Interface Update!

Posted by Danny on Friday, June 19, 2009 at 6:14 pm

All this talk about tag clouds got me hankering to try one out, and all the exciting WordPress plugins I discovered while finding my cloud widget got me hankering to try them out, so I’ve made some fun changes.

User Accounts and Avatars for Discussion

The biggest change is that you can now make yourself a subscriber account.  It’s completely optional (and if you don’t want to do anything differently, you won’t notice any change in your current functionality); the main perk in signing up is that you’ll be able to upload a custom avatar to appear next to your comments.  Fun and easy.

Register or log in via the Sidebar Login widget, courtesy of Mike Jolley.  Upload your custom avatars in the dashboard thanks to Peter Sterling’s Avatars plugin.

Quotations

While hunting for specific Modifaction bon mots, I occasionally hit some tasty bits that don’t immediately apply to the card in question, so I dump them into a big repository of quotations for future use.  I’ve also been meaning to add a quotations section to the sidebar, and I just found a widget with a really nice interface for it by Srini G called Quotes Collection.  Be on the lookout for fresh content: I’ll add more quotations as I find them.

Idea Sphere!

The tag cloud widget I finally settled on is WP-Cumulus by Roy Tanck.  I think it’s a lot prettier than many of the static clouds I’ve seen and comes with a slew of options that I’ll probably investigate further in the next little while.  Clicking on an object within the cloud will take you to a list of posts that include it as either a tag or a category.  (I’ve removed the category navigation widget to save space and because I figure the cloud can handle searches for now.  If anyone really, really misses the functionality, I am susceptible to reason.)

Whee!