I spent today changing a number of things about how the site works, how it navigates, and added a number of new features. So let’s start with the changes. I upgraded the theme to the newest version and it was hell to fit into the mold of the older version. Much of the underlying code had changed dramatically so I had to fight with it (which is not something I should have to do) to get it to my liking. You’ll notice that the formatting is slightly different and each post’s page is formatted a little differently. I’ve changed up the font sizes and body width to more appropriately display the content. The sidebar formatting is now more appropriately justified as I’m not a big fan of having everything centered, I think it looks very unprofessional.
Onto the additions. Since I already spoke about the sidebar once, I’ll talk about the additions I made to it. First, you’ll notice two new pages: Tag Cloud and Photos. The tag cloud is provided by Ultimate Tag Warrior (more on that in a minute) and the Photos page links directly to my Flickr.com account where I can display slideshows of my various concert pictures. Currently, I can only show a single set of photos but I hope that the plugin will soon support Flickr’s newly added “Collections” feature which also me to categorize all of my photo sets into a larget set. I added a new tagging system: Ultimate Tag Warrior (also known as UTW). This will greatly help me in tagging and categorizing posts. It also adds a much sought after feature for me: Technorati tagging. I’m sure many of you have used sites similar to Technorati before, such as other social bookmarking or tagging sites, and it’s a great asset to webmasters like myself in getting content out there and distributed more easily. Trust me, it’s a lot easier these days to get your content out there than when I first started writing about 6 years ago. You’ll notice TAGS: and SEARCH TECHNORATI at the end of each post. This is where the power of UTW comes into play. I can now more easily display my tags/categories in each post and also link directly to content-specific Technorati tags so you can find similar content to mine, very helpful!
The sidebar also has a new section of RSS feed buttons. Frankly, I didn’t like the text-only links but I also know that they didn’t stand out whatsoever so I completely replaced them with very familiar buttons to the 16 most common feed readers and aggregators on the web and I replaced the RSS Feed text link with the now familiar XML button for easier recognition. All 17 of these buttons are fully linked to my RSS feed and will display in whatever feed reader you use most commonly if you use one, I highly recommend Google Reader as it’s the simplest, most user-friendly web-based feed reader I’ve found yet.
The next big thing you’ll notice is the giant SOCIAL BOOKMARKING text at the end of each post as well. This goes hand-in-hand with Technorati and allows you, the ever adept reader, to submit my site to a number of social bookmarking sites. I’ve included the most common ones that I not only visit myself but see the heaviest commonplace use of in today’s semantic web. This will hopefully be a spring board into more traffic and a more varied audience.
Each feature I added into today was something I’d been looking for since before this site was even put into production. Many of them didn’t exist or some of them had very archaic documentation that I found confusing and hard to understand but now, each plugin has matured and is much more easy to use.
Now that there’s a whole myriad of new stuff, I’m going to hopefully get more reviews out the door given my current work schedule. I can confirm that two of the upcoming reviews are doom metal CDs that I absolutely love.
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