After putting it off long enough, I spent some time this weekend tweaking my blog.
First, I hacked some plug-in code to get the random posts in the format I needed. I had to go all the way to making changes in some SQL queries. While WordPress’ APIs are getting better, I still find myself going all the way and hit MySQL to get the necessary data. It’s not ideal because this type of code changes will break with schema changes. Oh well, it is a hack I guess… Finally, I tweaked the CSS to fix issues that had been bugging me. Some were minor issues like color and font inconsistencies; some were layout issues.
Some of results are:
- The sidebar is re-arranged around a bit. More useful data is pushed up and space efficiency was taken into account.
- The new list of random posts, with excerpts, appears at the bottom of the sidebar.
- The footer is now rendered a lot cleaner than before.
- The new list of most commented posts appears in one of the footer columns.
- More consistent link hover styles for both black and blue backgrounds.
- Time/Date is now displayed with no wrapping.
Next thing I want to tackle is to build a better Flikr widget than the one I’m currently using…