This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 11:50 AM and is filed under Blogging, Software, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I’ve been making some additions to my WordPress blog, better known as this site or www.cocoacrusty.com. Some of the changes were CSS changes, some were some enhancements to the blog via WordPress plugins, and I also added some links to some friend sites to the blogroll. I have documented the different things I have done to the site below:
External Links: Since I use a ton of links in my blog posts, I thought it would be nice to denote which links are external to my site so my visitors would know when certain links would take them away from cocoacrusty.com. For example, if I were to link to a web site outside of my web site, you would see an icon appended to that link that looks something like this, 
. So, when reading through the blog, if you see that icon alongside a link, you will be leaving cocoacrusty.com and going to an external web site.
Gravatars: Gravatars are a way for users to have an identifiable icon, or avatar, associated with their e-mail address. A lot of blogs on the Internet use Gravatars to give their site visitors who post comments on their blog entries a graphical way to identify themselves. Most Gravatars are pulled from the site www.gravatar.com and therefore will be consistent across any blog using the Gravatar plugin for WordPress or a similar blog plugin for other blogging software.
The Gravatar web site is currently under construction as they are updating their services and they are not allowing anyone new to sign up for the Gravatar service at this time. However, most web sites, mine included, allow registered users to upload their own Gravatar for use on that specific site. So, if you want an icon or photo displayed next to any comments you post on this site, register an account and under your User Profile there will be an option that says Gravatar. That screen will allow you to use an image from your local PC or enter a URL for an icon on a remote web site to use as your Gravatar when posting comments on cocoacrusty.com. Note: Please make sure your image is no bigger than 32 pixels high by 32 pixels wide. If it is, I will delete it because its going to mess up my flow… Ya heard me?! 
Once the Gravatar web site and services become available again, you can register on their site and then have your icon with you wherever you post comments and the Gravatar service is enabled.
Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking sites are popping up all over the place these days. Sites like Digg.com, Del.icio.us, Bloglines, reddit.com, and Google Bookmarks have been popping up everywhere and rapidly gaining popularity.
These sites, and other similar sites, allow you to bookmark web sites, blogs, and also subscribe to RSS feeds from blogs and news web sites so you can keep all of your favorite bookmarks and syndicated feeds in one place for easy access and organization of your favorite web content.
Thanks to the Social Bookmarks plugin for WordPress by Apostolos Dountsis, you can now easily bookmark specific posts on cocoacrusty.com as well as subscribe to the cocoacrusty.com RSS feed. You will find all of the services available to cocoacrusty.com readers at the bottom of each post. There are currently 26 social bookmarking services available and I would bet money that if you are into social bookmarking, you use one of the ones listed below under the Bookmark to: text at the bottom of this post.
Optimal Title: The Optimal Title plugin for WordPress changes the way the title of your page is displayed in the <title></title> tags of your HTML code so that search engines like Google and Yahoo! will better understand and index the content of your blog entries.
I believe that about covers the WordPress plugins I have incorporated into the site. The other changes I made were some cosmetic changes to the way comments were being displayed. I am thoroughly enjoying messing around with cocoacrusty.com.
Until next time…
Bookmark to:
2 Responses to “External Links, Gravatars, Bookmarking, and More”
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Flickr Updates
February 6th, 2007 at 7:51 AM
[...] my last post I mentioned that I had added some links to the blogroll. Well, I forgot to post any information [...]
FromFebruary 15th, 2007 at 10:43 AM
I have disabled gravatars in comments until the Gravatar service goes live. It was supposed to go live today but they had some issues with the Beta.
You can access the beta site at http://site.gravatar.com/ if you’re interested assisting with the beta.
Jeff
From