Website Tweaks

This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on June 18, 2008). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

One of the projects I’d like to tackle over the summer is redesigning my weblog. I’ve been using this design for a couple years now, and I’ve been thinking that I’m about ready for a change to something a bit cleaner and sparse.

However, as the major project over the next few weeks here at home needs to be packing things up and preparing for a move, I’ve settled for doing a bit of minor tweaking here and there to streamline things where I can.

To that end, here’s a quick rundown of the changes I’ve implemented:

  • Upgraded to the most current version of WordPress. Admittedly, a behind-the-scenes change that won’t really make a difference to visitors, but it was time.

  • The About page has been cleaned up a bit, removing the incomplete bulleted list of other places on the ‘net to find me with a simple in-paragraph listing that’s far more complete. I belong to far too many different networking websites.

  • Rather than listing my tweets in a sidebar box, Twitter Tools and AsideShop will now be displaying them inline with weblog posts using their own lightweight display style. In order to keep my RSS feeds from getting too cluttered up, Advanced Category Excluder prevents tweets from showing up in syndication feeds.

  • iWPhone has been installed so that iPhone/iPod Touch users will automatically get an optimized, lightweight layout.

  • LiveJournal Crossposter has been upgraded, which should (I hope) fix the odd problem I was having with crossposts not appearing in LJ Friends pages. It’s also configured not to crosspost tweets, as they’re already crossposted by Ping.fm.

  • Postalicious will be automatically posting my del.icio.us bookmarks daily around midnight, as long as there are five or more unposted and ready to go, otherwise it will wait until the next day. This allowed me to drop the (huge) ‘eclinkticism’ box out of the sidebar.

  • In another behind-the-scenes change, the WPhone Admin Plugin gives me an iPhone/iPod Touch optimized administration interface, in case I ever need to do any posting or tweaking while on the go.