This week I set up a cron job on my Linux server, monad, to run the program automatically. I told the job to fire at 11:30 every Thursday. It didn’t work this week because I stupidly got a password wrong. But the program worked perfectly a hour later when I logged on to the Linux box using ssh and typed its name manually. I’m reasonably confident that the automation will work next week.

grep get_sidebar *

This showed me that the sidebar was called from a file called footer.php. The call looked like this:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

I changed it to read:

<?php if(is_page()) : else : get_sidebar() ; endif ; ?>

The effect of this is to turn the sidebar off for all pages (as opposed to posts). I could have been more selective and just switched it off for that page by putting a page name argument between the brackets of the is_page() call.

I got the information on how to do this from searching the Wordpress forums.

As a separate exercise, I’ve taken the Python program listing page out of the sidebar by changing its status to “Pending review”. You can still get to it from the link in this post.