Place of Stuff

In keeping with my previous post, I have tidied up a little bit using widgets in the sidebar.  You will notice that the Categories and Archives sections are now drop downs and that I have a recent comments section on there.  The reasons for this are that the Categories and Archives were taking up a huge amount of usable space and I would rather they be kept out of the way until they are needed.  I added the Recent Comments so that I could see at a glance if anyone had noticed anything on the site :)

Anyway, I don’t think anything is particularly broken, but let me know if something isn’t working or looks strange.

While having a quick look at my dashboard, I noticed that WordPress has now released version 2.5.  And they’ve made a load of changes to it under the hood.  These changes can all be found by going to the WordPress.org development blog.

If you wish to install it, go to the download area and do what comes naturally.  From my point of view, a few things that appeared broken on my blog are now fixed: I can use the pop up to insert links again and activating plugins no longer horribly leaves me unable to use the dashboard.

You won’t see much change on the blog itself, but the dashboard appears to me to be a little tidier and more intuitive.

Recalling various posts from R T Cunningham’s Untwisted Vortex blog, I realised that there is no real way for anyone to mail me if they don’t want to risk being censored, deleted or flamed in the regular blog comment area. Apparently, this is a bad thing. I’ve also shifted the tag cloud further down the sidebar.

So if you cast your eyes to the top of the page, along with the regular links there, you will also see the email address to contact me.

It will make a big change to my regular mails. Apparently, targeted spam believes I need lots of watches and viagra.

My Links page has been a bit unwieldy for a while, so I decided on a bit of housekeeping.I have removed some broken links, added in some new sites and reorganised the categories. Hopefully, it’s a bit more usable now. The main reason for doing this is that the page acts as my online bookmarks folder and I found that some sites were there and others on my home machine. So now all the sites I visit are in one place. So that’s nice.
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In the continuing spirit of openness, I thought I’d let you know of two (2) recent changes I made. Recent as in within the last hour.

The first is very obvious, you will see it as you enter the site: I have joined the ever growing ranks of people who make it easy to add stuff to social bookmarking sites. You will now see the “Share This” icon at the bottom of every post. And it looks like this:

I got this via the Wordpress dashboard and from Alex King’s site. Simple to add and customise and it has a number of sites you can link to. If any social bookmarking site you use isn’t on there, leave a comment to let me know and I’ll see if it can be added.
Continue reading ‘Slight (Site) Changes’ »

I have sort of moved towards Web 2.0. If you look to the top of the sidebar, you’ll see that I have a tag cloud. Whoopee.

The plugin is New Tag Cloud from FunnyDingo and is a piece of cake to install: unzip to the plugin directory, navigate to sidebar.php, add in the following line of code:
<?php
newtagcloud_output(array('maxcount' => 10, 'bigsize' => 18, 'smallsize' => 10, 'step' => 2, 'sizetype' => 'px'));
Continue reading ‘New Tag Cloud’ »