A number of years back I did a lot of woodworking. I made a variety of things from large items such as bookcases to small toys, the closest I came to a speciality was musical instruments having made a number of dulcimers of the courting type (two dulcimers merged into one so spooning couples could play “knee to knee”) hammered, mini, and normal. Also Hurdy-Gurdy and a banji-mer (a dulcimer built on a banjo body)…. anyway I made a lot of things. (past tense). Often as I was working in the shop I found that getting ready to make a project was a huge part of the satisfaction, it was not always in the making. Sure I liked the finished product, but making a fixture here, a jig there, rearranging the shop layout to be more efficient… those were the things that I spent more time in tinkering with than actually making things. I guess that is why I enjoy tinkering with WordPress and the variety of themes, plugins, widgets and general overall flexibility it possesses. I enjoy tweaking, occasionally breaking and fixing, and just “messing around” with WP in general.
[jalbum_iframe_album:https://www.kasdorf.net/GSlideShows/Woodwork/index.html,100%,600px]
And that brings me to the topic of this post. . . a fantastic new plugin crafted by Janek Niefeldt called “my custom widgets” UPDATE 21/14/2015 this link no longer appears to work so I have removed it. I had tried another plugin that was supposed to let you turn things into a sidebar widget but I was having problems with it. This one was just created and so I gave it a spin. It is really great. There are more options than I know what to do with right now, but hopefully I will learn them as I go and discover the full range of capability in this plugin. I like I can create a widget using PHP or HTML code. The HTML code was used for the Dilbert Cartoon strip, simple copy and paste. I also used it for the link to Technorati (glad I am not in this for money or the back links would be really disappointing!). The other neat feature is you can specify exactly which pages you want the widget to appear on. So for Dilbert I flagged it as “Home” only so it only appears on the page listed as home in the set up. Then when you go to other postings it is not there slowing things down with having to load it again. I see where you could have different content on pages this way also. Other choices are page, single, search, all, archive and tag. I give it my “Cool Tool” award!
Now, not unlike my woodworking projects, all I have to do is keep myself from endless tweaking or additions making the pages so crowded as to become annoying.
Until the final widget blows up the blog,