On the Latest Website Tweaks

For a few months now, I’ve left my WordPress install alone. I haven’t gone through a succession of themes, I’ve added no new features.

Yesterday, I made a few tweaks.

I was visiting Peter David‘s website, and I noticed that he had a bar of social networking icons attached to every post. Curious, I took a look at his source code (his blog runs on WordPress, so if I could figure out which plug-in he was using, I could use it, too), and I quickly ascertained that Peter was using Bookmarkify.

I’ve tried out some social media bookmarks in the past, like Alex King’s Share This, but I was never really happy with them. Either I didn’t like how they looked, or I didn’t like how they depended on someone else’s server (like Share This) which raised privacy issues.

However, Bookmarkify looked like it was easily customized, and it looked like it didn’t rely upon someone else’s server to do the work.

Installing Bookmarkify was a snap. Then I had to style the strip of social media icons, and I modified some CSS code from their website to work with the Tarski theme. Then placing the strip where I wanted it meant digging down into the Tarski code and writing a plug-in. (The issue was that Bookmarkify naturally placed the strip between the post and the list of tag links. I wanted the strip after the list of tag links. Fortunately, it was a five-minute coding job to get exactly what I wanted, once I understood the PHP code I needed to use.)

I also added an “About Me” bit to the sidebar.

Tweaking done, we return you to your regularly scheduled blogging blatherings. 😉