I first learned about widgets – a way to automate your sidebar management – a few months ago. But you have to have a widget-enabled theme for it to work, or you have to edit your existing theme. I didn’t want to change the theme or do the work, so I just forgot about it. Until I saw this nifty plugin: Now Reading, at Roblog. I was tired of hand coding my sidebars anyway, and all the books I have in my review queue needed to be added. This plugin/widget combo gives me an interface to quickly add them by ISBN number, and even uses my Amazon associate ID to I get a few cents on every book sold. Can’t beat that.
SO I selected a new theme and customized it (hope you like it), installed the widgets plugin and installed the Now Reading stuff, which in spite of crystal clear documentation I managed to mess up. Here’s the official Wordpress Widgets blog if you go with this and want more widgets. So I’ve gone from hand-coding to dragging and dropping.
If you don’t know html, this is the way to go. You’ll love it.
One more plug for Wordpress – I had over a year’s worth of Blogger posts. The Wordpress install took less than five minutes to complete, and about ten minutes to import my Blogger stuff. It has been largely hassle free ever since. You can get a free Wordpress blog here, or if you want to host it yourself, GoDaddy has an excellent plan for $3.99 a month.
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