WP Station » sidebar

Ryboe Tag Cloud — Categories as Tags

miklb — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:57:54 +0000

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!

Learn More and Download Ryboe Tag Cloud for WordPress here!

flickrRSS

miklb — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 17:19:53 +0000

eightface

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.

Now Reading Updated

miklb — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 00:03:25 +0000

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

Zap_Recent_Commented

miklb — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 12:32:32 +0000

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.

Sidebar Slider

miklb — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 21:37:56 +0000

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.

Left Sidebars and Optimal Code

miklb — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 08:33:36 +0000

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.

My first attempt was to simply float the sidebar left, and the content right (I use a div “wrapper” to contain both, makes life real simple). Didn’t work. No matter how much I played with paddings and margins, the sidebar wanted to drop below the content, albeit to the left of it. I did some reading , and found that order does come into factor when floating. So I did a position:absolute to the sidebar. Voile! It worked. Great. THEN I started looking at page views, where there was very little content. Yuck. No go. The background image would only extend the length of the content, not the sidebar, despite the fact the sidebar was “longer”. A lot more trial and error, I resorted to posting to the CSS-discuss mailing list. A kind person said, “float left, float right”. I replied I’d done that. I guess the level of understanding of CSS 2 I have was showing, because he gave me a link to a site, with left hand navigation (sidebar). I looked at the code, and sure enough, float right, float left with the navigation coming after the content. What he left out, was the position:relative added to the navigation. I quickly tried that out, and settled on position: relative for my sidebar, set some widths and margins to fit within the background image, and bingo! my small content page views work out, so the background extends the distance of the sidebar. And I’m just slightly more understanding the intricacies of the box model.