David.R.Gilson

Cosmetic changes to the blog

Jan 20

Website Updates David No Comments
favicon, icon, RSS, sidebar, socialnetworking, wordpress, wordpress-plugins

Okay folks, I know I’ve broken with my regular posting schedule, sorry!

However, I haven’t abandoned things; I’ve been busying myself with making some subtle changes to the looks of the site. This post is more for myself than anything, as a record of what I’ve done. Also, I’d like to thank my friend and server admin, Ryan, for suggesting most of the things I’ve done to the site.

Header

I’ve done two things to the header, and I’m very pleased with both.

First of all, I’ve created a search box (one less widget to put on the sidebar). I also created a custom background for the text box so that it fitted in with the theme design. The submit button looks like text, although it is actually an image of text. This is because no matter how I set the style of the basic button, I could not get rid of the edge shading effect. So instead I made some text in the same font as the page links, and used it as an image.

Secondly, I changed the RSS link. Before it was a simple line of text with an RSS icon. Although now, I have taken the Feedburner counter that was on my social networks widget and put that in place. Then also, I have replaced the standard RSS icon with one lovingly drawn by yours truely.

Custom social networking widgets

Sidebar

I have dropped several unnecessary widgets, including my free-form text boxes with the QR codes and campaign badges. I’ve added a collapsible archive widget, I wanted to have a collapsible category widget too, although I just could not find one that worked properly, shame!

My “social networking” (a simple Text WP widget) has gone back to the original version – a collection of favicons. The first time I had it like that, I eventually dropped it as I thought it too much work to keep maintained. I still feel that way although I developed a spreadsheet to help me manage all the lines of text. So now, I just enter any new social networks into the spreadsheet, and then copy-paste the final cell of the sheet into my text box.

After having such a massive traffic spike last week (1,432 visitors!), I thought I should put up a “most popular” widget (rather than just a recent posts widget). It took a lot of experimenting to find a plugin that worked the way I wanted it to. I ended up settling with a plugin called Recently Popular. I also modified my Twitter Widget to show my Twitter counter. With these changes, I didn’t loose the counters I had in my social networks widget, but instead distrobuted them around the page!

Finally, just to try and save on more space, I have reduced the line height and font size (1.1em & 90% respectively).

The great spike of January 10th 2009

Popularity

I didn’t finish reporting my traffic surge properly, but I just thought I’d show the spike before I let anymore time slip by. I’m dissappointed things have slipped back to normal, but there is a small improvement on my mean daily visitors, and I’m hoping to get writing more soon to pull more people in from search engines. (Chart created by Piwik.)