David.R.Gilson » widgets

Twitter widgets

David — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 12:16:19 +0000

I thought it would be nice to put a Twitter widget on here although having tried several, I can’t seem to get one that works. I’ve tried “Twitter Tools”, “Twitter for WordPress” and “MyTwitter”. “Twitter Tools” just wouldn’t update, “Twitter for WordPress” wouldn’t ignore @ replies, and “MyTwitter” didn’t integrate with the them. All very frustrating.

Today’s website updates

admin — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 18:52:01 +0000

Oh boy, I’ve done a lot with this site today. The most noticeable change is the theme. I liked “Description 2.0“, although the double sidebar, which I felt I needed, just made the thing too cluttered, and I wanted clean. Having done some shuffling around, a single sidebar is just fine. This theme is called “MoreOrange“, and if you know me, you know I like my orange! You can find credits for this theme at the bottom of the site (added my own name for modifications).

As part of having a new theme, I had to put my own stamp on the header image, which I have done, quite literally. For the record, I use The GIMP.

Oh, and this theme has sorted me out with permalinks. Each post title is the permalink; nice touch.

I found that the social bookmarking widget I was using didn’t work with the new theme, so I ended up finding one I think is better, “Sociable“.

Returning to the sidebar, I removed my social networking links from the links menu. There were too many of them, and I’m not sure it was appropriate. Anyway, I came up with something better, which was a cracking idea from my current/old site. I took all of the favicon‘s from the sites I’m linking to, and used them as the link (they have roll-over text to explain what they’re linking to). I also grabbed a WordPress widget to give me subscribe links. I’m not sure about keeping these, but they might be helpful to some people (?).

Speaking of links, I redid the blogroll. I removed all the default WordPress links, and used it for blogs I like to read; just as a blogroll should do. If you’re reading this and think I should have included you on my blogroll, just leave a comment and I’ll probably oblige.

As a final touch, I made myself up a favicon to reflect the header image. If you can’t see it, you might need to empty your cache and reload, repeat as necessary until it shows up.

Hello World!

admin — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:00:09 +0000

Okay, so here is my second attempt at a WordPress blog. The first one disappeared into a failing hard drive last week. I should also say, many thanks to my old friend and host, Ryan Hitch, who has given me this space while I teach myself how to use WordPress.

Fortunately, I had saved the HTML of the two static pages I’d written on the first blog, so they are here now in their original form.

I will just say for anyone reading this for the first time, that this site (www.digitalranger.org.uk) is my test site. I’m learning WordPress here and working on designs, when I have achieved some level of competancy and have a design I like, it will be going to “www.davidgilson.co.uk“.

The only different thing I’ve done so far is that I’ve installed a Widget (go me!), to display my “FriendFeed”. In other words I’m showing a feed of all of my activities on other sites. I’m happy with it, although what I don’t like is that is showing all of the photos I’ve uploaded in each batch to Flickr, making the whole thing longer than it needs to be.

The next thing I need to do is look at some themes. I have some downloaded from WordPress.org and other sites.