On More Tinkering

And now, at last, I’m happy with the way the tag listing appears in the sidebar. 🙂

WordPress 2.3 added tags to the code core, only it didn’t really provide any good methods of working with them. And the solution that worked for previous iterations of WordPress — Ultimate Tag Warrior — didn’t work any longer, once the tags were imported into the new schema.

So, I tried plug-ins, and I tried the plug-in, Simple Tags. And it produced a sidebar tag cloud — as an alphabetical ordered list — that I was completely happy about.

Then the author produced a new version, and…

It didn’t do alphabetical anymore.

I figured out yesterday how to produce an alphabetical tag list, using the function call built into the WordPress core. And then, to make it work with my website layout, I whipped up a really short, really dirty sidebar widget to take the top 150 tags and run them alphabetical in the sidebar without doing the crazy different-sized stuff.

At this point, I don’t actually need Simple Tags anymore, as both the sidebar tag list and the master tag cloud page are being generated by WordPress’s built-in functions. And I’ve used Simple Tags to locate and tag all untagged posts from the past five-plus years.

I’ll still keep it around, though. 🙂

Just for kicks, I added the WordPress Cabaret. It’s a plug-in that takes posts I’ve written in the past — and it has close to half a million words to chose from — and chops them into poetry. There’s nothing actually useful about, but I’ve set up a page, and every time it’s loaded it generates new “poetry.” I will say this if you use it — if you see something you like, copy it to Wordpad or something, because you will never, ever see it again. 😉

I don’t know that there’s any other tweaking I need to do. I’ve written a special calendar widget. I’ve written my tag widget. I’ve got my print stylesheet in place. Tag pages, archive pages, and single pages are all set. Nope, I think it’s all well and done. 🙂