The Sidebar is Looking Pretty Great, eh?!

Have you noticed the beauty?  Big blog doings, since the Sidebar is the Essence of a Blog

The new KeriBlog.com sidebar, now with:  less placeholders and more widgets; a new bio with a current photo; the return of ‘This Week’s Car’; drop down menus and multiple search bars, rotating photos, come ON

I’m being dramatic, it’s okay, it looks like nothing, I know.  But that’s 14 hours straight, no dramatics, eating at my computer, it was a Saturday, my shoulder was burning, no wonder I procrastinated so hard.

But two weekends ago, remember the big storm?  I was supposed to be travelling, so my whole day got cancelled, so I settled in, bit the bullet and built it.

I also made 50 more Sidebar Art pieces.

There’s an accompanying spreadsheet, each leads to a different post. They’re not installed yet though, just the prep work is done.

After these are live, there’s one more batch of sidebars to make, ‘Car Reviews’… I guess I can link up about 30 reviews.

After that’s done, the next project is ‘Pages’.

Have you ever clicked a link in the top nav bar?  Don’t.

Made a couple headers too.

 

 

New Sidebar Art

Set up an assembly line the other night, made these 30.  The sidebar is the essence of a blog.

There’s an accompanying spreadsheet, each one links to a specific post.

Separated them into 5 topics: Cars, Lifestyle, and Security, TIFWGAL.com, and Food.

Each topic will have it’s own area to your right, and the images will rotate through YES rotating sidebar art; that’s been 3 years on the want-for-my-blog list.

Some of these you’ve seen before, from the old blog design.

The other side of the sidebar.

There’s another spreadsheet, of individual sidebars to make too. Like, my printing, favourite videos, this week’s car….

Most excited to make the badge-collage one: the Cars section, broken down by auto manufacturer. I’m betting 75% of all badges have been blogged about.

 

New Sidebar Art

The best way to get to know me is in my sidebars.

I’d like to throw a KeriBlog party, and I’ll print off all my sidebar art and nail them along a wall in one long continuous row, tada, now my party is an artshow, too.

Don’t bother clicking through, I haven’t yet linked them up to their proper destinations.

I keep a list on my phone of sidebar art ideas. It’s 50+ strong.

Click here and here for past sidebar art posts.

 

 

 

Headed to Vegas for the Week

I spent my flights making sidebar art, I love to make sidebar art.

Made 15, which will get their own post.

I’m headed to Blackhat and DefCon,

the world’s largest online security conferences.

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Both those I like very much. But not Vegas.

Excess is gross.

Also, it’s like everyone packs their inner douchebag, and boy does it ever come out here. That and binge drinking. I don’t understand any of it.

TTYL have a great Sunday

 

 

Widgets and Night Walks

As a blogger, the most common question I’m asked is: what do you blog about? If my answer takes longer than 3 seconds, their eyes glaze over.

Now look right at my sidebar and scroll down to see “Categories”. Say that in 3 seconds.

Click here: remember this? The start of my network? It was too much, WAY too much. Managing one site is enough, and I couldn’t pull off 8. My interests remain the same, but publishing and maintaining them proved impossible.

So now what?

I sat down quietly with a pen and paper, and narrowed it down to 5 topics / categories:

3/5 of those topics have companies who see the value in social media, and invest real money, not gift cards or swagg. Good.

So I’ve been hunched over my laptop, re-designing the backend of KeriBlog.

This is a big deal. Above are my Widgets, what you know as my sidebar, look right. There is no easy method to move them from one site to another. What you see on the side is hours of build time. Manage 8 sidebars? OMFG.

If I do this correctly, I will be able to use the same one across all the sub-sites, and that’s huge.  I did not do this correctly when testing on KeriOnCars though, see, sidebar vanished.

I’m trying to be better at remembering to push away from my computer regularly, not to sit there in the shape of a C for hours on end. So easy to do, isn’t it.

Ice cream stop.

It was quiet last night, didn’t see anything that exciting on the street.

Then back home to hunch.  Found this, exciting!

That’s my sidebar above. Blog friends: your sidebar is in your wp_options file.

If you have any advice theming categories on WordPress, please let me know.