New Look with Wordpress
Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006I decided to do a little cleaning up of my blog and make a list of the various functionality I wanted for this journal. The list included:
Extending the width:
I wanted a change away from the thinner in the middle fixed area. I decided on something wider not only from an aesthetic point of view, but also in combating scrolling. More text can be viewed now at a glance.
Colour:
A coat of paint and a cosmetic touch up to give it a cross between corporate blue and personal red. This makes a break for me as my usual choice of colours are more washed out and strongly influenced by the coast. Lot’s of space (as reflected in my Southbourne site) and sudden burst of subtle colour. With this blog I have gone more vivid.
Functionality:
I wanted more of instant access to the sidebar. The only way to do this was to integrate the Wordpress 2.x Widget functions into this template. With the help of Paul from Tolra Micro Systems the sidebar now has become ‘Widgetized!’ meaning I can swap ‘cats’ around ‘on-the-fly’ and change content with ease.
Meta-data:
Something I have been meaning to do for a while is take control of the Wordpress Meta-Data and add my own content to it. We managed with a few tweaks to get a permanent meta-description in the Wordpress index page for this theme.
Theme:
A cross between Kubrick and CleanCut gave me what I needed. From point on we went about chopping and restyling the whole layout and design.
Plugins:
There are a few I am using for various task and I’ll name some them here:
Adhesive by Owen Winkler:
A good plugin that allows the author to create a sticky form a post and keep it at the top. This is great if you want to keep some search engine friendly content about your blog permanently at the top of your home page.
Filosofo Comments Preview by Austin Matzko
It’s a nice plugin that lets users preview their comment and helps in the fight to combat spam.
ImageManager by Per Soderlind
A very handy image management plugin. Allowing for image uploads with naming and size editing functions.
WP-phpMyAdmin by Christopher Hwang
Provides phpMyAdmin from the WordPress admin console
Ubernyms by Joel Bennett
Another good plugin that gives tooltips using powered domTT (optional) for example wave the cursor over this: SEO, and your get an explanation of the abbreviation. Joel has created this to be easy to configure as possible.
Fancy Excerpt by Denis de Bernardy
Enhances WordPress’ default excerpt generator by generating sentence aware excerpts.
Head META Description by Kaf Oseo
Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else.
There are quite a few more plugins in there, some I am just experimenting with at the moment. There is one particular plugin I wanted and had originally read about it first on Lorelle’s blog when she was waxing enthusiastic about Narchives. The last time I read her blog it was still being set-up. It is a Wordpress site map. No SEO in their right mind should be without one. I have tried a few plugins that give a site map page or a links page and both of them I found were near enough impossible to integrate without something breaking. I am hoping that Lorelle announces the release or fix for Narchives quite soon.
Besides the above I’ll give the image in the header a brief mention. It’s a radar, no particular reason it is there. I like them, something very industrial and at the same time they give me a feeling of trepidation. I liked how it was jutting into the blue sky. industry meets the vast power of nature, a sort of tech-industry utilizing nature. (Depending from what point of view you are coming from).
