Along with more conventional writing, I love to tinker with code. One of the reasons I switched to WordPress from MoveableType, and, before that, GreyMatter, is the accessibility of its PHP and MySQL code, as well as a host of third-party plug-ins, most of which allow lots of tweaking.

So, you may have noticed a few new things in the left-hand sidebar and elsewhere:

“Popular Entries” ranks entries by hits (always a suspect number). This might help you discover an entry you’ve missed. Bear in mind that most people read the main page (index.php) without ever going to a specific entry page. So, most of the numbers under this heading are from people going directly to that entry page, either via RSS-feeds or search engines. There is an odd bug with the first item under that heading: the count is for index.php but the title displayed is always the top entry; in effect, each new entry in turn seems to be the most popular.

“Top Links” ranks the links people follow leaving this main blog page. So, this shows links people have chosen to follow, for what that’s worth. (It certainly interest me.)

“Recent Comments” have been showing for a while and may be self-explanatory.

Further down the sidebar are category links (each with its own RSS feed) and number of entries in each category. Then, “Blogs I read” (just a few of them), and my other blogs. Next you will find all the members of the Edgewiseblog Collective, my web-hosting and blog-evangelizing site/service, then links to WordPress related sites for plug-ins and such. Finally, you’ll see the 5 most recent photos in my flickr photo site.

You should see flickr photos in between each entry, as well. These are random; each is a thumbnail you can click to see the larger version. Those of you who have Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer may see a difference here (and elsewhere).

For items in the poems or photos category, I have added a method to “vote” or rate the poem or picture. To do so, place your mouse over the 1st (lowest) to 5th (highest) star before clicking.

I have recently added a “Random Entry” link between each entry to encourage you to explore the archives. The constant flow of new entries is the life-blood of blogging but leads us to forget or ignore what’s gone before.

Towards encouraging reading of older stuff, I’ve added a “my favs” category and will flag a few entries I think are worth a re-visit.

You are always welcome to let me know what you think, in comments or email. Thanks for reading. mjh