Added a few more bits’n'bobs

Along with the changes I made last weekend (Added some menu functions) I’ve added a few other plugins to make the blog a bit more usable. These included adding some social bookmarking links and blog statistics.

Adding Social Bookmarking

I was looking at a few sites and noticed the prevalence of social bookmarking links. I know this site is basically unknown, but it seemed like something worth adding anyway.

I played around with the And2Any plugin but it seemed a little over the top and didn’t sit well visually. Then I found that Sociable seemed very popular and looked a bit simpler.

I installed it but found a conflict with my modified theme. Apparently I’d hit “CSS Specificity”, that defines the order that CSS tags are used. By #content tag was overriding the .sociable tags. I had to load up on the CSS definitions for it to work:

#content .sociable_tagline {
	background-color: white;
}
#content .sociable {
	background-color: #E1E4CE;
}
#content .sociable span {
	# display: block;
	background-color: #E1E4CE;
}
#content .sociable ul {
	display: inline;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
}
#content .sociable ul li {
	background: none;
	display: inline;
	list-style-type: none;
	margin-left: 3px;
	margin-right: 0;
	padding: 0px;
}
#content .sociable ul li:before { content: ""; }
#content .sociable img {
	display: inline;
	float: none;
	width: 16px;
	height: 16px;
	border: 1px solid #357306;
	margin-top: 3px;
	padding: 1px;
}

This resolved the conflicts and allowed me to create a theme-friendly look (see below).

Stats

My hosting service gives me a lot of stats if I want them. I’d also enabled the WordPress.com stats plugin, but it seemed to show zero visitors all the time and had problems retaining my login id.

So I had a look and saw a few posts talking about the Google Analytics for Wordpress plugin. Then I found a brilliant Wordpress.tv video showing how to get started with Google Analytics. I couldn’t believe how simple it was; just go to Google Analytics, register and get the javascript code and put it into the appropriate page (footer.php). How easy was that!

Infact, I created a Google Analytics entry for my Photo Gallery as well using the same approach.

Now I just need some traffic to get some value from it.

A few others

I’m also gorging myself on a few other plugins, just to see if they add any value:

• Broken Link Checker which periodically goes through your posts and check all links. It puts broken link info on your dashboard.
• WP Auto Tagger that can automatically generate tags as you post, or you can set it to suggest tags when you click the button. I’m using the manual option and it does give some bizarre tags. The jury’s still out on this one.
• WP Page Navi to add page number links to the bottom of the main blog pages. I had to do a bit of tweaking of the CSS (including copying the pagenavi-css.css file into my themes directory). It seems to work fine.