Notes

Notes are a post type of their own: short posts without a title, for a thought, a link or a photograph. They run alongside the blog rather than in it, so the blog stays an index of written posts and the quick things have somewhere else to go. Together they read as a stream — no titles, just the notes themselves.

Write them at Notes → Add note in the admin.

Enable notes

Customize → Notes → Enable notes, on by default. It adds the Notes menu to the admin and shows the stream on the front end. Turning it off hides both; notes you have already written are not deleted.

Notes page

Customize → Notes → Notes page. Pick a page and the stream is built on it, under whatever the page itself says — so you can introduce the notes in the page content and have them listed below. Leave it unset and the stream stays on its own archive at /notes/.

Setup creates a page called Notes and points this setting at it.

Watch the slug

Notes are published under /notes/ out of the box, and the obvious title for the page you point at them is also Notes, which WordPress slugs notes. Those two are the same URL. The theme redirects the archive to the chosen page, and when the page is the archive that redirect points at itself — an endless redirect loop on /notes/.

Two ways out, either is fine:

• Change the base. Settings → Permalinks → Note base — set it to note, fieldnote, journal, anything that is not the page’s slug.
• Change the page slug. Keep the page titled Notes and edit its slug to field-notes or similar.

The same trap exists for the portfolio if you point it at a page slugged like its own base.

Display note date

On by default. In the stream the date is also the link to a note’s own page, so switching it off leaves the notes to be read where they are, with no way through to the single note.

Exclude notes from search results

Off by default, so notes are searchable out of the box. Turning it on keeps them out of this site’s own search, including the live-search suggestions. It has no effect on Google or any other search engine — for that you want a noindex, which is a plugin’s job.

The URL base

Settings → Permalinks → Note base, beside WordPress’s own optional bases. It is notes when nothing is set, which puts the archive at /notes/ and a note at /notes/<slug>/. Changing it rewrites both. As with any permalink change, existing links to the old base stop working, so pick it early.