Widget

Just playing around with Clearspring widgets…

I’ve switched themes to Tarski, not because I was having any theme problems, but because I felt like a change of scenery round here, and I thought that this photo from my recent week at the beach would make a good custom header background. I cropped it, and added text to it, with Picnik. The font in header is Ariel, which while not ideal was the most suitable of the fonts available in the basic version of Picnik.

Reasons for choosing Tarski (from among the thousands of themes available for WordPress these days) include: it’s clean; it’s well documented; it’s kept up to date, and indeed the version I’m using was released a couple of days ago for compatibility with WordPress 2.6; it has all the features I was looking for, such as widgets; it’s available at WordPress.com, so if I get to like it enough I could switch my main blog to it.

There are a few ways in which I think that Tarski could be even better. For example, I don’t like the way it displays tags separate from other post metadata. I’m not sure that I like the navbar, but I don’t see a way to disable it; on the other hand, maybe it’s such a basic feature of the theme that if you don’t like it, you should find another theme, or be willing to do your own Tarski-hacking. Oh yes, and there was some widget-related weirdness when I switched to Tarski. But I’m glad that I did switch.

The new Yahoo Music Player seemed to make playlists as simple as they could be. So I thought I’d try it out, at the same time getting some of my favorite tracks from an out-of-print CD up on to the web. See my main blog for more details.

• Bad Reputation, by Freedy Johnston.
• Bad, by Kirsty MacColl.
• Broken Bottle, by Alejandro Escovedo.
• Fall at Your Feet, by Crowded House.

My route to a theme for this blog was as follows:

• Scott’s post on minimalist WordPress themes.
• Azeem’s White as Milk, which I use on my WPMU blog (which I have neglected of late).
• Thortz’ Skimmed Milk, which is based on WaM.

I downloaded the freshly-skimmed V1.1 of the theme, followed the Codex instructions for adding a theme using cPanel, and voila. I’ll think I’ll tinker with the theme a little; for example, I’d like the sidebar to be a little wider.

One of the purposes of this blog is to try out things that aren’t possible at WordPress.com. The first example, and the subject of this post, is SmartLinks from AdaptiveBlue. I think that SmartLinks are best illustrated by example, so here goes.

1. The World is Flat, Release 3.0 is a link to my review of Thomas Friedman’s best-seller. What makes it a SmartLink is the blue icon that follows the regular link. If you click on the icon, you’ll see that it shows you various web services you might want to apply to that page (e.g., Digg).
2. The world is flat : a brief history of the twenty-first century is a link to the appropriate Library Thing page. Clicking on the icon will show the smartness. The SmartLink recognizes that this is a book, and provides other relevant links. One of the links is to Amazon; that link includes my affiliate information.
3. The link is smart is what I’d really like to do. The link itself goes to my review of the book, but the SmartLink recognizes that this is book-related, and gives Amazon, etc. Actually SmartLink doesn’t generate this for me; I pasted together the link from example 1 with the SmartLink from example 2.

I emailed AdaptiveBlue support about this last night, and Alex replied impressively quickly. Reading his reply, I realized that the support request I sent at midnight or so might as well have been written by a pumpkin for all the clarity it provided.

Sorry, Alex. I hope this is clearer. I think that SmartLinks are very cool, and would love to see them available at WordPress.com.