can’t “Wordpress do this already”?

I’m subscribed to two Tumblr feeds: The first is one by Tom Davis. If you’re into your literature and photography go subscribe! The other is an online sketchbook from Rill Marchant, listing images that inspire her work. I felt that Wordpress could achieve something like this alongside the actual blog. Why would I want to do this, I hear you ask. I have several reasons for this:

• I want to document my research
  Even though I have Foxmarks installed and also use del.icio.us I still don’t like having millions of bookmarks, so for me this approach of record keeping is better.
• I don’t want to flood people’s inboxes
  I think there’s an unwritten rule/general blogging etiquette as to how many posts you should make in a day. Even though blogs are personal, when you allow subscriptions (via rss/e-mail) you have to start thinking about your readers. If I made ten posts a day of images I’ve found on t’interwebber that inspire me, without context - i.e. explanation of what they are and why they’re posted - they will hold little value to the reader and I think they’d consider unsubscribing or just not reading anymore. That said, I would still want the reader to be able to peer into how my work evolves.

Right, on with the show!

To start off I wanted to replicate the quick posting option found in Tumblr. Enter the QuickPost plugin. Once activated in Wordpress whenever you find something you want to blog about just press the bookmarklet et voila! One important feature is that you can specify a default category to post to. You’ll see why soon. As I wanted to create a sketchbook I set the default category to ‘Sketchbook‘.

The massive hurdle I had to overcome then was to how to stop post under the Sketchbook category from appearing in the blog and, more importantly, in the RSS feeds. Remember, I don’t want to flood the reader’s inboxes. I tried using the Category Visibility Plugin but I think it was conflicting with some of my installed plugins, so I turned to the Advanced Category Excluder. With this installed I set the Sketchbook category to be displayed only in the Search function. This meant that it, along with its sub categories, was blocked in the main blog and the RSS feeds (comments and posts). Brilliant!

Now that I had Tumblr-like posting and a way to block these posts from the main blog I needed a way to display these posts somewhere else, like on a Page. Odd, I know! I had a look for a plugin to allow posts to be displayed on a Page, but lets just say none of them worked, and, after five hours of search you get a little frustrated. I then knew this would require me to do some actual coding. For anyone else reading this, I wouldn’t recommend searching for a solution in the Wordpress support forum. This sort of question has apparently been asked many times, so just read their solutions.

I created a custom template, copied the code from the page.php file from my current theme and inserted the following code before The Loop:

<?php
query_posts(”cat=156″);
?>

cat=156 refers to the ID number for Sketchbook, which is 156.

If this means nothing to you do what I did and do some research!

So, if you check out the sketchbook you’ll see some test posts. OK, so the page is pretty ugly at the moment, but once I remove the category sidebar it’ll be just what I want it to be. Also, under the single post view you still get links to sketchbook entries. D’oh! I’m sure a bit of coding can sort this out

In a useful twist there’s still a feed icon next to the Sketchbook category name, so if people really wanted to subscribe they could (although this can’t be monitored using FeedBurner)

I also added the Category Posts Widget to further inform people that I have a sketchbook and that it’s being updated. I also also also also also use Custom Query String Reloaded to limit the amount of entries displayed on the sketchbook page (have yet to see if that will work)

So, in summary by using a few plugins and a very little bit of coding I now have a blog-like sketchbook that I can post to easily that doesn’t interfere with the main blog. Awesome!