The Kazology Blog uses Word Press, no surprise there. What makes it fun is the amount of customization even a “non-programmer” like me can do to make it a personal thing.
You can get thousands of themes, and thousands of various plugins to modify the basic installation of WP. Even better are “Widgets” which are an even simpler version of a plugin. You only have to know how to:
- Copy a file from the web to a directory on your server or home computer
- Unzip the file
- Move it to the proper directory in the Word Press install on the host server.
- Access the WP Admin Control Panel to activate the plugin / Widget
- Access the WP Admin Control Panel configure settings, if any
How simple is that!
I enjoy trying out new plugins, although sometime with nasty results. To be fair, normally all you have to do is delete the offending plugin from the Host Server and you are back in business. Even then I did manage to lock myself completely once. Guess what? Another plugin to the rescue. (Maybe not technically a plug in, but PHP file, but you use it just like a plugin.)
So where the heck is all this going – to my latest project – The BlogRoll page. It seems everyone posts a list of links to other blogs/websites they like, but it seems the normal default is just that, a list of links. Boring, unordered list like “Georges Web Site”, “A Cool Web Site”, “A boring Web Site”, “Aardvarks Are Us” to “Zebra’s need a home too”.
I didn’t like that list.
I didn’t like that list. So a search began. While there are a number of plugins out there that do this the one I found was “Zo’C’s Powerblogroll“. I downloaded and installed. Oops… had some trouble here. It is not a widget, so requires some knowledge of coding to put the BlogRoll where you want it. That wasn’t getting me to far. I had used another widget “Widgetize Anything” to convert a Plugin to a Widget so gave it a try. With a lot of playing around with the single line of PHP code I finally got it working! At that point I had a nice BlogRoll in the sidebar. Looked pretty good with a nice Favicon and the name showing. Not quite satisfied I thought I would add a short description to let the reader know what “Aardvarks Are Us” is all about. (in ten words or less…) That worked great also. But did make the sidebar column sort of long, okay, but sort of long. Then I starting adding a few more links to things I use in Word Press or the web page itself (some day I am going to figure out how to switch the current home page to a page in Word Press . . some day.) At this point it just wasn’t going to be practical any longer to keep the BlogRoll in the sidebar.