General News, Software

Souping Up WordPress and TAAG Updates

10 Comments

I can’t believe it’s been almost 2 weeks since I last updated. It seems like every day I think about something new I could do for this site, yet I only get to do a small portion of what I think about. I have more stuff coming down the tube, though I’m not sure when I’ll have it out. Sometimes I think I’ve got programmer ADD. Anyways…

New TAAG Feature

I added a new feature to the Text Ascii Art Generator (TAAG) program that allows you to easily generate an image of your ascii art output. In the outputted text, you’ll now see a new link, next to the “Open In A New Window” link, that says “Generate Image”. When you click it, it’ll generate a PNG file of your output.

Currently this feature is only available for FIGlet fonts. I had some issues with getting some of the more eclectic Arial font characters to print. I’ve even noticed that the AOL fonts (which are done in Arial) don’t show up correctly unless I’m using IE, which I find a bit annoying. Anyway, let me know if you have any problems with this feature or if you see any obvious flaws.

WordPress

After reading up a little bit on WordPress optimization tips, I decided to re-do this site’s sidebar. Mostly because I felt like the site related content should come before the outgoing links (sorry guys). I’ve also read that it’s good to have a large feed icon so I made one that blended in with this site’s color scheme. I almost went with this icon:

Which was generated using this nifty little program. However, I wasn’t sure how many people would actually understand what that thing was for, and it is kind of ridiculously big, so I went with something more traditional that had some explanation text (“Get Updates in a Reader”). I read somewhere about an experiment someone did that showed that people were more likely to click a link that said “get updates” than they were to click one that said “subscribe”. I think that makes a lot of sense too, since subscriptions usually cost money and involve you giving out some kind of personal information, which most people don’t want to do.

The other feed icons, the brand-name ones, I got here. I’m not sure how long I’ll keep them. They’re not ads, they’re just links to online feed readers. However, the big Google Ad below them is an ad.

Right now I’m not really sure if this is the layout I want for the sidebar. I may try some different configurations in the coming days, but I haven’t made up my mind. I want something that flows and looks nice and I think I’ve sort of got it, but not really. So you may see things change around a bit. If you have any suggestions/complaints/ideas, let know know.

I also added a feedburner counter. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea or a bad idea. However, I do appreciate the adds from those of you who have for some reason or another decided to subscribe to this site.

Subscribe to Comments

Lastly, I also added a new WordPress plugin that allows you to subscribe to certain comment threads on this blog. When you subscribe, you’ll get an email notification each time someone posts a new comment to that thread. I figured this would be pretty useful. At least I know it would have been if I’d had it when everyone was giving their updates in the Three Things to Say entry.

10 thoughts on “Souping Up WordPress and TAAG Updates”

  1. If you haven’t installed wp-cache yet, you might want to consider it.

    I’ve read about sites going down under moderate traffic without it, and withstanding a Digg rush with it.

  2. Just finished installing it a few minutes ago. Thanks for the suggestion. I had completely forgotten about that plug-in.

    I remember reading an article a while back that talked about how the was probably the second most important plug-in you could install (after the spam filter one). I don’t know why they don’t just include it with the basic setup of WordPress.

  4. I didn’t read through all of the comments, but the one by “Donncha O Caoimh” wasn’t totally convincing for me. I suppose a bare bones install sort of makes sense, but it’d probably make a lot of people’s lives easier if caching was part of WordPress itself. Though according to those comments that was also something that was in the works, so that’s good news.

  5. It seems like all bloggers use feedburner and I have put it on some of my blogs, but I really do not seem to see any benefit from it. Anybody here feel that it is helpful?

  6. Feedburner allows you to quantify the number of people who are subscribed to your site as well as take away the bandwidth load of checking and distributing the feed information. In addition to those two things (and both of them are great benefits) it allows you to have some basic statistics about your feed.

  7. I was confused as to what exactly was feedburners purpose, it is just so that we know how many people are subscribed to us or does it have any more benefits on the subscribers side too? I know its pretty useful considering google bought it for a $100 million.

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