Do I need to reconfigure my widgets? Hold that thought.
What I Did for Day 5
For Day 5 of the Intermediate Customization Course, I didn’t have to do much. That was a “free day” but I had the option of creating a test website. That was fairly quick to do. So now, I have a site where I can text widgets and whatnot before changing things here.
Day 6: Looking at My Widgets
When I set up my widgets, I balanced what needed to be shown on all pages and what I wanted to show on the pages that used the sidebar.
The home page has the wider view, so I needed to at least have:
- A list of the latest posts;
- The latest comments made on my blog;
- A calendar, a search bar, and;
- A follow button for extra measure.
I wanted my sidebar to have:
- My Gravatar and a little summary;
- Another search bar so users could search easily;
- A follow button in case users didn’t want to scroll farther down to follow;
- A grid showing at least 10 blogs I follow;
- A text widget to show off blogging community websites I follow (right now, it’s The Blogging Meetup);
- archive and category dropdowns, for easy navigation, and;
- A counter for the number of hits my blog has received so far.
In June, I added the Twitter widget, just under the search bar in case anyone who visits this blog wants to give me a follow on Twitter.
Much of the work on my sidebar was already done months ago. I reordered some of the things to list the items in order of what I felt was most important.
That said it’s great to evaluate my widgets every now and then. And upon closer inspection, I needed to make some small changes to my sidebar.
For starters, I changed some of the text for some sections, like the Follow button, the blogs I follow, and the text widget. I made sure the titles for each widget were more descriptive.
In particular, the text widget’s display needed to be updated. I had badges from two old Blogging University courses I took that have since been reworked and renamed. That was of issue of addition by subtraction.
I think that’s all I need to do for now. Of course, the sidebar will be reevaluated every now and then. I might even add to it if I want to connect this blog to another social media platform.
Shmaltz and Menudo 