As you may be aware, I’m home, and relaxing a bit before I get back to work. This morning I decided to spend a little time playing (while the rest of the family is still asleep) at sidebar envy — a phrase coined by my friend Sharon Peters in Montreal.
First, I got rid of my blogroll. Too dangerous. There are just too many bloggers to list, and to tell the truth, I don’t really read them all. It’s sad. So I replaced it with a list of blog postings that I share from Google Reader. It works pretty nicely, because I can call up Google reader anywhere — even my phone.
I also went to my del.icio.us pages and learned how to include my latest bookmarks, tagged with blogsneducation, including an RSS feed. I tried to figure out a way to enable readers to click in other tags for display, but I couldn’t get WordPress to pass those variables through, and mucking around in php right now just seemed like too much fun, so I settled with a link and an RSS feed for nine of my most populated tags.
I also worked on my tag cloud script, which I wrote on another playful day. It now color codes words by frequency as well as sizing them.
Time for my early morning 12 mile bike ride along the green way, and then some serious relaxing, or some serious work. Heads or tails!
2¢ Worth
Sounds like you had fun but alas the links from your RSS Reader (I believe you sat are your shared feeds) do not seem to work for me. I get a message from feed burner saying “there is an error of some kind”.
Ps I hope other do not follow suit and get rid of their blogroll…it is one of the ways I tell my staff to look for other blogs to read. You and Will, along with Clarence, Darren and Jeff are the 5 feeds I give them to get them started.
Enjoy the rest of your day!
Thanks, Barbara. The RSS parser that I used was an old one, and is obviously broken. I downloaded a new one, and it seems to be working fine. Thanks again!
— dave —
I agree with you about the blogroll. I decided only to list the ones that I am actively reading on my blogroll. I have to update that often, because it changes for me a lot. As many good ones as there are out there, I’m pretty brutal about dropping one if I find that it is not catching my interest anymore.
10 is my number, and if I want to add a new one, I have to drop an old one – harsh, huh?
Hi, David, yesterday I came across blogger Information Aesthetics and I really like his/her design, especially the sparklines which you might be able to use (I’m not technically knowledgeable enough to implement it). I also like Infosthetics search options which allows visitors to search the blog by date, by category and by keyword. I think that is a very useful option. I’d like to implement that. Do you know if WordPress allows for that, and if so, how?