Website updates (finally!)

Hoorah for the holidays! I’ve finally had a chance to tackle some of those things that I’ve been meaning to do with my blog. The most obvious (perhaps) being a (slightly) Christmassy theme:

Archives

After my archive musings I’ve finally updated my archives page. I went with the Smart Archives Plugin; I thought it had the easiest-to-understand layout.

I decided to only have the category list on the archives page. From Google’s overlay tool, it looked like very few people clicked on that list from the homepage.

To do that I’m using a copy of sidebar.php with the wp_list_categories tag above the dynamic sidebar. On the archives page, I’m using
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . "/sidebar-archives.php"); ?>
instead of
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>. There is a method to use “if is_page(archives)”, I’ve used it for single pages before, but I couldn’t get it to work.

When I have tags and categories sorted out, I will think about including a tag cloud on the archives page.

Sideblog

Having moved the categories out of the sidebar, removed the “meta” links (I’m probably the only one who used them), and started using Del.icio.us again, I thought it might be time to try out a sideblog.

There are several ways of implementing one including: a dedicated WordPress category and loop; simplepie plugin; sideblog wordpress plugin; Twitter; Del.icio.us; Tumblr.

I recommend Michael Martin’s category solution. It produces a sideblog that’s contained within your own blog and database, making it customisable and independent from outside services.

I’ve chosen to use Del.icio.us. I already use it and as you can see, the output is pretty neat. By going to settings>link rolls on your Del.icio.us page, you can customise a script output to your liking. Mine is as simple as possible – no title, icons, bullets or network links. I copied the script into a text widget, gave it the title Linkblog, and a link to my Del.icio.us page to find my other bookmarks. Once there it adopted my blog’s list style, so I didn’t have to do much. I’m still contemplating whether the descriptions are too small, but it’s nothing a bit of CSS won’t fix (if I decide it needs to be).

Feed Reading

I don’t know whether this is the most notable, or least. I’m down to just over 100 unread feeds! I had over 1000 yesterday; with a little time and concentration on my hands I powered through them. I didn’t actually read all of them, they’re not all applicable to me, or of interest. For some blogs I went through the titles and marked as read the ones that obviously weren’t for me. I did read the majority of the feeds, many were photos that just required some decent bandwidth and viewing time.

This morning I could comfortably go through the Today’s Articles folder and be up-to-date. Amazing!