Having fun with the Sidebar

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Update: Collapsible Archive Widget plugin has been replaced by Fancy Archives plugin, which is a bit more flexible and suits the need better.

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