Easily display a tag cloud of all your post categories in your sidebar. This plugin uses the WordPress Widgets sidebar. The plugin utilizes the category slugs you define as links and shows the amount of posts with that category tag as a measure of font size. Quick and easy install!
A small update to this popular plugin is out. The update deals with how urls are handled by Flickr with certain images. If you are not familiar with the plugin, it grabs the latest images from your Flickr accounts RSS feed for display on your site. Very popular for showing latest images in your sidebar.
RobLog
A bevy of changes to this popular WP plugin which allows for users to show books in their sidebar (or other places) of recommended or now reading. Now in 3.3 beta 2
Zappelfillip plaudert…
At first read, it sounds like a plugin to eliminate comments, but actually zap is the unique tag indentifier for the plugin, I’m assuming do the author’s name or site (it’s in German). The function of the plugin is actually to list just posts titles of recently commented on posts. Though the site is in German, the author has added a “view in English” link to instantly translate the page. Just another expample of the growing plugin database to further customize your site.
Ars Aranea
Quite the nifty plugin, uses DHTML (isn’t that the old school term for AJAX?) to keep your short sidebar in the screen while visitors scroll down through long lists of posts. Especially useful to blogs that keep the sidebar tidy, but post full content or long posts. Extensive directions and explanations on the site, and assumedly bundled with the plugin as well. Author’s site contains a working example of plugin (note, you have to scroll, I couldn’t grab the vertical scroll bar and slide fast and see the sidebar). Very nifty plugin, to say the least.
There’s much discussion regarding SEO (search engine optimization), which I’ll leave to those who want to “specialize” in it. I’ll trust the consensus, which makes sense, that content should come before sidebars, etc. Which can present a small dilemma when designing using CSS and PHP. While porting the X blog theme, I entered my first foray into this.
Continue reading