Spring Cleaning The Blog & More On Thesis For WordPress

It’s been over three years since I launched Daggle, and things have been overdue for an update. So, I’ve finally gotten to that. For those who care, a rundown on changes and some further thoughts on the latest version of the Thesis theme for WordPress.

WordPress? Yes, I’ve moved off of Movable Type. Since my blogging at Search Engine Land shifted to the WordPress platform last December, it made sense for me to use the same system here. Plus, I do love the Thesis theme that makes it very easy for me to add things to my sidebar units and elsewhere.

Shifting to WordPress was also an easy way for me to move off using TypeKey registration for commenting. I didn’t have to use TypeKey with Movable Type, of course. But I’d rigged things up that way from the beginning, and it was going to be a hassle figuring out how to disconnect all the custom stuff I had in place.

So, for all you who suffered with TypeKey, thanks — and those days are over. In fact, I’m dropping registration altogether. Anyone can comment without registration, and we’ll see how well the Akismet spam detection system works. As for having your own picture or “avatar,” well, if you have Gravitar, you’re good. Use the same email as your Gravitar-registered photo, and it will appear. I haven’t yet figured out a way to allow users to upload their own without using Gravitar, even if I enable registration (OK, this plug-in likely will do it, if I add the right code to my pages — but I don’t have time to poke around on the right way to do that within Thesis). Hang in there!

What you’re not seeing is a major redesign. I’d really like to get a new logo done — but what, I dunno! So I kept the old logo and personal pictures off my Flickr account (see Adding A Flickr Photo Stream To My Blog), but out-of-the-box, Thesis gives the entire thing a fresher, more legible look (or so I think).

I keep mentioning Thesis! See my past post, Launching My Wife’s Blog & Playing With The Thesis WordPress Theme, for much more about the reasons why I love this theme. I’ll also build on some things I’ve learned since that post, which I employed in the Daggle migration.

Most important tip – get Thesis Open Hook! In my earlier post, I talked about the saga of editing the custom.css file. OK, it wasn’t a saga, but with Thesis made so many other things easy, I didn’t want to have to open up that file in a text editor and FTP things across.

Thesis Open Hook makes those issues go away. Using it, I was able to add background colors to my custom.css file easily. Similarly, I didn’t have to edit that file in order to insert my custom logo, as was the case the last time I wrote about Thesis.

Thesis Open Hook also made it easy for me to insert ad units into my pages, though exactly where content appears before you insert it into one of the “hooks” isn’t always clear. After some experimentation, I figured out that code in the “Before HTML” box would come at the very top of the page (where the big AdSense unit now shows), while “After Content” made code show at the bottom of a post and before comments (where my smaller AdSense unit appears).

In the old blog, I had an annoying AdSense unit that would appear usually a few paragraphs into a post. It would show between wherever the “top” of a story ended and the “more” part began. Annoying, but effective — people did click. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your view), I couldn’t find a way to make that happen easily with Thesis or Thesis Open Hook.

Of course, I’m not trying to make a living off Daggle. Good thing, too — the blog’s traffic has stayed steady, but AdSense payoffs just keep dropping. AdSense here is more to play with how AdSense itself works.

Thesis Open Hook also made it quick and easy to customize my footer and customize the text on the 404 page.

I installed the latest version of Thesis (beta 1.5 r5), which fixed some of my earlier wishlist items. But I still have more!

• Give me a field to block a particular page from being spidered (or let me insert a custom meta tag of my own choosing, in addition to setting custom titles, descriptions and keywords — which, of course, are great to have). As a workaround, use the Meta Robots plug-in. That lets you set the meta robots tag for any page (options appear at the bottom of your edit window). As an added plus, you can install NOODP and NOYDIR tags. Need to know more about these things? See my Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More post. I was glad to see that Thesis seems to have dropped the unnecessary “robots=all” tag that it was inserting.
• Ability to save widgets and easily move them between sidebars 1 & 2. It’s a real pain if you make something for one sidebar and then decide to move it to the other. You have to copy, paste & delete.
• Ability to force a line break in the title text of a widget.
• Still hating the fact that I cannot change the text of the search box to something other than “To search, type and hit enter.”
• I have a new appreciation of how you can make any category into a navigational tab at the top of the page. However, now I want to control the order of those tabs. And I still want to have a “master” page that lists all categories. I had to hack one together that doesn’t automatically update if I add new ones. Down the line, I’d like to feature some categories and then have this master category page appear at the end with the heading “More Categories.” I also found that if you have lots of tabs, Thesis nicely wraps them into additional lines — but the “Subscribe Option at the end doesn’t play nice with this.
• I wish the Recent Comments widget had an option to show the actual comment, rather than the name of the person and entry.
• Give me an easy way to make the headline of a blog post also be a link.
• Give me an easy way to lose the “comments are closed” messages on pages.

I think Thesis is also preventing me from putting out a full-text feed here on Daggle. I’ve tried everything to restore that but have had no luck. I’ll keep looking at it.

Let me close with huge thanks to Michelle Robbins, who helped solve most of the line-break problems that resulted from the Movable Type to WordPress important. If you see any oddities, do let me know — there are a few still lurking around. Michelle also set-up the redirection so all my old former date/time-based URLs forward to the new keyword-based ones.