Making Things More Pretty

Its time to get the damn show on the road. I’ve almost been running this blog for a year now and its still in a default theme.

It took all of 5 mins to get things mostly how I want them. I have a pull-down menu for categories (So you can pull down the say the “Gun Death?” posts, or Product Reviews, or “Family and Friends”, or maybe you’re interested in reading the Epilepsy tap….)

I also have a search box which should be useful to all, lord knows I use it on other people’s blogs to look for various posts or subjects.

I wouldn’t mind adding a “Contact” button for those who would like something quicker than deciphering the scrawling of “weerdbeard AT gmail DOT com”, but I neuter the email like that because I don’t want constant spam. Can I have the best of both worlds?

The most important (at least to you guys) is an RSS sidebar. Overall I don’t like the whole “Blogroll” thing as I’d rather not be exclusive at all, so it would be HUGE, and with big lists like that it tends to favor people in alphabetical order. So I’d like to have an RSS feed on my side bar so you can see people who have been added who’s posted most recently.

#1. I see this as a reward for those who keep their blogs active, and #2 it benefits the people who don’t update their blog every day, because they’ll show up when they do drop an update.

So the Widget controls are asking for an RSS URL. I appear to have something off my blogger account so maybe that would be the best start, but I really don’t know how to drive it, nor do I know its URL.

So can anybody give me a hand?

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0 Responses to Making Things More Pretty

  1. alan says:

    I use the “Fast Secure Contact Form” plugin. It hides your direct email address and does some spam filtering.

  2. Linoge says:

    So the beautiful thing about WordPress is that it is effectively entirely modular – pretty much every “pretty” thing you see on my page, I did not write myself. Instead, I went to my Dashboard, and looked for Plugins -> Add New, and then typed in the keywords of what I was looking for. The list of plugins I use has gotten rather long (which probably explains why my load times suck), but implementing them is not too difficult… Granted, you have to pay attention to version compatibilities, and you occasionally have to do some tweaking to get things straight, but the Caveman Rule applies ;).

    I think what you are looking for is the “Blogroll Widget with RSS Feeds” – not too sure, but you could poke around with it and see what happens… if all else fails, uninstall it and try something else.

    Widgets are accessible under the “Appearances” tab, and you would add them to the right toolbar in this case, under/over whatever other widgets you want to order it with. If you break anything, generate me an account, and I will see about unscrewing it :).

  3. MiniMedic says:

    If people really want to contact you, it’s not hard to switch out the “at” and “dot” with what they know should be there.

  4. Patrick says:

    I will offer the same service as Linoge. If he can’t unscrew it, I’m sure I can. I am a wordpress plugin w****. There haven’t been many plugins that I haven’t liked.. LOL

    On the email thing, I put mine in the contact without embellishment and gmail has been real good about not giving me back spam. I’ve had it up for view for the better part of a year and don’t believe I’ve seen any spam on my gmail.

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