GreyMamba

The inStacks documentation indicates that the Poster Stack does generate an "RW Default" archive for your use and delectation. This is great and it gives some tantalising code snippets but crucially doesn't give a blow by blow account of what to do - bugger! Lots of googling and I was only a little bit wiser ( also the story of my life).

So, what to do? I could ask on forums or even ask inStacks but where’s the fun in that? Also, I’m an unreconstructed dinosaur and as any modern young person (kids) will tell you, we never ask for directions or RTFM!

As an aside, I guess many of you know that RTFM means “Read The F&%@ing Manual” but not everyone knows the origin of the rather gentle phrase ‘Fubar’ or ‘FooBar’ – or ‘foo’ and ‘bar’ (oft used generic names in coding). Well my understanding is that this originated in the Vietnam conflict and comes from the phrase “F&%@ed Up Beyond All Recognition” (which, of course, it was ).

Back to the story in hand. Firefox is nice because it has an easy-to-use ‘Inspector’ feature that allows you to look at any web page’s underlying code. So, I inspected some of the example Poster Stack web pages and managed to glean some snippets that might work when inserted into a sidebar. They didn’t. So, I tried again … and again and … finally the infinite monkey drive fired into life and something actually started to function.

So now I could write code to produce a sidebar menu system with clickable links that would take you to all posts with a given Category, Tag or date. Great – but it was all a bit text-editor intensive. Next step, fall back on trusty Python and generate it. This I’ve now done and all you have to do is feed the code with a file containing lines indicating Categories, years and tags and, hey Presto, I’ve got a file full of code to paste into my site’s sidebar.

You can get the the zipped code - not pretty but seems to do the trick - by clicking the button below.