Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I had a mood and a few moments to spend on making my blog better. This time I decided to take a closer look at the sidebar. I’m not finished yet, but the changes that you can see are the following:

• Compressed archives. Archives have been taking too much of valuable space, so now they are compressed. You can either navigate (page by page) through archives for a particular year (which, I guess is not very useful), or click on a plug sign near the year that you are interested in. You’ll see the year expand into a list of months that have posts. Click on any month, and you’ll see the posts. If you want similar functionality for your blog, I used the Collapsible Archive Widget plugin.
• On this day. I’ve been blogging for a few years now and managed to accumulate quite a few posts here. But neither me, nor most of the visitors to this blog ever went through the archives of this blog. It’s a shame, since there is plenty of cool stuff in there. I’ve installed On this day plugin, which shows up as a widget in the sidebar and shows a list of everything that got posted on this day in previous years. Also, if you are not on a front page, but reading a post, sidebar will show you more posts not from today, but from the day that post was published. It’s fun, like any other attempt of a time machine.

Update: Collapsible Archive Widget plugin has been replaced by Fancy Archives plugin, which is a bit more flexible and suits the need better.

I’m glad to say that this blog gets more comments these days than it ever had. This is probably due to several reasons - frequent posting on my side, improved web design of the site, recent comments list on the sidebar, email notifications for replies to your comments, etc. Most of these improvements were introduced via different WordPress plugins.

Today I am adding yet another one, which will, hopefully, bring in even more comments by making the web site a little bit more personal. I’ve installed the Easy Gravatars WordPress plugin, which shows the author’s picture near the comment. Pictures are taken from the Gravatar.com web service, which was recently acquired by Automattic - the company making excellent WordPress software and running WordPress.com web service.

If you don’t have an account at Gravatar, no image will be shown near your comments. But if you do, your comments on this site, as well as on any other web site that uses Gravatar.com will become more recognizable. So, I suggest you go register and upload the image of yours - it’s really simple, straightforward, and free.

So, let’s see faces now behind all those comments…

P.S. : I mentioned avatars before on this post.

I’m doing lots of silly stuff.  Who else could post a few articles in the morning, and then start with major WordPress upgrade?  Surely, there was a disruption of service while many of your came to read the posts.  Sorry, guys.

The good news is that I finally did it.  The blog was lagging behind the recent security updates and new features, running on WordPress 2.2.2 .  Today I updated it first to 2.2.3, which went without any problems.  Then I went for 2.3.1, which broke a few things.  I had to remove a few files and re-upload them and then fix a few places in the database and adjust the theme a bit.

All my posts were under a single category, and were tagged with Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, which WordPress 2.3 provided an import for.  That thing didn’t work properly.  Probably, because I have a few thousands of posts, and a few thousands of tags, and importing them all takes more time than a browser is willing to wait without timing out.

But I don’t care for that right now.  It was a mess anyway.  Some posts got tags imported, others didn’t.  I’m not going back to fix them all. What’s done is done and it’s time to move on.  All posts will still remain under the single category (General), but that won’t be displayed.  Instead, you’ll see the tags to each post.  I’ll try to keep them orderly, and maybe even organize them a bit later.  For now, if you want to find something, use the search box of this site, Google, or drop me a line and I’ll try to locate the bit for you.

If you notice any misbehavior of the site, please let me know.  Thank you.