You may have noticed that I’ve been playing around with WordPress Themes. It relaxes me. I’m hoping, as well, that using a much more minimal design and removing a lot of the RSS twitching I had going on in the sidebar would improve the performance — I’m hoping.
I’ve left the basics in the sidebar here, blogroll, which is now coming out of WordPress’ links rather than an aggregated RSS feed, and archive. I had to include my travel photos as well, from Flickr, and I go no where without my ClustrMap.
The rest, however, is still here. Thanks to John McCreesh, in his Meall Dubh post, HOW-TO: Include an RSS feed in WordPress, I can now create separate templates by duplicating the page.php file, labeling it as a template, and the inserting the code that generates the RSS feed, which he includes in the post.
So, rather than waiting for the feed to be parsed and displayed in the sidebar every time you load the blog, you can click “What I’ve been Reading“ in the sidebar, and view a page with a list of the latest blog posts I’ve read and flagged for sharing, the RSS feed generated by Google Reader.
I’d also hacked together a tag cloud generator, which was also being displayed in the side bar. Now it is available on its own page, “Tag Cloud,” showing the most used terms in my latest 30 posts and the most used terms in the latest 120 comments.
Of course, I’m the only person I know who really cares about this 😉
Actually, Dave, I switched to a simpler look on my site as well. Less is more.
Miguel
Dave, I like it too. However, I feel so web 1.0 having to ask this…but I am not sure how to follow the links in “what I’ve been reading”.
@Theresa: Ooops! Better look into that 😉
I like. Just a note, for those of us who sub to blogs via readers, we will NEVER know you changed your theme if you don’t point it out (hint, hint Miguel).