I don’t have much time this morning before some really bad weather is heading our way but I thought I’d take a few moments to list several of the changes I’ve made to the blog in the last few weeks as part of my reorganizing & simplification efforts this year.
- I’ve changed to a greatly streamlined theme with only one sidebar. This is major for me because I tend towards prefering themes that are full screen and fluid with sidebars on left and right but I fell in love with this Notepad theme when I ran across it recently. I have a thing for making lists on notepads – steno pads, mostly – and since I used to call my old blog Bev’s Notes, I think I was feeling a bit nostalgic. Okay, whatever. I am looking for a particular graphic to use as a logo and keep it from being quite so generic. I just haven’t found it yet.
- Anyway, streamlining to just one sidebar also created the need to reorganize what was there, so I decided to move some of the sidebar content into pages that can be found at the top in the navigation bar. So, now there’s links there for:
- Home
- About
- Archives
- Categories
- Links
- Tag Cloud
- The other thing I’ve been doing is simplifying the categories I use both for posts and for links. To me, categories, at least the way they’re used in WordPress are supposed to function as a Table of Contents. With the advent of tagging, those can be the index and I fully intent to start using them. As to the categories, I’m still cleaning out the ones for the posts. The categories for the links have an interesting story behind them, though. When I rearranged my book related feeds on Google Reader recently, I decided to do something different. I looked at each feed and asked myself “what kind of posts are there?” An extremely interesting thing happened because the choices were fairly obvious and had nothing to do with “who” was blogging. So I decided to use what I ended up there for the categories here. I still have some feeds to add to the links here but I’ll get to them as time allows.
- And one final thing with regards to simplifying, one of the things I’ve been giving serious consideration to is what I use and what I don’t use. While I haven’t decided on the fate of my Facebook and Twitter accounts yet, which I don’t use all that much, I have found something extremely useful on Google Reader which I use all the time. It’s a widget that I’ve added to the sidebar that allows me to “share” links with comments to things I find that I might not necessarily have time or inclination to include in a full post here. The neat thing is that readers visiting the site can either go directly to the link or choose to go to my shared page and see them. Everyone should be able to see the posts and anyone with a Google account should be able to see my added comments. I think. There may be bugs to work out.