As promised, here is a short recap and some comments on changes that were made to this site yesterday. While I generally enjoy doing web development type activities, they always seem to take quite a bit longer than I ever estimate that they will. Am I the only one that experiences this? Also, am I the only one who genuinely loses track of time when pouring over lines of code?

Anyway, the better part of my day yesterday (Friday) was spent working on some minor changes and tweaks to this site. I installed three new plugins and then made some minor changes to accommodate those plugins in the manner that I wanted them to fit and as a result of the addition of my privacy policy.

None of the plugins that I added are anything new to the blogosphere, I just never took the time to install them or felt I had reason to. However, I decided that I have been putting it off long enough and that I should give them a try. The three plugins that I added are: MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad, WP-Email, and RSS Signature.

My biggest complaint with the MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad is that I had to register for it before I could use it, I really don’t care for that concept. Adding it was pretty straightforward and didn’t take too much additional tweaking.

There does appear to be something wrong with it, at least the version I got and it’s interaction with my theme as it does not appear to scroll with the page when viewing with Internet Explorer and if I have it on “sticky mode” where it is supposed to be anchored to the top of the page it wants to cover the top of my header. These problems are only evident, however, in Internet Explorer.

I am not too concerned with this issue mostly because I do not see the stripe ad as being a permanent part of this site and it with the way it is set right now, it does not interfere with the usability or functionality of my site. I intend to only use it to promote things and events on this blog and possibly (if the event is large enough) other events throughout the blogosphere. At this time I plan for the use of this plugin to be quite sporadic and that it will not be there most of the time. However, if the offer is good enough, I might be willing to accept advertising in the stripe ad.

The WP-Email plugin took a little bit more effort to get installed. After downloading, unzipping, uploading and activating the plugin, I checked the settings and the defaults all seemed pretty good. As I recall, I may have adjusted the wording on the template as far as the email subject line and such, but it would not have been necessary.

Implementing this plugin, however, took a little bit more effort. I had to locate the correct code to insert to get the plugin to behave properly (there are two versions of the call command, one that opens in a new window like I use and one that opens in the same window and tries to load your entire site with the email form as the content) for the way I wanted it to work. Then for the location I have inserted it (next to the Trackback URI at the bottom of the post) I had to remember that the spot I was looking for was located in comments.php and from there it was simply pasting one little snippet of code. Of course I played around and experimented with a couple of other thoughts as well but did not use them at this time.

So, now, if you read an article here at romandock dot com and decide that you want to share it with your family or friends, you can simply click the link at the bottom of each post (when you are viewing the individual post) and send the article to them via email.

Finally, I decided it was time that I should have some sort of copyright notice at the bottom of my RSS feed. I checked out and even installed a couple of other plugins that would help accomplish this task, but, as I wanted to be able to have multiple items in the feed footer, I needed one that would not limit my length. I chose the RSS Signature plugin because it met all of my needs and at this point I don’t need any of the fancy rotating ads options that some of the other plugins offered. For these plugins, I would have to copy and paste the same thing into each entry and then any changes would need to be made multiple times.

This plugin installed very smoothly (much better than other similar plugins I tried) and works quite well. The installation was very straightforward and all that had to be done was to upload, activate, and then modify the signature message to have the desired output.

For now, I am using the RSS footer for a copyright notice to try and help prevent and combat scraping as well as promoting big events (similar to the stripe ad), however, I have been considering running a sort of RSS Footer giveaway or promotion so be sure to sign up. Also, while I did not install this plugin with the intent of increasing revenue, if the offer is right, I may accept advertising in the RSS Footer as well.

The final change I made was to add a footer bar to the bottom of the site. Previously, “powered by WordPress” was the last thing on the page. However, I wanted to have a link to my Privacy Policy that would not clutter up other parts of the site and determined that I wanted to place it there. I then also had to make some tweaks to the pages list near the top of the page.

All-in-all, even though it took quite a bit longer than I expected, I would consider the changes I made yesterday to be successful and I was able to get everything working in a manner that was either the way I wanted (or - in the case of the stripe ad – at least acceptable) on my website.