Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

The last few days, I have been adding some bells and whistles pretty cool tools to my site. I thought that you might like to know about them. In a week or so I will write another post with links to all the different plugins I use; I want to let them run for a while to see if I need to make any changes.

Changes

1. I’m definitely into building a community and making this a two-way blog. Therefore, I have added “Recent Comments”, “Most Typative in August” (i.e. top commenters), and “Recent Trackbacks.” All of these include your url, if you give one, so it gives you an extra point on your own quest for more links. I also have the blog set up to send trackbacks where possible. I have been playing with little tiny ravens. ;)

2. To give people something else interesting to read, I put in a “related posts” plugin. This is an idea I ganked from Ordinary Folk. Unfortunately, I had a slight nightmare with tagging and some posts are incorrectly tagged. I am slowly going back and fixing those. Please understand that if a post “relates” to something very unrelated, I’m not cynically trying to suck you in. I just made a boo-boo. ;)
   
   The tags are not public; this will stop me creating a Google disaster. I may put up a tag cloud page sometime if I think it might be fun. ;)

3. I just installed the “nofollow” plugin, with a one-day delay. In other words, comments you make on posts count as links, for the increase of your linky goodness scores after one day. The one day gives me time to delete spams from Akismet. I’m waiting for the blogroll code.
   
   I am also part of the “You comment, I reply” movement.

4. I added “subscribe to comments” to comments. If I happen to reply to you individually, you should already be getting an email. However, in cases where you just said “cool” (for example) and I simply want to acknowledge you, I’ll probably be doing some “reply to several people at once” comments. Therefore, checking the box will let you get your acknowledgement (but it means you will also get notifications of every comment posted after yours.)

5. I installed “Buy me a cuppa” mostly because I thought it was cute and funny. It’s like a tip jar.

6. I installed a different “add me” widget. This one makes it easier to grok which services you’re recommending the article to (Technorati, Digg, etc.) It’s also smaller.

7. If I got it right, my feeds should now go out “full.” I still intend to put the “read more” cut on longer posts for the front page, to keep that a sensible size. Even if I do that, the feeds should go out in full format. I think that’s better.

8. Gravatars. You might notice little blue icons or custom icons next to the lists of commenters etc. These are called Gravatars–you can give yourself an icon (symbolic picture) which can be used on any site that has the gravatar plugin. It recognizes you based on your email address (and, I think, a cookie.) Click here to get a gravatar. I have been amusing myself by noticing how generic icons are slowly being replaced by little tiny pictures.
   
   I like little tiny pictures.

9. I added widgets for MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. It is sort of fun to see, visually, some of the people who stop by. Today I found a third service which I promptly lost, but when I find it again you’ll probably see a third box unless it starts slowing things down too much.
   

I think that’s it!

Just a few random posts

• XV1000 Virago Right Side Reassembly (0)
• An entire ecosystem in one tree (4)
• Blog Stew: 26 August 2007 (8)
• Let's get this show on the road (0)
• High-speed wine (0)

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