Written by Groucho on August 25, 2006 under Uncategorized
Blogging is awesome because you could share what you know and have others tell you what they think about it as well. You could figure out what has been said recently. There’s always the plugins for recent comments but now you have a widget for it. I present to you the
http://thezeroboss.com/active-discussions-sidebar-plug-in-for-wordpress-20/”>Active Discussion 2.0 widget.
What’s to love about the Active Discussions 2.0 widget?
- The following information are available:
Title of the currently active discussions
Last person who put a comment, the time and date
The number of comments in the discussion
Link to the entry with the discussions.
As with most widgets, you need WordPress 2.0+ and the WordPress Widgets plugin. If you still don’t have that by now, go download it!
Installing it is a breeze:
Download the file and make sure you rename it to ActiveDiscussions.php
Upload the file to your wp-content/plugins directory.
Activate it on your Admin-panel.
Go to the Presentations part of your panel and play around with it.
For more information about this widget, check out the ZeroBoss’ blog. It’s actually very interesting because there are some issues about marriage and parenting being discussed there. And I am sure that he really could make so much use of the widget he released. He even has plans to improve it by the end of the month. One of the planned improvements is to AJAX-ify the comment so that you will see the recent comments in a pop-up box.
Nifty eh? Looks like it’s one of those widgets brought about by necessity as he has a lot of hot discussions on his blog!
The widgets I have seen so far are mainly on the sidebar of the blogs. Although you could play around with the positions of the widgets by dragging and dropping them wherever you like, I first encountered something like that with Canvas.
What is Canvas?
Canvas (from Fresh Pursuits) is something you could use to customize your WordPress blog without knowing anything about PHP and CSS. Blogging newbies are welcome to try this! It was a really interesting experience. You could have your layout in this admin interface and you have blocks and blocks of your layout in front of you. You could also add similar elements by drag and drop too. And you just need to click the particular block to customize it. You even have a color palette so you could easily choose colors that you want for your blog.
Why widgetize themes when you have Canvas?
I didn’t totally love the way Canvas worked. It is nice in the sense that you could easily drag and drop ‘boxes’ into your layout and customize them. I think it was mainly working with the Ink part/color palette that I didn’t like much. In any case, at least having themes that are widgets ready would make it easier to somehow manage. Especially if you are using WordPress MU to manage your blogs. That way you could let each blogger on your server to tweak their blogs to their hearts’ desires as long as you have themes that allow that.
Also, it could sometimes be easier to modify by hand the CSS of your WordPress theme. So if you already have widgets, you’re one happy blogger who will customize as the entries come and go.
Maybe there were already widgets before Canvas came out. I don’t really know for sure. All I know is that they both make customizing blogs so much fun and easier too!
Do you have a way with words? Or maybe even a great fascination for them? If you’re a word geek, show the world by adding the associative dictionary widget on your sidebar! I first saw on it giagia.co.uk and I simply was intrigued. After all, it said on the sidebar “GiaGiaDictionary” so I just had click the words. Some of them have definitions already, some don’t.
As the description of it goes:
...it adds a dictionary to your site and displays words from it through ajax calls. All the words in the description are links themselves, so you can keep wandering through the words. If a word has no description, a small form is displayed to make one up.
Interactive fun!
The Associative Dictionary could be quite fun. If you have people visiting your blog and happened to be intrigued by your ‘dictionary,’ they would probably start checking out the different words in the definition you have. It seems as though GiaGiaDictionary has quite a number of words already so with each time I click and add my own definitions of words, I get new ones. It is quite addictive as I don’t notice how many words I gave definitions to or how many words I have checked out definitions of.
Stumped?
If you don’t seem to have a nice definition for certain words, you could always click the back button and you will get back to the word you were checking out. If you feel like adding some definition to the word selected, go ahead and just write your own definitions. It certainly is fun because sometimes you would see other people’s biases and backgrounds through the definitions they add. If you are currently in another country like Japan, wouldn’t it be fun if you let your Japanese friends add their own definitions in your Associative Dictionary? That was you get to interact in some ways.
About the creator
You could get this from the dirkie.nu blog. It seems that it is his second plugin. The creator has his own associative dictionary but it is in the Dutch language, not English.
Written by Groucho on August 15, 2006 under Uncategorized
Click to enlarge the image.
Looking for a blog theme that looks clean? Look no further. Indigo is one awesome WordPress theme which has widgets support.
Some things about the theme:
Color scheme: white, blue, gray/silver, orange
Lists: bullets, round
Links and headers: orange
Links on the sidebar: gray/silver, hover over them and you’d see arrows on the left side of the links
Text: gray/silver
This widgets-ready theme for WordPress makes good use of white space so you don’t see it as too crowded. It is pretty simple. Quite bloggish for some people as it has the typical two-column layout comprised of one main column and a sidebar with the widgets and other stuff you might want to put there.
Another thing I like about this WordPress theme is that the typography looks really neat. You would want to have your text easily readable by those who’d be reading your blog so this is another plus point for Indigo.
Something about the theme creator:
I don’t understand the language on the Arcsin site but it appears to be Swedish. The theme creator is probably from there. In any case, there are a lot of awesome layouts on that site. Arcsin also was the source of Summer Breeze, Gemstone and Blackbox. Those are also pretty templates for WordPress. Looks like Arcsin is one of the most important stops for those of you who like changing themes a lot!
Is there anything not to like about the theme? I don’t really know. You be the judge!
Check it out:
Download link
Demo link
Click the image to view the theme clearly.
Solostream’s Michael D. Pollock has released a new theme called Bosco 1.0 + Widgets. As the name implies, it is ready for widgets! It really looks sleek. It has a simple two-column layout with a nice white-red-gray color scheme. You could check it out here.
Appearance
Colors: White, red, gray
Number of columns: two (sidebar is on the right)
Search box: at the sidebar, upper part
Images in the post: they are set to be at the right side
Other distinguishing features: rounded corners on the header, footer and around the main content area, the dates on the entries seem to be in black ‘tabs’
Additional information on the theme could be found on Michael Pollock’s blog entry about the theme. As he has pointed out though, if you want to use widgets with it, make sure that you have the widgets plugin up on your host and active too. Looks like he is quite active in consistently improving it when bugs are reported to him so in case you try it out and find out there are some quirky things with it, don’t hesitate to email him or post a comment.
A little something about the creator of the theme
Michael Pollock is the man behind Solostream Web Studio. He is into blog design and consultancy. He has been into small businesses since 1999. he has some interesting blog entries aside from blog themes.
Would you like something soothing on your blog and still be widget-friendly so that you would not find it difficult to work with it? If so, there is the blue horizon theme by Kaushal Sheth. It is a predominantly blue and green theme and as such, you could feel the calm and cool aura of the theme.
Things to like about the theme:
- The cool and calm feel.
This is really amazing. The header image is that of rolling hill and you could see the clouds there too. Really soothing.
- Header navigation – you could put your links to your blog’s static pages there. Or a link to another blog you update regularly.
- Blockquotes – The style is cute. When you blockquote something, there are left and bottom borders, even for the ones nested inside those blockquotes. Really cute because you could distinguish the blockquotes from the rest of the posts.
- Fonts – sans serif and rounded fonts
- Categories and subcategories – They are indicated underneath the titles of the posts.
- Widget-friendly – This is definitely something positive about it.
This is one of the themes by Kaushal Sheth and it really looks quite usable. Any blogger could easily use it and feel at home with it. This theme might be quite good with blogs with themes that center on reflection like a parenting blog or maybe travelling, especially if you feel like the default header image reminds you of your favorite place to relax. You could view the testrun here. You could also download the theme from here.
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