This is the fourth week of the Blog Improvement Project. Our task for this week is to focus on the basics of our blog. I’ve been very busy!
I spent ages trying to improve the layout and add a ‘recent comments’ section to the sidebar. It didn’t really look very professional, and I was worried all my messing around was actually making it worse!
Then I upgraded to WordPress 2.7 and everything became much easier! WordPress 2.7 is a big improvement. It is much easier to add things to the sidebar without a knowledge of html, and all the behind-the-scenes management of the blog is much more intuitive.
With WordPress 2.7 it was really easy to add the recent comments section to the sidebar. All I had to do was tick one box!
It also has an option to add a text box, so I added my ‘currently reading’ and ‘top of the TBR’ boxes, so that everyone can see which books I’m focusing on at the moment.
My next task was to try to add a tab to show all the books I have reviewed on my blog. This was a lot harder than I expected. Bloggers seem to want everything archived by date, so it took me a while to find this azindex widget to organise things alphabetically. It is a big improvement to have all my book reviews in one place, but I’d ideally like them ordered by author. I know this can be done using tags for the first letter of an author’s surname, but this would be a lot of work for me. I’ll try to do it one day when I have a bit more time.
I must have done something to improve my blog’s visibility, as I was previously getting between 5 and 10 spam comments a day. I the last 12 hours I’ve had 156! I’m off to find a good way of getting rid of it!
I look forward to seeing what improvements everyone else has made, and hopefully I’ll get a few more good ideas!
