Tonight I had the intention of playing with the CSS files for this website, because I want to change the coloring and the fonts (the layout will stay the same). Before that, though, there were a couple of other things I wanted to take care of.
First off, my gallery. The software that I have installed for this is called Gallery, and it integrates into my Wordpress site using a plugin called Wordpress Gallery2 (WPG2). Both the plugin and Gallery itself were old versions, so I’ve been wanting to upgrade those. Tonight was the night for this to happen, but not until after problems on the server that this website lives meaning a help desk call and a server reboot. I finally got it done, hopefully I’ll be able to tweak Gallery some more to get some better performance out of it (mostly with the random picture on my index page).
Secondly, I’m now re-routing my main RSS feed through Feedburner, which they tout to be the most incredible thing since sliced bread for routing your website’s feeds through. There’s even a Wordpress plugin for it - originally titled Wordpress FeedBurner Plugin. After an hour or so of playing with my .htaccess files (it’s usually one, but since my site is set up the way it is it’s different for me) I finally got it working, so now the feeds (look at bottom of site for the links to the feeds) go through FeedBurner. It’s only the feed for my posts, not the comments feeds. The only real advantage that I see for this so far is that I can track the number of people reading my site through the feeds, and what type of software they are using. Interesting, but not life-changing.
Third, I’m going to start putting Technorati tags on all of my posts. It might generate a little more traffic on the site, but what I’m most interested in is seeing who’s writing about the same kind of stuff that I am. Not wanting to have to go through the pain of putting in the links on every post, I figured there was an easier way. Turns out that I was right. It also turns out that there is a WordPress plugin for it (I really love WordPress). It’s called SimpleTags, it allows me to easily put tags on the bottom of posts. We’ll see how that goes.
A few days ago I also did a few changes to the site. I cleaned up the sidebar, first removing the web design links. Secondly I removed the Meta stuff and added most of it to the new footer, which is the content displayed at the bottom of the page. Since the upcoming version of Internet Explorer is going to use the same icon that Firefox uses to denote whether an RSS feed is available for the site you are on, people are starting to use that icon for their links to their feeds. I did. I’m glad it’s orange, I like orange. Lastly, I removed the archives links and put up a new page for monthly archives, the link can be found up top.
Now that was very boring to write, and will probably be more boring for most people to read, if they even understand a lot of the lingo that I used. Why, then, did I write it? The purpose of my site is so that people can get in contact with me, people can read about my inner thoughts, and also I want to add to the community on the internet - Christian community, Web Design community, and my own circle of ‘real-life’ friends and family. In order to do this correctly time must be taken to make sure things are in order, that they work correctly. It’s the same as in music, if you play badly or if you record with shabby equipment, people aren’t going to listen to you. On the internet if you have a bad site people aren’t going to read it. I’m not saying that everyone needs to be programmers but I did see a Xanga site today that had a photograph as the background image - I couldn’t even read the text! The first thing I did was write it off as a bad site - it could have been the most brilliant writing. Too bad nobody will/can read it.
[tags]wordpress, gallery, wp-gallery, wpg2, feedburner, wordpress feedburner plugin, technorati, simpletags, rss, weblogs, blogs[/tags]
