It’s not quite done yet – I’ve installed most of the stuff I was excited about, including ajax commenting, tags, and asides. Now I’m left with the task of making everything play together neatly. I don’t need tags on my Asides, and I don’t need any additional tags on my nightly delicious links, and I don’t need the date on Asides, and I do need to style those Asides, and it would be nice to have some control over how those list-items on the delicious links look. Maybe I’ll even ditch the nightly link dump and just put my delicious feed in the sidebar.
Perhaps you’re wondering “Hey, what the heck is he talking about?”
The “Asides” I’m talking about are the short posts without big silly headlines. That’s for the stuff I just want to point our during the day. Right now I usually just post that stuff to delicious, and then it gets spit back out onto the blog once a night automagically. This way, the whole “timely” thing will be in play.
The “tags” are the little things in the gray box below each post. That’s me adding some labels to a post, so that you can click on “redesign” and see all the posts on my blog about “redesign.” You might be more interested in tags like “newspapers” or “j-school” or “podcasting.” Just click on whatever you see that you want to know more about, and off you’ll go to a page that makes sense to you.
Want to know what makes sense to me? Check out the tag cloud on the top of the sidebar on the right.
The bigger, darker words are the tags I use most often. All my previous posts just have categories, so those tend to dominate, but as I use tags more, you’ll start to get a graphical idea of what I write about here.
The ajax commenting is just a cool-looking buzzword-compliant thing. Click on the “show comments” link at the end of any post with comments to see something cool happen. Hopefully it encourages discussion.
The WordPress plugins I’m using for these new features, if you’re into that sort of thing, are Ultimate Tag Warrior, Inline Ajax Comments, and Simple Asides.
Ryan Sholin 