Richard Lennox » Wordpress

Widgetizing

Richard Lennox — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 21:34:30 +0000

I have taken the time over a few evenings to widgetize my sites theme and then use new widget plugins to recreate my sidebar in a widgetized form! Wordpress widgets seem to be the in thing right now. It is basically a simple way of creating a customised sidebar without having to edit any code. Of course that is not entirely true, it is of no use if your theme does not accept widgets or the widget plugin require some CSS rewriting. I did spend a lot of time last weekend updating the theme to accept a widgetized sidebar.

The widgetized sidebar basically lets you drag and drop the required sidebar components into the sidebar and saving this means the sidebar is created on the fly as the sum of its parts. It took a while to work it all out but I have managed to get it exactly as the PHP hard-coded version! Which I never expected. This is a great bit of functionality for those people without the skills to update the template.

My Gallery Page

Richard Lennox — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 21:38:51 +0000

So I have my wish – a gallery page. Pretty simple really – I used the Lazy-K-Gallery Plug-in and found it relatively easy to install and configure.

It did however, take quite a lot of template and style changes to make it fit, mainly because of conflicting CSS classes. I managed to get it working though, and I quite like it. It is very simple to use and view images as thumbnails or as larger, fuller images! You use the breadcrumb or back button for navigation. One of the good things about it is that there is no javascript or funky scripts to edit just straight forward link management. Less work for me, having spent the best part of 3 hours getting it to work.

My first gallery is a snapshot of our city tour of the U.S. this time last year. Enjoy! Visit the gallery page [see the page menu in the top right corner] and enjoy the pictures.

My S.E.O Rating

Richard Lennox — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 21:46:46 +0000

I found this little S.E.O. analyser that is free on the web site for a company called Sitening. It allows me to enter a URL and will return a reasonable analysis of how I am doing to help with my search engine rankings. I am not really that bothered about my rankings but I thought it would be good to take a look.

The analysis is made up of various sections, and help me realise that the themes available for Wordpress required some modification to get the basics right. I had issues with semantic structure, for example H3 HTML tags coming before a
H2 tag and worst of all no H1 tag beign in my site template. Plus many other little style sheet changes and header changes, as well some real cleaning out of some of the code due to deprecated attributes and tags. All in all, a few more hours has been spent on tidying up the coding of the new site. But it is always worth it when someone gives you a perfect score! Here is mine, click the link to read my certificate.