Theme peril

by IndiepoprockJesse

After looking at page after page of wonderful WordPress themes today, trying to find a “temporary, close enough” one for our work WordPress implementation, I decided that the theme on this blog was far too boring. So I picked something more colourful. I like that the links are very easy to see.

Unfortunately, though the theme was listed as having widgets, that function seems not to be working. Those boxes that you can see on the sidebar are not optional. So I can’t add back my “recently clipped or saved feed”. If you miss it let me know. Maybe I will change the theme again. Or I could just send you the feed URL itself.

Second change(s)

1. In the first iteration of this blog I had a theme in which the RSS feeds for the blog were displayed via a link (not an icon) on the “Meta” widget and I placed it low on the right hand column. On the top of that column was (and is) a widget displaying my recently shared and clipped posts which because it uses an RSS widget also displays an RSS icon/link. One of my readers (my hubby) mistook this for the link for the feed for the blog and subscribed to my shared posts instead of my blog feed. A lesson in usability- make things obvious. I could have made a RSS icon by placing some HTML in a text widget but I decided to change the theme instead. I will probably change themes fairly often. It gives me the opportunity to discover what I would require from the perfect theme. Using WordPress.com as my host means my choice of themes is relatively limited and I can’t change the CSS without paying for an upgrade.  Something for the future- I’ll build up to it.

2. I also wanted to add a library blogroll to the sidebar – in part to pay tribute to all the wonderful librarian bloggers out there and in part to suggest possible sources to anyone new to the biblioblogosphere who may happen to pass this way.  Ideally a blogroll is a dynamic thing and stays in sync with where ever I am reading these feeds. I often add and delete feeds. However the way Newsgator (and Google Reader and Bloglines) generates the link to your feeds is via a small piece of javascript – something not supported by WordPress.com for security reasons. The compromise was to temporarily sync my library folder feeds from FeedDemon to Newsgator. Then in Newsgator find Settings/Edit locations/Web edition/OPML which gave me an OPML URL (after I ticked “expose OPML to all users“). Then in the admin for this blog under Manage links/add new I found a link to Import links. This allowed me to specify an OPML URL. It sure saves adding the links to a blogroll one by one or even downloading the OPML file to a local drive then uploading it to this blog. The compromise it that it will not stay in sync. I will have to repeat the process from time to time until I find another workaround.

First change

I just added the Meta widget to quickly make the RSS link obvious. What is it with wordpress themes that hide the RSS icon link in the Meta widget? The readers don’t necessarily want the link to wordpress.org or the admin client but they do (or should) want an oblivious RSS link.

Note to self- add RSS icons in a text widget or learn CSS enough to rewrite WordPress themes. Start a to do list on this blog.