Well, my blog has. Yes, I’ve added an extra column to it.

I thought the information down the left hand side was getting a little long. The further down the screen it goes, the less chance of it being read. So I’ve split it into 2 and divided it onto both sides of the page. The left hand side is for information about me. The right hand side is for information about the blog.

And it’s still XHTML compliant.

But in doing so I found a problem with my Simple Wakoopa List plugin – when displaying “newly used” software the links don’t work properly. After having a bit of a fumble about, it would appear the problem is the feed from Wakoopa rather than my plugin – it doesn’t appear the supply them in certain circumstances. A quick fix would be to not display a link if one is not forthcoming from the XML feed. However, just after I wrote the plugin, Wakoopa launched a new API – my plan, therefore, is to move to this. The one downside, though, is that I can’t find an equivalent of “newly used” with the new system. So I’ve contacted Wakoopa. As soon as I get a response I’ll code a fix.

FeedBurner is no more¹. Long live raw, in the flesh, naked feeds.

In other words, if you previously subscribed via FeedBurner, please re-subscribe. I promise to make it worth your while

1. to be perfectly honest, it was being just a touch flaky since Google took over. Not only that but it kept complaining that my feeds were too big. [↩]

You’d think I enjoyed dabbling with my WordPress theme and plugins wouldn’t you

Ok, yes, of course I do. It’s great fun.

The smiley above is one such change, as I updated my “smiley pack”. I’ve also introduced the calendar which you can see at the beginning of each post. The way to do this is relatively easy (assuming you know your CSS and a bit of PHP). At first I had an iPhone style background for it, but after a scourer of the ‘net, I came across this more suitable dark version. Very nice, and I chose a text colour to match (it was white before and looked obviously stuck over the top).

The menu at the top has recently changed, to include some popular categories, and the sidebar had a refresh a while ago.

And, thanks to Tony, I’ve now added footnotes¹.

Finally, I’ve settled into Twitter and am now happy to say what plugin I’m using for that! I kept swapping at first as I tried various Twitter plugins, all of which didn’t work quite how I wanted. I wanted two pieces of functionality – to be able to inform Twitter of a post and to be able to display my latest Twitter – and thought I’d have to have two plugins. In the end, though, I cam across Twitter Tools which does both and has all the functionality that I wanted. Perfect.

Not WordPress related, but whilst on the subject of Twitter, I also experimented with Firefox plugins – TwitterFox ended up the best of that bunch (I wanted a simple way to post Twitters from my browser, and one that didn’t fowl up through my works proxy and firewall).

However, as much as I’ve plugged into my blog, I’ve also taken out – there were quite a few functions that I simply wasn’t using. It’s also keeping this installation as lean as possible – thanks to the shoddy speed of my hosting I need all I can get. As soon as I can scrape some money together I’m off to Memset (yes, yes, I keep promising that I know).

1. and this is an example [↩]