Themes, Comments and Blog Helps

Posted By ê¿ê on June 1st, 2008

Your attention, please! I’m seeking your honest opinions about some things.

I’m sure you noticed I changed the theme. I haven’t personalized it — yet — it’s fresh out of the box. There are things I like and things I don’t like about it. That’s the norm for me. I think I need to buckle down and READ that book on PHP that I bought some months back and just create my own dratted theme so I don’t have to depend on everyone else’s code.

Well, that will be a six month project even if I start on it today, so….what do YOU think of this theme? I’m not gonna tell you what I like and don’t like as I don’t want to influence your opinion. I wish I knew how to do one of those survey things, but I don’t so you’ll just to have to leave me a comment and I’ll take it from there. C’mon now, don’t be shy!

And speaking of comments — how do you like the disqus comment system? Is it hard to use? Does it leave you cold? If you like it, why?

The whole reason I installed it was because I did a search for comment plug-ins as I wanted one that did the comments more in a bulletin board style and this came up first with all these accolades about it. I don’t think I’ve hit on but one other blog that’s using it, so don’t know about all the others touted in the stuff I was reading. Maybe I was just taken in by some cleverly written press.

Again, I have mixed emotions about it and my continuing use of it will depend on your input here.

And lastly, I’ve been using a Firefox service/plugin — something — called Zemanta that gives me this nifty-yet-irritating side bar in Wordpress‘ write screen that shows me some images I can add to my post and links to other, pertinent articles it finds by some means based on keywords it perceives I’m writing in the post. And in case you like it and don’t use a Wordpress blog, it also works on Live Journal, Movable Type, Typepad and Blogger as well.

I often find some of the images to be rather more unrelated than related. The sidebar overlaps about a 20 pixel portion of the area I’m writing in, so some words get lost over on the right-hand side and I can’t see whether I’ve made a typo or something when they’re hidden underneath the side bar. The articles it pulls up are hit-or-miss as well. Every once in awhile there will be one that’s pertinent and I’ll include it at the bottom of a post so you’ll have something else to read, but I mostly ignore the articles. It does have a nifty “visit” link, so I can at least read the entire article before adding something stupid to my post.

This is another feature I’m not seeing used a lot on other blogs. But do YOU ever click the links I include? Am I choosing the right pictures for my posts? Or do you just ignore it all and only read what I wrote, or worse yet, drop on the EntreCard widget and leave? (of course if that’s all you do, you won’t leave that opinion because you aren’t’ reading any of my scintillating posts anyway.)

So, now I’m anxiously awaiting the flood of opinions here. What are you waiting for? Start writing!

ê¿ê