A Host Of Changes (Not A Change Of Host)
September 21st, 2007 by Stephen Cronin (3,828 views)Return readers will notice some changes here at More Than Scratch The Surface. I normally don’t blog about changes, but in this case, there are so many that I thought it would be worthwhile. Here’s a rundown on them.
Modified Theme
My theme was just a customised version of the default WordPress Theme. It still is, but I’ve modified it further. One day I will design a Theme from scratch, but for now I’d rather spend my time writing plugins.
The main change is that I’ve widened it: it was optimised for 800×600 with one sidebar, it’s now optimised for 1024×768 with two sidebars. I’ve put both sidebars on the right, although I may change this. I’ve stayed with fixed width, because I prefer to know exactly how it will look.
I’ve been threatening to do this for a while. Actually it’s only been 6 weeks (seems longer) since I said I’d do this in the comments of Untwisted Vortex’s The Death of the 640×480 Resolution.
Menu Bar
I’ve removed the Pages section of my sidebar and added a menu bar instead. I suspect this will get crowded as I write more plugins, but for now I’m happy with it.
Contact Page
I now have a Contact page, which was one of the things picked up when my site was reviewed on Untwisted Vortex.
I am using a WordPress plugin to do this, but I won’t tell you which one yet. I tried out five different plugins in making the selection and I’m planning a series of reviews in the coming weeks. I don’t want to spoil the conclusion!
Articles Page
I’ve added the Articles plugin by Alex King and used it to create an Articles page, so my articles are not buried over time, as pointed out by Hari when he reviewed my site. I will supplement this with some extra article features in future (such as a Most Viewed Articles section in the sidebar).
One thing I noticed while setting this up is that I have gotten away from article style posts in recent times. I am going to work to get back to articles in future.
The Corn Factor
I removed my ‘blurb’ and changed my tagline (from A Journey In Web Development to Exploring Web Development). My blurb seemed good to me when I started out, but now it seems corny. To prove I still have the corn factor, I’ve added the infinite loop image to my header.
If I had a travel blog, I’d add a great photo to the header, but it’s not so easy to do when you are writing about web development! I’m sure something better will come later.
Social Widgets
The Bumpzee, MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog widgets have migrated from my sidebar to my footer. They were just taking too long to load. They aren’t any quicker in the footer, but at least they aren’t holding up the rest of the page.
DualFeeds Beta
I’ve also been running the beta version of DualFeeds 1.1, which includes a sidebar widget and the ability to show the RSS feed links after each post. You can see these in action on my site.
Actually, I’ve held up the release of DualFeeds 1.1 while I’ve been redesigning the site. People haven’t been clamouring for it and I want to have my site right before I start pushing the update.
FeedBurner
I started using FeedBurner for my feeds several weeks ago, as part of testing DualFeeds 1.1. I am not sure I’ll keep using it. It’s nice to get stats about the number of subscribers and there are other benefits, but although FeedBurner works well for the main feeds, it’s not so good with WordPress’ dynamic feeds (eg category feeds). I’ll discuss this further later on.
Also, it appears that FeedBurner feeds don’t work in China, meaning I can’t use my desktop reader to read my own feed! Makes testing interesting. The Subscribe To Email feature may sway me to stick with them.
Antisocial Plugin
I’ve adopted Andy Beard’s Antisocial hack of the Sociable plugin, which adds social bookmarking links to end of each post. Antisocial makes the links nofollow, so you don’t leak too much PageRank. I’m not sure if anyone is using them, but they sit just nicely below my feed icons.
The Dreaded Adsense
I’ve been warned that Adsense is not going to make me much money and that it may even drive readers away. I understand that my core readers are mostly Adsense blind and less likely to click ads. So why am I adopting it?
I’m about to develop a site for someone else and I may do more freelance web development in future. I should at least try Adsense shouldn’t I? I’ll be trying other options too in future, but I’ll try not to go overboard.
Polls
I’ve adopted Lester Chan’s WP-Polls plugin. Polls are a great way to interact with your visitors, so I’ll be adding one every so often.
Alexa Widget
I’ve added an Alexa widget, now my ranking is semi-respectable. I know, I know, there are serious flaws with Alexa, but it’s one way to measure my progress. Let me add it damn it!
The Future
That’s all the changes for the moment. There will be more changes coming in future (rework my About page, separate comments and trackbacks, add a top commentator section, sort out my meta tags and a bunch of other stuff). I’ll leave all of that until after I get the DualFeeds 1.1 update out the door.
If you’ve read this far, you truly have stamina (or at least you’re not easily bored!).
Tags: Adsense, alexa, DualFeeds, feedburner, social networks, widgets, Wordpress Plugins, wordpress themes
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There isn’t actually much difference between sidebars and footer for widgets if the sidebar loads after the content.
There are so many themes I look on as “broken” just because they load the sidebars first. That includes Mashable, Marketing Pilgrim and a few others.
If you’re not going to make a real footer to place the widgets in you could just as well get rid of them or place them within a hidden layer. Currently they look out of place I’d say.
The other changes sound good, nice to see yet another saying goodbye to 800×600, especially if you don’t go with fluid content. Especially when working in a high resolution it’s just annoying to see sites made for 800×600, definitely if they’re static.
“If you’ve read this far, you truly have stamina (or at least you’re not easily bored!).”
I’m a fast reader…..
Looks good, and thanks for the link to the Articles plugin, I think I can make use of that.
Agree with Slevi about the footer, it does look a little messy, but then not many people come down that far I guess.
Those widgets do load s_l_o_w_l_y. Your post reminds me that I need a contact page.
Andy, my sidebars do load after the content, but if the widgets ‘hang’, my background image doesn’t load. The image is called via CSS from a div immediately after the body tag, which finishes just before the footer. Moving the widgets out of this div into the footer solves the problem. There may be better ways to design the page, but this is how the default WordPress theme does it and I haven’t had time to investigate further.
Slevi and Chris, thanks for the input about the footer looking messy. I agree. I’ll try to tidy it up later. I may yet decide to remove them (but I like to see who’s been stopping by and check out their sites and not everyone leaves comments).
Lucia, yes, they do load slowly. Having said that, they haven’t been too bad for the last day or so. Let me know if you want to know which Contact plugin I went with (to be honest they all do the job, just some are fancier and more complicated than others).
Nothing wrong with putting Adsense on your site. A site with advertising looks more professional and gives you credibility as opposed to looking like a personal site.
[...] am tickled pink. I wrote a review for More Than Scratch The Surface a little while back and Stephen has implemented some of my recommendations as well as at least one [...]
Alex, thanks for your input. There are a lot of people saying Adsense drives people away from your site, so it’s refreshing to hear someone take a different point of view.
i definitely haven’t found much use for those widgets. I really didn’t get much traffic from them on even my most popular blogs so I dont really know how it is working for you but I think it just clutters a layout!
Amanda, Thanks for visiting. Personally, I like to see who’s visiting. I could display them only if the viewer is logged in (ie it’s me). But I am looking at other options.
In theory it is possible to load scripts after the page has loaded, in which case it wouldn’t mess with my theme if they were in the sidebar. As it turns out this isn’t possible with these scripts because they use document.write() which can only be use when the page is loading. I’m looking at one more alternative, before I give up.
I will do something with them one way or another.
Looking forward to your release of your widget reviews… I’ve done my contact form as a static page but it’s always nice when it’s easy to handle with plugins
I think the new changes look great, I especially like that new menu bar. I think that makes the site look a lot more professional.
DeMerchant, actually I almost made my own contact page too. The first plugin was terrible – actually it probably works fine, just the documentation was terrible (it didn’t even say how to call the form). Then I found 4 other ones and they all seem pretty good.
The beauty of using a plugin for the Contact Form is you can easily call it on multiple pages. At the moment I only use it once (on the Contact page), but I’ll probably add it to more pages in future (such as my plugin pages).
Court, Thanks for your feedback. I’m happy with the menu bar for the moment, but I’ll fill it eventually and I’ll have to consider what I do then.
Hey, like the layout Stephen, and the bigger form fields
I think adsense is a bit of a waste of time and effort for blogs like these, at least those that focus on geeky nerdy tech stuff like we do. Most of us are adsense blind. Still, all good for experimentation purposes and positioning. OTOH ifyou have the traffic then, heck small %’s of high numbers can be pretty useful.
Sigh, I now find myself debating whether to open up some files and do a little more with mine. A good dvd seems a better option
Thanks Rob, Yes, I’m Adsense blind myself (at least I was, I keep wanting to click on mine)
But I knew it wasn’t going to work well before I adopted it. I keep having ideas for other sites where it would work better, but I don’t have the time to implement them!
“As it turns out this isn’t possible with these scripts because they use document.write()”
Clearly, blogrush and bumpzee need to find another way to deliver this stuff. Some of my visitors say they don’t notice the slow load, but I do. It’s aggravating.
[...] s__l__o__w__l__y and causes my sidebars to hang. ( I complained about this here. You’ll find Steve Cronin also moved the widget to the footer because it often loads s__l__o__w__l__y . I’m sure if you [...]
Lucia,
I totally agree. These widgets are too slow. Not all the time, not for all users, but too often (and they cause problems with some sites’ layouts). I know many people who have moved them to the bottom or dropped them all together. They need to find a better way to deliver it.
I haven’t totally given up on finding a way to speed it up (testing another method as we speak). If I can find something, I’ll let everyone know (and hopefully turn it into a plugin).
Adsense is bad when webmaster dont know some techniques, I mean background colors, places etc. Your adsense block is pretty, dont worry.
Alex, Thanks – although I need to work on the placement etc. I haven’t had time to try many permutations to see what works best.