Better search, Widget tidying, wider sidebars, who am I?
Posted on: December 17, 2006
Cleaned house today. Thanx to the wonders of Google Co-op Custom Search Engines, it's now easier to find previous posts on Torley Lives. Google search isn't as visual as the WordPress default (which showed full posts), but it's definitely deeper and summarizes more effectively. You'll note there's a faint yellow placeholder bar on top — that'll be filled with Pages content as I do it.
I'm also in the process of cleaning up Widgets and trimming down extraneous and rarely-used ones. One of these, alas, was the RSS feed + email subscription form. The latter hardly got used, so it's been deactivated. My apologies to those who were using it. The former, I've found, will be accessed anyway by those who know what they're looking for. Not the most obvious, but for the space it was taking up, that Widget wasn't providing enough benefit in return. I've also removed "Multimedia" for now pending further visual organization (and ways of streamlining my offsite media collections — perhaps I should highlight some of my creations like textures).
Another note is, I wanted to add a My Clipmarks feed — and possibly others — to keep an open view on what I'm doing in some of my fave web communities, but it's not working for me for some reason. It's OK, I've asked the Clipmarks crew for help as they continue to improve with nifty, new features!
You may have noticed I broadened my blog's left sidebar too, so both are now 200 pixels wide. This makes the middle column noticeably thinner, but the shorter line length may be easier to read, and still allows for images I wanna share. I do know, tho, that there are older blog entries with rather large images jutting off to the side: not an elegant presentation, but at least you can see the running history I'm keeping.
At latest shortly after the New Year, I plan to update the "Who am I?" section.
Thanx for visiting my home page, hope you're enjoying your stay. 
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December 17th, 2006 at 7:54 AM PST
Congrats on the improvements Torley, very slick
I'm having EricW look into the Clipmarks feed issue. Should be a quick fix… I'll let you know.
December 17th, 2006 at 11:33 AM PST
Hmm - I'm a bit stumped. If I copy the exact XML of your feed to my site, It comes through into the wordpress RSS widget. If I get it from clipmarks.com, it just doesn't come through or occasionally throws an errror.
I'm going to dig around and see if I can get some more information out of wordpress
December 17th, 2006 at 3:28 PM PST
True, there's no need to waste visual space on the page with an RSS feed pointer; the information is already in the LINK tags in the page HEAD, and any RSS reader worthy of the name will be able to find the feed address in there (such as with Sage's "Discover Feeds" button). Best to take up that space with features that promote watermelony goodness.
December 17th, 2006 at 9:58 PM PST
Adam and Eric, thanx SO much for checking this out! I thought it'd be straightforward, or that I'd goofed something up, but it seems like there's something more. I want to show off what I'm Clipmarking easily — before I was in a bit of a weird dilemma, not knowing the best way to present the headlines, but RSS is convenient.
Erbo, thanx for the advice. I suppose I was drawn into an RSS-badge lull in part because I wanted to recolor mine. But seeing Firefox 2 and IE7 being able to auto-discover a lot more effectively, and using a handy WordPress plugin to redirect RSS subscriptions to my Feedburner feed is great.
I love watching news go by: several times last week, I was editing my site when I heard of Grand Unified Linden Blog news first as I casually gazed at the sidebars.
Incidental news!