Your site runs on WordPress and you want to hide posts which belong to certain categories or sub-categories from your front page, search or archives.

That should be an easy task.

These days, there are a number of WordPress plugins developed for that purpose and here are three of them:

Front Page Excluded Categories - Excludes posts in one or more categories from appearing on the front page. You can assign these posts to an excluded category so they don’t appear on the front page, but do appear in a category page.

Simply Exclude - Provides an interface to selectively exclude/include categories, tags, authors and pages from the front page, archive, category or tag, search and feed functions used by WordPress.

Advanced Category Excluder - Hides some unwanted categories from defined parts of the blog including the front page. This plugin can override WordPress default search results, RSS feed listing, category listing, recent post, tecent post widgets and entry pages. If you wish, it can also hide whole categories of posts from web crawlers.

Why exclude posts from your front page?

Two reasons:

1. You want your site with a CMS like functionalities and you want to separate post by categories in the front page or hide some unwanted categories.

2. You are using an automated posting system that updates your blog regularly which is good for SEO reasons, but you don’t want these posts to appear in your front page. So, you assign these posts to an excluded category.

So, how are you coping with categories in your site?

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Did you know that emanilagroup’s poetry site, emanilapoetry, turned last Friday?

We officially launched the site on 19 June 2005 using a news publishing script which allowed members to post their works using their own password-protected username. In February 2006, we released our first anthology of poems selected from our poetry site. There were 101 poems included in the anthology from 55 contributors.

Today, we have more than 10,000 posts in our poetry site. If we are to put up the second anthology, what criteria are we going to apply in selecting the poems? Should we appoint Writers Group members to sit in the selection committee? And what should be the format of the second anthology? Any suggested title?

Any suggestions, please email me or you can post your comments on this post.

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To those who think that the Spam Act 2003 of Australia applies to emails only, think again.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) recently was successful in obtaining orders from the Federal Court of Australia against at least four Australian companies and individuals for breaching the Spam Act 2003 by sending unsolicited SMS.

Australia’s Spam Act 2003 regulates the sending of commercial electronic messages which can be emails, SMS messages, MMS messages, instant messaging messages or any other similar messages.

According to ACMA, this is the first time it has taken court action against companies sending SMS spam.

For a commercial electronic message not to be classified as a spam, it must meet three requirements:

Consent - The message must be sent with the recipient’s consent either expressed or inferred.

Identify - The message must contain clear and accurate information about the person or organisation that authorised the sending of the message

Unsubscribe - The message must contain a functional ‘unsubscribe’ facility to allow the recipient to opt out from receiving messages from that source in the future.

So next time you receive a commercial message in your email or in your mobile phone, ask yourself: Does the message meet the requirements of the Spam Act? If not, then, chances are, it is a spam.

If you wish to seek more information about spam or wish to complain about spam, you can do so at ACMA’s spam website at www.spam.acma.gov.au or call 1300 855 180.

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The Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans, in his statements issued Monday 25 May again gave assurance that the temporary visa skilled workers program will not be used to undermine local labour.

Senator Evans said that the number of visa applications for subclass 457 visas lodged in April 2009 was the lowest rate in four years.

The number of temporary skilled migration visas granted in April 2009 was almost 23 per cent lower than in March and 64 per cent lower than in September last year, when the global financial crisis hit.

Although the number of workers coming to Australia under the sub-class 457 visa program has reduced significantly, Senator Evans said however that “there will continue to be demand for skills in some sectors, such as healthcare, so there will be a need for employers to access skilled overseas workers.”

Based on the latest DIAC statistics, primary applications lodged in 2008-09 year to 30 April 2009 totalled 48,090 as against 49,360 of comparable period in previous year.

During the same current period to 30 April 2009, 43,580 visa applications were granted.

The top three citizenship countries for primary applications granted were United Kingdom (9,770), India (6,320) and Philippines (4,070).

By occupation, primary applications granted to professionals were highest (25,550) followed by tradespersons and related workers (6,680), associate professionals (5,890) and managers and administrators (4,030).

New South Wales was the top destination of temporary visa holders with 13,240 primary applications granted in year to 30 April 2009, followed by Western Australia (9,370), Victoria (9,160) and Queensland (7,970).

By nominated position location, 37,970 were employed in non-government sector and 5,610 or 12 percent were employed in government sector.

As at 30 April 2009, the Philippines ranked number 2 in terms of citizenship countries for primary visa holders currently in Australia.

There were 8,820 Filipino workers in Australia holding temporary visas compared to 18,700 UK citizens who were in Australia also on a temporary workers visa. Coming very close to the Philippines was India with 8,440 nationals.

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Our congratulations to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) for garnering first prize in the e-Awards for Excellence in e­Government for 2009 category at the recent CeBIT international business technology conference in Sydney.

The awards were first introduced by the Australian Government in 2006 to promote excellence in the use of information communication technology in Australia at all levels of government.

DIAC was awarded the top spot for its Visa Wizard and Citizenship Award online services, launched in September 2008 and December 2008, respectively.

We wrote about the Visa Wizard a few months ago and tweeted it around too.

The wizard helps users in finding the right Australian visa. It is one of our more popular posts.

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