At first glance, it might seem to have been a quiet week here at jimcofer.com. But there’s been a lot of stuff going on in the background:
As mentioned in this post, I added the Plugoo widget to the sidebar. This allows anyone to contact me via instant message from the sidebar. They need not use the same IM service as me; in fact, they don’t even need to subscribe to any instant messaging service. This change was implemented because its predecessor (the IM Online widget) frequently “timed out”, and in doing so held up loading the home page. I feel that the Plugoo widget is more useful all around, plus I like that it doesn’t slow down the page loading. So we’ll test that out and see how it works.
Whilst adding the Plugoo widget, I decided to play around with the layout of items on the sidebar. Things have been moved around a bit, but it shouldn’t be too confusing.
I then ran into some “writer’s block” on Tuesday. Although I wanted to post something, I just couldn’t think of anything to say. So I decided to convert the “British English Glossary” page from the old FrontPage format to the WordPress format. After all, that’d just be a cut and paste job, right? Well, not exactly. I could cut and paste plain text (which would lose all the formatting), or I could copy the FrontPage-generated HTML (which would have been quick, but I just couldn’t abide the clunky HTML code the page uses). So I cut and pasted the plain text, then spent an hour adding formatting back in. In the process, I decided to add several entries I’d been thinking about lately. So what should have been a 30-minute cut and paste job turned in to a 2+ hour ordeal.
And when I was finished, I took a nice long look at the “Pages” link on the sidebar. The widget lists all the static pages on my site (as opposed to posts, which make up the bulk of the content). There are two types of pages on my site: “important stuff” (like the About Me and Contact Me pages) as well as pages that aren’t especially important, but work better as a page than a post (like the British English Glossary, for example). I then decided to break the pages into two widgets: “Pages” for important stuff and “Other Pages” for non-essential pages. I did this in case I want to change themes – many WordPress themes have tabs at the top of the home page for all pages; this way I can have just the essential stuff listed there and users can use the “Other Pages” widget to find other content.
And lastly… last night I was typing up this entry for this week’s episode of Ashes to Ashes when I realized that I had a category for “Music”, but not one for “TV”. Instead of simply creating a “TV” category and adding the post to that, I took a look at the categories and added a few new ones (“Anglican News”, “Sports”, “TV”, “Movies”) and got rid of at least one (“My Writings”; all of those posts are now in the “Commentary” category). I then went through all 400+ posts and changed the category of the post, if necessary. Eagle-eyed readers might notice that there are a total of 415 posts on this site but a total of 483 posts when you add up each category of post. This is because each post can exist in more than one category.
Fun stuff, huh? I just wanted to let you know about the changes!
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