Blog tinkering
Over the last few days I’ve added a few features to my blog which other blogs have had for ages…
- Comments subscription. Get email updates to post’s comments. I’ve never quite understood why this isn’t a standard feature of WordPress. Does anyone ever subscribe to an RSS feed of comments? I don’t think I ever have.
- Gravatar. Updated my theme to include comment author’s gravatars
- Tag cloud. Seemed an obvious thing to add to the side bar, given the time I’d spent tagging old posts.
- Clustr maps. A little sidebar widget to show where the site visitors are coming from.
As, I assume, most people will be reading this through a feed reader, all of my tinkering will be irrelevant/invisible. Which means you won’t see the long (pointless?) sidebar of widgets now on display.
Does anyone ever look at these sidebar widgets? I’m sure when I view others’ blogs/sites I tend to block out anything down either side of the page assuming it’s peripheral, unless it looks like a menu for navigation. So why should I expect anyone to look at the ones on my site?
On the OpenLearn project the number of Moodle blocks (down either side of the page) grew to an unmanageable number. Deciding which (or rather whose!) block should be removed or put at the top was a tricky task. Though, this problem has now been solved by moving all the tools into one block.
[The photo above, which I took yesterday, has nothing to do with this posting, other than to show I have done something else over the last few days apart from tinkering with my blog.]
